By: Alex Tilton
I’d been planning a review of season 3 of The Witcher, but couldn’t find the energy to power my way through five hours’ worth of the show when I just wasn’t in the mood for anything heavy. So instead, I reviewed a 10-month-old movie on Roku…because why not? And I’m glad I did because it was nice to sit down with a comedy for a change. I kept seeing this movie advertised on the Roku screen saver that the TV goes into and I wanted to watch it before it disappeared.
If you grew up with “Weird Al’s” music, or if you were ever any kind of a fan, then it won’t surprise you to hear that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, isn’t actually “Weird Al’s” life story. Rather it’s a satire/parody of biopic films that shamelessly jumps between truth and outright fantasy without batting an eye.
This works strongly in the movie’s favor because some things you would assume were made up turn out to be absolutely true, like the scene where “Weird Al” records a song in a public bathroom because it has good acoustics. And other things that seem completely believable turn out to have never happened at all. At that time “Weird Al” went to Columbia to rescue his girlfriend Madonna and kill drug lord Pablo Escobar.
In all seriousness, I loved this movie. It had the courage to make some very bold choices. One scene in ‘Weird’ references an incident from a 1969 Doors concert in Miami where Jim Morrison got arrested for indecent exposure. A lot of people aren’t going to get this joke, and the ones who do will be surprised at how adult it is. It felt like being rewarded for paying attention in class, and it was great. The movie expected me to be an adult with a certain amount of knowledge and it was willing to leave me behind if I wasn’t. More movies need to do this.
Al himself plays several characters in the film, mostly a music producer who tells movie Al (played by Daniel Radcliffe) that his music is stupid and also that it sucks. One thing that the movie left out was the fact that in real life “Weird Al” seeks out permission from the people he’s going to parody. This has been a big factor in his real career, but it wouldn’t have made for a good comedy movie. Instead, “Weird Al’s” song ‘Eat It’ is portrayed as an original song and Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ is portrayed as an inverse parody.
Interestingly, Al has said that the fictional relationship with Madonna was not something he got her permission to put in the movie. He said in an interview that he doesn’t even know if she’s aware that the movie exists. But she’s well-known for being a fan of his music, so I imagine she was fine with it.
Every so often a movie is exactly what it needs to be. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is one of those. It stays true to its spirit the whole way through, delivers a lot of good laughs, and doesn’t water itself down to appeal to a broader audience. It did a lot of refreshingly good things and it was nice to see.
Image Sources: Film-Authority.com & IMDb.com