Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) It only takes watching the first few minutes of 'Weird' to figure out what its writer, song parodist Al Yankovic is up to.....
Just as Weird Al mocked pop music hits by cleverly re-writing their lyrics, he now witheringly mocks the entire genre of showbiz film biographies.......
As he shows his own life as little mercy as he did to the songs he lampooned.
In short, an alternate universe anti-biography......one in which Al gets it on with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) and shoots it out drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro).
No question, a brilliantly funny idea for a satire for sure. Cornball glossed-over fictionalized movie biographies have had it coming since the 1940's......
But is this joke sustainable for close to an hour and 50 minutes?
Nah.
As much as Yankovic and his co-writer and director Eric Appel struggle to maintain the craziness over the long haul, the movie starts to run out of comedic energy after the first hour.....and then settles down to coast along on just being......weird.
Can't fault the film's casting, though......some of which is inspired.....
Let's start with Harry Potter himself, the 5 foot, 5 inch Daniel Radcliffe playing the lanky 6 footer Yankovic. You can think of it as another one of film's living sight gags, but Radcliffe fully commits to embodying Yankovic's innate talents and his manic frenzy to blaze his own path to fame and fortune.
The film further benefits from its two main supporting players - Rainn Wilson deadpanning it as the famous d.j. Dr. Demento, who specialized in airing novelty songs and Wood wickedly spoofing Madonna's 1980's music video persona.......
And cameos run rampant, especially in a pool party where Al's seen hobnobbing with his fellow off-the-rails celebrities......Wolman Jack (Jack Black), Andy Warhol (Conan O'Brian), Pee Wee Herman (Jorma Taccone), Tiny Tim (Dimitri Martin), Gallagher (Paul F. Tomkins), Salvador Dali (Emo Phillips) and Divine (Nina West).
These cameos, we should point out, occur early on in the film......the chunk of it that still maintains its hilarious deconstruction of biographies, That part that keeps you laughing.....
But alas, all good things come to an end and the good things in 'Weird' come to an end with almost an hour of it still left to play out......
Weird Al of all people, should have understood that the brevity of his song parodies kept us giggling. His biography parody had comic potential as maybe an 80 minute film, not 108 minutes.
BQ did laugh......until we knocked it down to slightly smiling.....and then further to sighing for it to end. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
No comments:
Post a Comment