Weird - The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2022 12:51 pm
I've been excited ever since I discovered this was in production, but I wasn't sure why. I think I already saw Weird Al's Behind the Music, and I've read several books about the guy so I just didn't feel like there was anything they could include in a biopic that I didn't know.
But I didn't know about the time Al's father nearly beat a traveling door-to-door accordian salesman to death for exposing their son to the "devil's squeeze box." I didn't know that Al and Madonna were tight -- like, "real" tight. And I never knew that Eat It, one of Al's biggest original hits, was later parodied by Michael Jackson in a song called "Beat It"!
Weird Al, the king of parodies, is back with perhaps his biggest parody of all -- a parody of biopics themselves. Just like every episode of Behind the Music there's betrayal, drug abuse, and violence. It takes a beat or two to establish that viewers may or may not be watching actual events depicted, but once the film takes off -- and it's pretty quickly -- hold on to your sides as they'll be hurting from laughter. Halfway through the film my wife came to see what I was laughing so loudly about.
You'll need more than all your fingers and toes to count all the celebrity cameos. This is UHF all over again, and the jokes continue into and through the credits. The content is a little more adult than UHF, but he -- and we -- are 30 years older now. This time around the jokes are a little darker and cut a little deeper. Almost, Like a Surgeon.