Post by Dracula on Nov 26, 2022 8:25:31 GMT -5
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story(11/19/2022)
Alright, before I get into this I should say that the only way to watch this movie right now is on the Roku streaming channel, which is extremely annoying. Firstly there’s no way to watch that channel on a television unless you own a Roku Box, which is a completely obsolete invention that’s only useful to people who somehow still don’t have a smart TV or a game console in 2022. What’s worse the only way to watch anything on this streaming service is with commercial breaks, which is something I normally avoid at all costs. Consequently I had to watch this movie on a laptop screen, which is less than ideal and may have resulted in me going into it pretty grumpy. So was it worth all the trouble? Eh. It was alright. The film is a dramatized biopic of famous song parodist “Weird” Al Yankovic, played here by Daniel Radcliffe… except it actually isn’t. Rather this biopic of a parodist is itself an over the top parody of other musical biopics. It uses a couple of real facts about Yankovic’s life like the basic era he became famous and the fact that he was discovered by the radio DJ Dr. Demento, but otherwise add a bunch of absurd embellishments in order to dramatize his life story into the most over-the-top version of something like Bohemian Rhapsody imaginable. So, in this telling Yankovic’s parents have an outlandish hatred of accordion music that the film’s protagonist needs to overcome, Dr. Demento is not just a radio DJ but a sort of svengali manager in his career, has a whirlwind romance with Madonna… and at one point finds himself having to take down Pablo Escobar and the entire Medellín Cartel. Sounds like a clever idea but the albatross around the movie’s neck is that it’s not the first one to do this. The 2007 movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did all of this first and to my eyes did it better and that’s a hard thing to overcome. That having been said, the movie does have its highlights and clever moments (a pool party scene filled with comedians doing cameos playing various cult figures from the 80s is quite the highlight). It started to wear out its welcome towards the end but ultimately I was entertained enough by the movie that I’m willing to give it a light recommendation. It’s no UHF though.
*** out of Five
Alright, before I get into this I should say that the only way to watch this movie right now is on the Roku streaming channel, which is extremely annoying. Firstly there’s no way to watch that channel on a television unless you own a Roku Box, which is a completely obsolete invention that’s only useful to people who somehow still don’t have a smart TV or a game console in 2022. What’s worse the only way to watch anything on this streaming service is with commercial breaks, which is something I normally avoid at all costs. Consequently I had to watch this movie on a laptop screen, which is less than ideal and may have resulted in me going into it pretty grumpy. So was it worth all the trouble? Eh. It was alright. The film is a dramatized biopic of famous song parodist “Weird” Al Yankovic, played here by Daniel Radcliffe… except it actually isn’t. Rather this biopic of a parodist is itself an over the top parody of other musical biopics. It uses a couple of real facts about Yankovic’s life like the basic era he became famous and the fact that he was discovered by the radio DJ Dr. Demento, but otherwise add a bunch of absurd embellishments in order to dramatize his life story into the most over-the-top version of something like Bohemian Rhapsody imaginable. So, in this telling Yankovic’s parents have an outlandish hatred of accordion music that the film’s protagonist needs to overcome, Dr. Demento is not just a radio DJ but a sort of svengali manager in his career, has a whirlwind romance with Madonna… and at one point finds himself having to take down Pablo Escobar and the entire Medellín Cartel. Sounds like a clever idea but the albatross around the movie’s neck is that it’s not the first one to do this. The 2007 movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did all of this first and to my eyes did it better and that’s a hard thing to overcome. That having been said, the movie does have its highlights and clever moments (a pool party scene filled with comedians doing cameos playing various cult figures from the 80s is quite the highlight). It started to wear out its welcome towards the end but ultimately I was entertained enough by the movie that I’m willing to give it a light recommendation. It’s no UHF though.
*** out of Five
