BEFORE: This year, at New York Comic-Con, I got to meet Eric Appel, the director of this film, and of course after he introduced himself I asked the single most awkward question ever, because I really really wanted to know the answer. I just thought that the short film this is based on was like the funniest thing ever, so I needed to know what it was like to direct a feature film based on a short film, like wasn't that a difficult spot to be in? Not really, because Appel also directed the short film, with Aaron Paul playing Weird Al, and Mary Steenburgen and Gary Cole playing Al's parents. It was comedy gold, lightning in a bottle perhaps, and then plans were made to turn that short into a feature, or to treat the short as the trailer for the feature, or words to that effect. I suppose the next most awkward questions then would have been, "Why mess with perfection? Why not just leave the short film alone?" but I managed to hold myself in check and not press the point.
So now I've been watching the hype for this build over the last month, and for me, it's at a fever pitch - so when I realized I could squeeze this one into my chain within the first week of release, well, I just had to do it. Sorry, Billie Holiday, I'll try to get to your bio-pic next year if I can. A parody bio-pic about Weird Al Yankovic supersedes all other plans, and is getting fast-tracked right to the top of my list, because I am the target market here. So Daniel Radcliffe carries over from "The Lost City".
THE PLOT: Explores every facet of Yankovic's life, from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like "Eat It" and "Like a Surgeon" to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle.
AFTER: I usually scan through the celebrity birthdays each day, hoping to occasionally land on somebody famous celebrating a birthday while also appearing in the film I'm watching that day. No such luck today, but as I'm sure you're probably aware, November 7 is the birthday of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the acclaimed French symbolist writer whose Romantic works were often infused with mystery and horror, and who believed that the imagination has within it more beauty than reality itself, existing at a level in which nothing real could possibly compare. It's also the birthday of Albert Camus, whose writings contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism, which seems like an appropriate thing to celebrate after watching this film. It's also Marie Curie's birthday, but who cares? What did SHE ever accomplish that was meaningful and important?
You have to be really in-the-know to get ALL the jokes here. Fortunately, I am in the know, because I happen to be somewhat Yankovic-adjacent, which actually was one of my career goals. Yep, I went to NYU film school, studied animation, and worked on as many music videos as I could in the late 1980's and early 1990's, just on the off chance that I could get myself closer to "Weird Al" Yankovic. For many years, this plan did not work, so I sidestepped into the world of independent animation production, and one day my boss got the call to animated a music video for a major, major recording artist who turned out to be Kanye West. It seems that famous auteur filmmaker Michel Gondry had been hired to make a music video for "the artist now formerly known as Kanye" and had spent a few million doing a stop-motion video in the Macy's Manhattan flagship store after hours over the course of several weeks, and the result was a breathtakingly beautiful and super-expensive masterpiece that Kanye absolutely hated. So he scraped together a few thousand in pocket change and hired an animator to make a replacement video.
A few months later, Weird Al decided to hire a bunch of animators to make videos for all of the songs on his album "Straight Outta Lynwood", and he came very damn close to NOT hiring my boss to animate on, only because he'd recently made that other video for Kanye. So I saw my dream of getting close to Al come to fruition, but it was a close one, it almost didn't happen, and then three years of film school and 17 years working in the film industry would have been a complete waste of my time. JK. But then on the next album my boss got to animate a second music video for Al, and this led to backstage passes for me and two co-workers at a concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Al's birthday, October 23, in 2011. I got my photo taken with Al at the meet-and-greet, and I was so star-struck that I couldn't speak, which only ever happened to me that one other time - and I've been celebrity-adjacent a LOT, I would daresay more than the average person.
Like Al himself, I grew up listening to the Dr. Demento syndicated radio show, where of course he got his reputation as the King of Parodies. It makes sense, if Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, then the person who parodies him should become the King of Parodies, right? But again, you have to be in the know and if you've done your homework, you'll know that Alfred Yankovic is possibly the most ironicially nicknamed person in show biz, because he's such a straight arrow - no drinking or drugs, no profanity on his records, and he's a vegetarian to boot. Happily married for over 20 years, and with a college-age daughter, the only vice I'm aware of is being the owner of what is perhaps the world's largest collection of Hawaiian shirts. So he doesn't fit the typical rock-star image, and yet his career has spanned over 40 years now, and he's outlasted many of the artists that he's poked fun at. Chalk that up to clean living, I guess, or the main goal of bringing joy and happiness to the world through music - there are worse ways to spend one's time, for sure.
But the director didn't let any of that get in the way, he assured the public that he did absolutely no research into Al's history or life when co-writing this film with him. Essentially the movie ITSELF is a parody of the "Dark Side of Fame" genre, and there are shout-outs to films like "A Star Is Born", "The Doors", maybe even "Showgirls". Of course this is all in fun and nothing is meant to be taken seriously at all, which must be incredibly liberating from a production standpoint - the film doesn't have to be accurate, it only has to be funny. Truly anything can happen in this alternate Yanko-verse, as long as that cardinal rule is observed. And even if you buy into the film as a true bio-pic, because it carries some air of truthiness about it at first, then by the time Al is single-handedly waging an armed rescue of his girlfriend Madonna from the compound of Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar, at some point you're bound to realize that almost nothing is real.
Self-reflexivity also reigns here - the closing song, in addition to pointing out that as a new song, it's automatically "eligible for Oscar consideration", drives home the point that this film is 100% accurate, except for the part where Al turns down the invitation to perform with Queen at Live Aid, because he absolutely, for sure, did that thing and by the way, he totally rocked Wembley Stadium in the process. But if I've got any concern about this format, it's the fact that there might be a few people out there who are NOT in on the joke, and might actually believe Al when he states in an introduction to the film that everything is 100% true, which might be the biggest falsehood of all. I'm only concerned because as a nation we're still getting over the last administration, which was famous for promoting "alternative facts" and claiming premature victory over the COVID pandemic, manipulating the minds of Americans through conservative media outlets, holding phony media events with faked props, even changing weather maps with markers just to try to make reality conform with the mistakes made by the Commander in Chief. It's the old joke about how you can tell that a politician is lying, because his lips are moving. So I'm like 99% on board with the fudging of facts in Al's back-story, and that 1% of me that's having a bad reaction, I blame that on Trump and his entire entourage of deplorables.
Parody vs. satire - what's the difference? I'm going to defer to the man himself, because by Al's rules, a parody song is one where he just changed the words, like "My Sharona" becoming "My Bologna", and "I Love Rock and Roll" turning into "I Love Rocky Road". The song was about one thing, and then usually Al's version is about food, or TV or being nerdy. But then with "Smells Like Nirvana" he started working with satire, as the changed lyrics ended up being about the original song and the band Nirvana, and thus became a commentary on itself, thus satire. Also, parody is allowed much more latitude when it comes to copyright violations than satire is, but as we all know, Weird Al ALWAYS gets permission from the songwriters to make his parodies, despite what Coolio once claimed. Parody tends to imitate a specific work in a humorous way, while satire tends to use humor to comment or criticize an aspect of society. But some works can be both, like SNL's "Weekend Update" segment, which is a parody of a typical newscast in format, but also offers up satire by giving criticism or comments on the events of the week.
The film is so wild and out there that it's potentially NITPICK POINT proof - it's impossible to take anything in the movie seriously, so why even try? Why complain about something that's not trying to be true or accurate in the first place? Anyway, Weird Al's fame is possibly even WEIRDER than what's depicted here - I mean, mostly less weird, but also weirder in some ways. If you've ever been to a Weird Al concert (and I've been to three of them) maybe you've seen the clip reel they play of the best Yankovic cameos from the world of movies and TV shows - who else can claim on their resumé the unique combination of appearing as himself (or versions of himself) in "The Simpsons", "American Dad", "Scooby-Doo", "Robot Chicken", "30 Rock", "Johnny Bravo", "The Drew Carey Show", "The Naked Gun", "Spy Hard", "Tapeheads", "The $100,000 Pyramid", "Rock & Roll Jeopardy", "Cupcake Wars", "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition", "Circus of the Stars" and "The Goldbergs"? Also, he played Ted Nugent on "Reno 911", Adolf Hitler on "Drunk History" and characters on "Bojack Horseman" and "My Little Pony". It's Al's world, the rest of us just live in it!
(Still, my favorite Weird Al moment came after his name had been floated as a possible candidate for being inside the Peacock costume on season 1 of "The Masked Singer". On the night of the finale, Al sent this message on Twitter: "I can't wait to find out if it's me!" Classic.)
in this alternate Weird Al Yanko-verse, the song "Eat It" was not a parody of a song written by Michael Jackson, but this intentionally false narrative is designed to make us believe, just for a second, that Weird Al wrote the song, and MJ stole it later. Obviously this is played for humor, and to create a disconnect in our brain that shocks us, but for a while I reasoned this out as "Naturally, the film wants to put some distance between Al Yankovic and Michael Jackson, because of the allegations which have since come to light." But no, this wasn't really the case, it was just done to be funny - but I would have understood if someone were trying to remove all references to the notorious "King of Pop". So it's a funny bit, but then there's something evil deep down inside of me that is kind of reminded of Trumpism again, like this is maybe just one or two steps away from "My inauguration crowd was the biggest ever." I'm really trying to not connect those dots here, I swear.
Maybe it's just that Election Day is tomorrow, and I've been watching too much MSNBC. I thought maybe this film would help get my mind off of things, but that was only partially successful. I shouldn't hold it against the film "Weird" if I'm stressing out over the midterms. I'm very sorry, Al, but you know it's been a tough couple of years lately.
I could write another whole essay JUST on the cameos in this film, mostly concentrated in the pool party scene. Plus I could get into a debate over whether that scene is referencing "8 Mile" or "Amadeus" (maybe both?). But it's all too good, almost, and I don't want to spoil anything - just go watch the film, it's streaming for FREE so what are you waiting for? Then call me later and we can discuss it together, OK? Oh, right, nobody calls each other any more. Text me, then and we can get into it. I'll tell you about that time I requested a Spike Jones song on the hotline and Dr. Demento said something very awkward about my mother...
Also starring Rainn Wilson (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Thirteen"), Julianne Nicholson (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Horse Girl"), "Weird Al" Yankovic (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Will Forte (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), David Bloom, Richard Aaron Anderson, Jack Lancaster, Spencer Treat Clark (last seen in "Glass"), Tommy O'Brien, Arturo Castro (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Keanush Tafreshi, Andrew Steven Hernandez (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Paloma Rabinov (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Scott Aukerman (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Johnny Pemberton (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Jonah Ray, Jeremy Bolm, Dean Sharpe, Nina West (last seen in "Starring Adam West"), Julie Chang, Jimmy Walker Jr. (last seen in "King Richard"), Trenyce (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), James Preston Rogers (last seen in "Pixels"), Erin O'Shea, Paul Riley Fox (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Jacob Lawrence Kreiss, Lisa Margaroli, Gordon Tarpley, LeChristopher Williams and the voices of Deidrich Bader (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Eric Appel
with cameos from Lin-Manuel Miranda (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Patton Oswalt (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Michael McKean (last seen in "The Meddler"), Dot-Marie Jones (last seen in "The Boondock Saints"), Jorma Taccone (last seen in "I Used to Go Here"), Demetri Martin (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Paul F. Tompkins (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Akiva Schaffer (last seen in "Hot Rod"), Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Jack Black (ditto), Emo Phillips, David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Dune" (2021), Quinta Brunson (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Josh Groban (last seen in "The Hollars"), and the voice of Seth Green (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer").
and archive footage of Madonna (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Dr. Demento (last seen in '"Zappa"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "Count Me In"), Paul McCartney (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), David Bowie (last seen in "Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain"), Don King, Queen Elizabeth (last seen in "King Richard") and Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Lucy and Desi").
RATING: 8 out of 10 artists who got the "Yankovic bump"
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