“bizarre: The Al Yankovic story” clearly earns its identify, working, accurately, no longer as an actual movie biography but an outlandish parody of one, full of comedy cameos and weird flights of fancy.
Starring Daniel Radcliffe and produced and co-written by using Yankovic himself, like its namesake’s songs, it’s at times little too silly, however still lively and interest-getting sufficient to help positioned the without difficulty neglected Roku channel on people’s radar.
The amusing conceit behind the entire project – increasing upon a spoof film trailer launched in 2010 – is that a peculiar Al biopic features like considered one of his chart-topping songs, taking the form of the style however turning it on its head. Throw in a who’s who of comedy skills popping in along the way, and there’s some thing to maintain visitors engaged and in the main entertained, at the same time as perhaps googling along to peer in which (if it all) the truth lies.
Take Yankovic’s dad and mom, who inform him flatly as a youth, “prevent being who you are and doing the matters you love.” Or the manner he starts playing the accordion, after his dad beats a door-to-door salesman inside an inch of his existence.
Ultimately, there’s Al stumbling into his musical career, remodeling the song “My Sharona” into “My Bologna” on the fly whilst his roommates ask him to make sandwiches, and later catching the eye of the novelty-track maestro/disc-jockey Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson), who absolutely did play a function in Yankovic’s discovery, just not pretty in the way depicted here.
The film embarks on its most eldritch odyssey via charting Al’s courting with Madonna (Evan Rachel timber, in a pretty uncanny impersonation), who absolutely did ask him to parody certainly one of her songs, however perhaps didn’t come to be his female friend and at some point get kidnapped.
Directed by means of Eric Appel (who produced the aforementioned short, and stocks script credit score with Yankovic, who also has a cameo), “weird” is produced through the folks at humorous or Die. In the beginning blush, the concept of producing some thing absolutely exceptional around Yankovic, infused with the identical playful irreverence that he delivered to his tunes, looks like just what the health practitioner ordered.
Given its narrow underpinnings, the concept that it runs out of steam a bit before it’s throughout seems inevitable and tolerable, especially while taking into consideration that its concern’s maximum memorable creations run approximately three mins, max.
In a way, nothing can be a more perfect signal of the starvation content within the streaming age than inflating a bite-sized comedy brief into a full-blown film. But even allowing for the reality that “bizarre” isn’t an awful lot greater than a snack, as the person in question sang, just consume it.
