Every time I hear one of a select group of pop hits from the last 40 years, I start singing the wrong words. They might be lyrics about the Star Wars character Yoda, when the song is actually about a woman named Lola. They might be lyrics about making prank phone calls when the song is really about chasing waterfalls. Every time this happens – and I mean every. single. time. – my wife rolls her eyes and threatens to divorce me.
I will never stop, though, because I am a lifelong "Weird Al" Yankovic fan. My music collection contains every album from the most successful and famous parody-song artist of all time, save two. (The last one I obtained was 2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood, so I’m missing 2011’s Alpocalypse and 2014’s Mandatory Fun.)
All that to say I might not be the most impartial judge of a movie about – and co-written by – Yankovic. The new film, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, directed by comedy writer and filmmaker Eric Appel, in his feature debut, is an absolute hoot. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, since I was clearly in the tank for it from frame one, but Weird is the goofiest, most ridiculous, funniest comedy of the year.
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Sometimes a movie comes along that defies any kind of deep intellectual interpretation. It simply unspools its crazy internal logic before your eyes and dares you not to get caught up in the madness you’re witnessing. Swiss Army Man is that movie. It takes the concept of magical realism and twists everything you think you know about narrative expectation into a pretzel. For ninety minutes, I could not believe what I was seeing. I was so caught up in what would happen next, the full joy of the experience didn’t hit me until it was all over. Part of that was never being able to predict where the script was going.
The guys who wrote and directed that script, Dan Kwan and Daniel Sheinert (credited jointly as “Daniels”), establish within the first ten minutes that Swiss Army Man would be crazily, stupefyingly original. When the hero rides a farting corpse like a jet ski to escape a deserted island, I knew the writers were issuing a cinematic challenge. I’ll admit, I was hesitant at first. I can enjoy potty humor as well as anyone, at least in limited doses. But when Hank (Paul Dano) investigates the dead body that washes up on the desolate beach where he's stranded, all that happens at first is the farting. I wondered if that would be the extent of the writer-directors’ imagination. Then came the aforementioned riding of the corpse like a jet ski, with Hank pulling on the dead man’s necktie like a throttle for increased speed. Challenge accepted.
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