![]() “The amount of people that have asked me about you and Madonna,” sighed Radcliffe. Madonna (played by Evan Rachel Wood), desperate for the honour of a Yankovic parody, initiates a love affair with him, for instance. There are a few bits of autobiographic truth in Weird, but the movie quickly, as Radcliffe said, “goes off the rails”, wildly overinflating Yankovic’s trajectory and many of his encounters. “As soon as I started reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing else that Al’s biopic could have been but something that is inherently a parody of all musical biopics.” “My first reaction on hearing the idea of me as Al was, ‘Wait, what?'” said Radcliffe. Appel and Yankovic worked on a script and reached out to Radcliffe. But a string of music biopics – many of which played so elastically with the truth that Yankovic sensed they were ripe for parody – made the premise even more appealing. Yankovic would play it at his concerts and bat away questions from fans about when the movie would actually be released. About a decade ago, Appel and Yankovic made a faux-trailer for a Yankovic biopic for Funny or Die. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is itself an unlikely movie that began as a gag. “I guess it’s just sheer tenacity because I should have gone away decades ago.” The New York Times has called Yankovic “a completely ridiculous national treasure”. That ranks him among the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson, who have, of course, each received the Weird Al treatment (Like a Surgeon, Eat It). He’s one of only five music acts to have a Top 40 hit in each of the last four decades. Yankovic long ago outlasted many of the musicians he’s parodied. Some, including Radcliffe, would quibble with that. The fact that I don’t deserve it is why this exists.” Daniel Radcliffe and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic at the Bisha Hotel, during the Toronto International Film Festival. There are detractors that are saying, ‘Why is Weird Al getting a biopic when there are a thousand names that should have gotten one before him?’ Well, that’s kind of the point. ![]() “That’s one of the reasons why the movie is funny because it shouldn’t exist. “I never would have believed this would happen early in my life, and maybe even a year ago,” said Yankovic. It distorts it through a funhouse mirror, turning Yankovic’s life into something that at its most absurd heights becomes its own parallel reality. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,written by Yankovic with director Eric Appel, does to Yankovic’s career pretty much what the 62-year-old comedian has been doing to pop songs for the last four decades. Like, what if, Yankovic imagines, Weird had that much-memed moment in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis where Tom Hanks’ Tom Parker hears Presley on the radio for the first time, dramatically swings around and exclaims “He’s white?!” – only it’s Weird Al he hears and instead responds, “He’s weird?!” He was sitting alongside Daniel Radcliffe, who enthusiastically plays Yankovic in the movie. It’s a funny enough idea that shortly before the raucous midnight Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story – a nutty, authorised biopic that takes that concept and has as much fun with it as possible – Yankovic was still riffing. But can you imagine if they did? That every step of Yankovic’s way – the first Hawaiian shirt, the epiphany of riffing on My Sharona as My Bologna – carried the same portentous sense of fate that rings through most music biopics? ![]() TORONTO (AP) – When a young, bespectacled Al Yankovic picked up an accordion, few – especially Al, himself – would have predicted the long-running show-business career that would follow.
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