Way Too Late at the Movies: Weird, the Al Yankovic Story

Michelle got me a copy of "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story," for Valentine's Day as she and our oldest headed out the door to drive our Expedition to North Dakota to sell it.

Finally popped it into the DVD player today. And I'm trying really hard to like it.

I mean, the parody of the artist's rise, fall, and rise again is spot on. That I'm having trouble liking it might be due to my general distaste for that kind of tropery less so than the film itself.

Nevertheless, I'll try to finish the film and regard it on its own merits.

I really liked the film up until Madonna showed up. I know her presence in the film is supposed to be the peak parody of the successful artist letting success and drugs and sex and alcohol go to his head, but it grates, and grates hard. It goes on much, much longer than it should, slowing the story down.

I'll be honest -- the only thing that might make me get to watch the film again are the cameos. Conan O'Brien as Andy Warhol and Jack Black as Wolfman Jack make the Dr. Demento party scene work far better than the Madonna sequence makes the entire film work. So maybe this film is better for the little bits than the whole.

Yeah. The Madonna bit is going to WAAAAAY too long. There's about 25 minutes left, and I hope it gets better.

Now he's redeeming himself. And his mom got fat. Which segues into Weird Al writing "Fat," of course. There's a lot of hint-dropping for Weird Al's songs throughout, and while some of them are Easter eggs, a lot of them like this are, well, eh . . .

So the film's pretty uneven. It's a perfect parody of the artist's rise, fall, and rise again, but while the first half has a lot of great jokes, the second half takes the parody just a bit too seriously.

From Annatevka to Lynwood

From the "You Never Know, but Sometimes You Do When God Speaks to You through Weird Al Yankovic" files:

Many moons ago, I was chewing on a personal problem. As introverted teenagers are wont, I hadn't talked to anyone about it. But I did talk to God about it quite a bit. Kinda like Tevye from "Fiddler on the Roof," constantly, but quietly.

I talked about that problem for a long time. Sometimes it felt like the conversation was rather one-sided. And maybe I was doubtful a bit that God was listening, or that he cared all that much about the problem I was facing.

I was mulling the problem over again at work one day, using the saw to chew through some bricks. And if you've ever been around a brick saw, you know they're loud. But I had a lot of bricks to cut, as as my mind still does, it wandered from the problem to something else. A Weird Al Yankovic song began playing in my head.

And when Weird Al sang the lyric "You're not perfect, but I love you anyhow," it was as if I heard God's voice not in the thunder, not in the whirlwind, but in the brick saw and the lyric and for the first time in months, I felt happy.

That didn't bring an end to the problem. But it brought some much-needed comfort that to this day, at the right time, makes me tear up whenever I hear this song.

It's not the Tab Choir. It's not choruses of angels. It's God speaking to me through the voice of a man straight outta Lynwood.

Another One Rides the Bus

I live in an area where public transportation is nonexistent.

Oh, we have a regional transportation authority that runs intercity buses and semi-regular routes through Idaho Falls, a city of 55,000 a half hour south of our town of 1,200, but there’s nothing that approaches regular bus service.

We do a lot of walking around town. Our kids ride their bikes to school. We walk to church, the store, the post office.

I commute to work. I have to; I work 178 miles away from home, round trip. I drive my truck 7 miles on way to the bus stop, then sit on that bus for 1 ½ hours each morning and each night because to drive that route is inexcusably expensive. I’d go through a tank and a half of gas a week. Driving to work simply isn’t an option.

Nobody outside of the federal workers who have the right to take our buses has that privilege where I live. Mass transit, in all its planet-saving glory, isn’t economically feasible.

Yet.

There’s always a yet.

Folks who live in the big city want to increase our gasoline taxes, because, well, they have mass transit systems. Increase the gas taxes, they say. That’ll get people out of their cars and onto public transportation.

Really?

Not where I live. I figured it out. A trip to one store – one store, mind you – in Idaho Falls (where we do our grocery shopping; don’t ask us to do it locally because if we do we can spend, on average, an additional $70 to $100 a month on food) would cost us, for one person, upwards of $30. One trip. And take half a day. And require lots of luggage to carry our food; we buy in bulk.

Not going to happen. We will drive. Even if gas taxes go up ten cents a gallon – the figure I hear bandied about the most – it’s still cheaper and more convenient for us to drive, carbon emissions be damned. Because given our scanty population base, any national gasoline tax levied for the funding of mass transportation systems ain’t gonna come to us. It already barely trickles here.

Then I look at states like New Jersey, where the governor killed a $2.7 billion (their portion, the total tab, from New York and the feds, more like $8 billion) because the state just can’t afford it. All that to get a mere 22,000 cars off the road a day. That’s money well spent?

The City of New York, by the way, is eliminating public transportation routes as they increase prices for their dwindling service. This is their third price hike in two years.

In many cases, I’m sure even with the price hikes, what the folks in New York are being charged is a bargain. I know I enjoyed the convenience of the metro systems in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Paris. But a system of that magnitude is just not economically feasible where I live. So to assume that an increase in gas taxes is going to push me onto public transportation begs the question: Do I have public transportation to be pushed onto? I already use a bus to get to work, and I pay for the privilege. Don’t assume I’ll forego gasoline to put money into public transportation which, in its present form, is incredibly inconvenient. Yeah, more money in the system, more ridership, would make the option more palatable. But that’s putting the cart before the horse – they’d get more riders now if their routes were more convenient.