Director: Jay Levey
Cast: “Weird Al” Yankovic, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Richards, Victoria Jackson
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Oddly, the thing I remember most from the film is that the DVD commentary goes a step above and “Weird Al” (must I use the quotation marks each time?) offers specific addresses for every location used. A weird running gag for everyone else, but for someone living in Tulsa, it was pretty helpful.
Also? Family lore does tell that for that brief moment where there were signs for the fictional “Spatula City” my mother expressed that it was a good idea and that we needed new spatulae*.
Did I Like It: Yes, but I can see why this wasn’t the beginning of a long happy career as a comedic leading man for Yankovic. When being the frontman of parody and comedy songs, he’s got more than enough charisma to sell spoofs of a wide genre of music. As a leading man, he never feels anything other than awkward. We didn’t buy him at the head of a movie, and I don’t mean that as any kind of insult. I think he would agree with that, hence why he didn’t try again in the ensuing 35 years.
Here’s where the film kind of works, some of the movie spoofs are a little scattershot, but they’re of a generally higher quality. I’d put them right up there with the best of the ZAZ crew. I laughed several times despite myself.
Other comedic performances are pretty good. Always nice to see John Paragon. Victoria Jackson isn’t all that funny, but she isn’t especially annoying either, so that’s something. Michael Richards manages to create a sort of proto-Kramer here that works so well that there are moments you forget the pariah he eventually became.
But you know what really brings me into the film, or at least what lured me into watching it this week? I saw Twisters (2024), and while I didn’t like the film very much, I was most annoyed by the fact that it is a very Oklahoma film, but from an Oklahoma that doesn’t mean much to me. The two main characters have their obligatory bonding during a rodeo in Stillwater. The female lead says at the top of the film, “I love Oklahoma,” where I spend most of my time trying to tunnel my way into pretty much anywhere else. The cowboy is hero here. And not the John Wayne cowboy that’s problematic enough or the Clint Eastwood cowboy that might as well be a samurai, but the kind of cowboy that lives exclusively in music videos that air on CMT, and would likely die because they were out and about on days when bad weather was coming in. Every Oklahoma movie, including the original Twister (1996) and The Outsiders (1983). But this movie, even though it is silly and occasionally proudly stupid, is an Oklahoma more interested in making weird stuff, unnerving the buttoned-down establishment, and confusing creativity and imagination with having seen too many movies. You know, the real Oklahoma. Or at least the one I’ve seen every day for forty years.
*That’s the plural of spatula, right? Or is that the plural, and the singular form is spatul?