#spadowski

UHF (1989)
Lag Time: 27 years
Dir. Jay Levey
Starring: ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, Michael Richards, Kevin McCarthy

UHF. This is either Weird Al’s love letter to pop culture or a love letter to himself. Either way, there are few movies that take on the personality of its creator like this one. No matter what it does or doesn’t do as a film, let this be heard loud and clear: this is a movie that was made for the fun of it, and that much is evident from start to finish. Quotable, feel-good, indulgent, and fun to indulge in, UHF is in a class of its own. As parody incarnate, it naturally sets itself apart from other films in how it looks at them from the outside and weaves together a daydream narrative of overt recreationthat separates what Weird Al does from the crass referencestyle parody of the 21st Century “[BLANK] Movie.” It’s individuality makes it hard to critique. I could comment on how Weird Al is the epitome of amateur acting, caught somewhere in between really good high school drama star and bad mainstream secondary character actor, but this film doesn’t take itself seriously enough to deserve that criticism. I would comment on how the blatant Asian stereotyping for comedic effect does not hold up under modern social grace but this film doesn’t take itself seriously enough to warrant that sort of attention. I should comment on how this film irresponsibly evades writing in a hard lesson for the main character about the exploitation of the mentally handicapped for entertainment and profit, but I realized half way through the film that it was not going to take itself seriously enough to do that. This funny, over-the-top, under-budgeted film could be a production of UHF Channel 62 itself. In fact, there’s probably an alternate universe where this movie was produced as a film of films within a film withinthe film. But under no circumstance is there an alternate universe where this film takes itself seriously. Because Weird Al transcends dimensions, just as this film transcends conventions of cinematic criticism. Thisis UHF.