Man on the Moon (1999)

I have never heard of this film until recently...extremely disappointing to say the least...cannot for the life of me understand why it has such a high rating on here , must have been one of them where you needed to watch it when it came out?. No thankyou very much.

The life and career of a legendary comedian, Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey).If you never had the chance to see Andy Kaufman in his lifetime, this more or less sums up all his characters and his best skits. The Tony Clifton character is best, at least as portrayed in this film, but all have become a part of popular culture. Jim Carrey may or may not exactly look the part, but he was the only man who could have done this and knocks it out of the park.Much like Kaufman himself, this film is hilarious at times and grating at others. Sometimes the laughs came from the audience and sometimes the audiences suffered at Andy's expense. But, of course, this is because he was not so much a comedian as a performance artist. When we expect something else, we only open ourselves to disappointment.

Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey) is a misunderstood child and a misunderstood comic. He loves to play WITH the audience more than play TO the audience. Talent agent George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) signs him up despite thinking that he's a foreigner who speaks broken English. He gets the role on Taxi and develops the character Tony Clifton with his writing partner Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti). Andy starts wrestling women planting actresses like Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love) who ends up being his girlfriend. He gets into a fight with professional wrestler Jerry Lawler. Then he gets cancer but people aren't sure if it's actually a joke.Firstly, there is a surreal quality to this starting with Andy Kaufman at the beginning of the movie stating that things have been changed up. The other thing is that so many people are playing themselves in the movie. It's like an alternate universe. There's also the fact that Jim Carrey does a lot of crazy stuff on stage. Carrey puts it all on the line in this movie and it shows. I wouldn't put too much stock in the accuracy debate. I don't usual care that much about that and this movie can be seen as another Tony Clifton production anyways.

Like most of the world, I was introduced to Andy Kaufman through the sitcom Taxi, where he played a goofy foreigner mechanic named Latka Gravas. Given his comedy style on the show, I would never have guessed what a different approach he took to most of his comedy in real life.Jim Carrey, a fan of Andy Kaufman, is great as Andy, and Andy's alternate persona Tony Clifton. The script is written by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, writers of biopics Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt. Like in Ed Wood, humor is used as often as possible as the story moves forward. Danny DeVito (Kaufman's co-star on Taxi) plays Kaufman's manager George Shapiro, and also produced the film. With the exception of Tony Danza (who had a rather strong dislike for Kaufman and felt it would be disingenuous to appear in a film about him), all of the cast members of Taxi make appearances.This is far from a perfectly factual movie, many events and circumstances portrayed in the film are highly fictionalized and sometimes appear out of order. But while the events portrayed aren't entirely accurate, they aren't meant to be, and the film remains quite true to the spirit of Andy Kaufman.I recommend this film quite a bit, for both fans and non-fans of Andy Kaufman.