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Man on the Moon (1999) More at IMDbPro »

Andy Kaufman: I'm From Hollywood (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: An old couple is sitting in their dark, 1970s-decor living room watching The Andy Kaufman Show on TV.

"What's that he's doin' now?" asks the old man skeptically.

"He's playin' with the medium," his wife responds.

That's one of Kaufman's hallmarks, after all: playing with the medium. Long before postmodern became a fashionable term in the entertainment business, here is Kaufman adding dimensions into and onto his stories so you never really know where reality, irreality, comedy, and commentary start and stop. Often it's laugh-out-loud funny, but Kaufman's humor is about saying more than the comedy itself. This DVD has nine "chapters" (not episodes) that at times leave you wondering if it's a put-on or if he's serious: he argues with former girlfriend Elayne Boosler, he praises a horrible tone-deaf singer with plausible ebullience, he exposes guest Dr. Alex Shorr as a fraud. In chapter 6, "The Going-Too-Far Corner," Kaufman has an immense man, shirtless, come on to sip an egg yolk in and out of his mouth from a glass. But then your laughter stops and you have to think while he's banished by a cartoon judge for "going too far" and spends time in exile on an animated island, only to return back to his show by way of a nightmare of odd personalities. Feel ill at ease now? That's part of Kaufman's ingenious, distinctive humor. --Erik Macki

Man on the Moon (dvd):

Amazon.com video review: "There is no real you," jokes Lynn Margulies (Courtney Love) to her boyfriend, Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey), as he grows more contemplative during a battle with cancer. "I forgot," he says, playing along, though the question of Kaufman's reality is always at issue in Milos Forman's underappreciated Man on the Moon.

The story of Kaufman's quick rise to fame through early appearances on Saturday Night Live and the conceptual stunts that made his club and concert appearances an instant legend in the irony-fueled 1970s and early '80s, Man on the Moon never makes the mistake of artificially delineating Comic Andy from Private Andy. True, we get to see something of his private interest in meditation and some of the flakier extremes of alternative medicine, but even these interludes suggest the presence of an ultimate con behind apparent miracles of transformation.

Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (The People vs. Larry Flynt) allege that transformation was Kaufman's purpose--more than a shtick but less than a destiny. As we see him constantly up the ante on the credibility of his performance personae (the obnoxious nightclub comic Tony Clifton; the insulting, misogynistic professional wrestler), Forman makes it harder and harder to detect Kaufman's sleight of hand. But it's there, always there, always the transcendent Andy watching the havoc he creates and the emotions he stirs.

Carrey is magnificent as Kaufman, re-creating uncannily detailed comedy pieces etched in the memory of anyone who remembers the real Andy. But while Carrey's mimicry of Kaufman is flawless and funny, the actor probes much deeper into an enigmatic character who, in life, was often a moving target even for those closest to him. --Tom Keogh