Pros: Jim Carrey CAN really act!
Cons: Subtitle: "A Jerk's Life"

Last week I was having lunch with McMaddog, and I was telling him about the movies I was lucky to catch over the '99 Holiday break, just before I caught the flu. I could remember everything I saw very vividly -- it was a really good week of movies -- except for one. I couldn't even remember that I saw "Man In The Moon."

That's normally not troubling, because in our disposable pop-culture, there's lots of sludge that goes in one ear and out the other. But why didn't "Man ..." leave any impression on my at all?

Well, it's finally struck me: "Man ..." isn't a movie at all, really. It's a tour-de-force recreation of a man who had a very strange public persona. Jim Carrey is SO GOOD as the Andy Kaufman I remember when I was growing up. But then again, the Andy Kaufman I remember was never very funny or appealing to me.

When I was young, I suppose, I didn't "get" any of his humor. Probably, it was just my youth. Now that I'm all grown up, as I look back, or when I catch the occasional Kaufman re-runs on Comedy Channel, I still don't think he's funny. I've heard him called a "genius." I ask: "Where's the proof?" Wrestling women? Oooh, ha, ha, ha.

What "Man ..." showed was a guy who learned how to manipulate people for the his own amusement. Fooling people is really funny, especially when you're the only one in on the joke; at least, that what we learn by watching Kaufman's life played out on screen. But I digress from the point of this e-pinion. The movie left no impression on me because of Carrey. He was so convincing as the Kaufman we saw on stage and screen (and as the other obnoxious characters too) that it distracted from the narrative flow of the story. That is, if a narrative flow existed.

There was really no beginning, middle, or end here. I know that when you do bio-pics, it's often hard to cram a real person's life into the artificial conceit of a story -- a Hollywood story no less -- but in this case, I don't think there ever was a story. Like Gertrude Stein said, "There's no 'there' there."

As far as I know it, Kaufman was an unfunny jerk. So why does he rate a movie? If you go and see "Man on the Moon" be prepared to experience this jerk for a couple of hours -- because Carrey pulls that off in spades -- but don't expect to walk away with anything resembling a movie experience.