Director: Miloš Morman
Cast: Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, my. This, along with Three Kings (1999), My Dog Skip (1999) (my sister was and is crazy for anything with dogs in it), and, naturally, Batman (1989) were the first four DVDs I ever owned. It seems like a long time ago, but also at times feels like it was just yesterday.
Did I Like It: Those first few dozen times I watched the film, I couldn’t help but become a little obsessed with Kaufman (Carrey). Not quite to the degree that Carrey became obsessed. Who could? It is a fairly apt primer into the ethos Kaufman strove for in his all-too-brief career. If you are getting ready to watch the film for the first time, it will bother you, it will annoy you, and it will occasionally be very funny. At no time will there be a moment where any of this is done by accident. At it’s very best, and if you’re with Kaufman in what he was trying to do, you’ll start to re-think what entertainment can actually be.
And yet, a movie hits differently after you have not seen it in quite a while, but saw so many times at a particular time in your life. The flaws creep up. I now realize that there was no way Kaufman was playing Ms. Pac-Man when George Shapiro (DeVito) tells him that he closed the deal to get him to star in Taxi. That show premiered in 1978, and didn’t start popping up in arcades until 1982. That’s a nitpicky thing, and the kind of thing I only pick up on in movies after I went past the age of 16, but now that we’re on the topic of DeVito, Taxi, and George Shapiro: the movie does go to great lengths to re-create scenes of that show, but has to bend over backwards to be a world that includes George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman, and Taxi, but doesn’t also include Danny DeVito or Louie De Palma.