For people who don't know Kaufman

Rating: 9/10 (3 August 2001)

As I heard, the film Man on the Moon` tells Andy Kaufman's biography quite authentically. I didn't know the man before but he must have been really hard to handle. He provoked lots of ethic discussions, and the film corresponds to them. For people who haven't taken part in the excitements Kaufman caused at that time, the ethic questions appear during watching the film. Is it funny what Kaufman does? Does he intend anything special with it? How far can he go and when do we start feeling betrayed? Actually, Kaufman himself seems to have had more fun on stage than his audience.
Man on the Moon` is not told like the biography of a man we already know. Maybe Kaufman fans will be bored because there are no surprises for them. But at the end and in the end Forman carries Kaufman's humour one step further and, by doing that, gives him an appropriate reference, I think: the way he directs Kaufman's death is as ambiguous as the way Kaufman would have done it: It outrages one part of the audiences and makes the other part smile sadistically.
Well, I liked it.