I'm surprised that I hated this movie

Rating: 4/10 (2 March 2000)

First of all, I was a big fan of Andy Kaufman's, I enjoy Jim Carrey and I've seen 4 or 5 Milos Forman films that I would call "great." That being said, I do not understand the motivation for making this movie.
Most of the scenes were just staged re-enactments of televised moments from Kaufman's career. On that level, you're much better off watching one of the oft-repeated documentaries on Comedy Central or parts of the retrospective shown at the Museum of TV & Radio last year. As far as the "uncanny" portrayal from Jim Carrey, I don't remember Kaufman as that blissed out.
As for his off-camera life (what there was of it, which I suppose is almost the point of this movie/exercise) some of those scenes were dreadful. Like when Jerry Lawler & he are in Shapiro's office and Lawler says something like "We really showed them, didn't we Andy?" I don't remember the exact line but things like that were so clunky you could hear them coming out of the typewriter as the writer pats himself on the back.
There's kind of a built-in system from fans of Kaufman and/or this movie that if you didn't care for him/the movie, then you "don't get it." I was right there with Kaufman most of the time. But there were other times when he really was neither funny nor interesting (like that one-time TV special of his - oy!). Like every performer, he had his ups and downs. Yet those in his camp seem a little too eager to think of him as a "genius" and thus won't say the emperor has no clothes and admit that everything Kaufman touched wasn't made out of gold.
As for this movie, OK ... he's an enigma. We get it. That does make this script worthy of an audience for two hours.
This thing was so stiff it made me rethink the whole creative principals involved and admit to myself that The People Vs. Larry Flynt was also a waste of time.