Great movie about Quixotic subject..

Rating: 9/10 (24 November 2009)

Andy Kaufman was indeed very strange. I never thought too much of his shtick, "Latka" after all was a very pandering character who succeeded very well at precisely what it was supposed to do, namely appealing to warm and fuzzy instinctive maternality on a banal level, a television staple. His stage routines are also just vignettes of the fantasies of a lonely boy who grew up to be a textbook neurotic nebbish. Nothing very original, mostly just an updated riff on Cab Calloway, more pandering with "Elvis" and some lip-syncing interspersed with again, the puerile "Foreign Man/Latka" providing some schizoid emceeing. What gets my attention, is the negative (and in my opinion hilarious) energy exuded by his bits as "Tony Clifton". This is truly a hoot and is some of the best show business satire around though I think even this was derived from Bill Kirchenbauer's hilarious turn as "Tony Rolletti" on "Fernwood 2-Nite". It is also a tribute to the old borscht belt tradition of the "tummler" whose job it was to disquiet an audience in advance of a headliner (think Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles etc.) This is where it all gets quite weird with Kaufman insisting on two plane tickets when he traveled etc. Kaufman was merely thumbing his nose at everyone (mostly the establishment, I hope). He even got away with it for a time until people wised up and voted him off SNL. As for Jim Carrey, you won't see any better acting, and the Milos Forman film is wonderful with many of the victims and co-conspirators in the cast. It seems the last laugh was on Andy because few people went to see a great movie about a man who did little to hide his contempt for the audience, milk and cookies notwithstanding.