blurry lines between reality and fiction

Rating: Null/10 (2 July 2000)

Wow. I don't think I could top the front-page review if I wanted to.

I found the movie entertaining, and definitely worth watching, although I had a bit of a problem with the way Milos Forman handled the re-enactment of scenes from Andy's career. For example, most of the cast of Taxi played themselves, creating a very disjointed effect since most of them look significantly older than they did in the early 1980s when the real show aired. (Okay, so Marilu Henner doesn't appear to have aged a day, but still.)
And the character of Louis De Palma is left out of the "Taxi" scenes entirely because Danny DeVito is already in the movie playing Andy's agent George Shapiro. Ummmm, problem.
David Letterman also looks significantly older than he did in 1982 when Andy and Jerry Lawler appeared on Late Night, creating the same "suspension of disbelief" problem as the Taxi scenes.
Then we see the infamous Fridays sketch, which instead of being reprised by the original participants as most of the other recreated scenes are, is actually performed by comedic actors (Norm MacDonald, Caroline Rhea) who are famous enough in their own right that a viewer unfamiliar with the Andy Kaufman story could be led to believe that they were really involved in the original incident.
So you end up with Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman at more or less the correct age, playing against a lot of people who look the wrong age for the time because they're playing themselves, one person who should be playing himself actually playing somebody else, and two people who are playing other people but are recognizable enough on their own that it interferes with the veracity of the scene.
I really believe Milos Forman should have stuck to one of two approaches: either *all* the original participants in the recreated scenes should have played themselves, or *all* of them should have been played by other actors. Mixing the two actually detracts from the movie.