Man on the Moon / YMMV

Accidental Aesop: The Japanese release's souvenir program (particularly in the plot summary) played up the romantic subplot between Andy and Lynne that doesn't kick in until the halfway point, likely to give the audience an emotional "hook" to a distinctly American narrative, and found one of these in the process. Very roughly translated: "Even if others don't understand and support you and what you do, if you have one person who does, that is a reward in itself."
Audience-Alienating Premise: This was the third installment of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's "anti-great man" trilogy after Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt. As such, the film bombed largely due to the advertising campaign's frankness about it being a biopic of Andy Kaufman, who was and still is a very divisive performer — an issue that extended to some reviews. The screenwriters' commentary track on the 2022 Blu-Ray release reveals that they and Bob Zmuda begged Universal Pictures not to position the movie as their big Christmas wide release for 1999 with this trope in mind (they would have brought it out in early November on the festival circuit to let word of mouth build).
Award Snub: Jim Carrey won a second straight Golden Globe Best Actor award (albeit in a different genre category) and still didn't receive an Academy Award nomination, the same treatment he got for The Truman Show. Reportedly the Oscar show's writers had to discard reams of material that would have tied into his being nominated. The film was completely shut out of Oscar nominations, in fact, even though "The Great Beyond" seemed highly likely for the Best Original Song final five; in the end it was only nominated for a Grammy for "Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media." (Lost to "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2). 1999 was an unusually competitive year for American film.
Awesome Music: R.E.M.'s "The Great Beyond" is a beautiful tribute to Kaufman's legacy.
Comedy Ghetto: Given that the biopic is one of the most reliable Oscar Bait formats and how much the Academy voters tend to love the variant on Method Acting Jim Carrey utilized here, the fact that this movie wasn't nominated for any Oscars may be at least partly due to this — both the lead actor and main character work in the space of comedy after all. Indeed, given Carrey failed to score an Oscar nom despite two Golden Globe wins by that point, he seems to fall squarely into it in the eyes of the Academy no matter how well he does — he would be snubbed for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind too. (It's especially awkward in hindsight given how several subsequent actors who won for musical Biopics didn't do much, if any, of their own singing and were much more heavily made up to resemble their characters rather than going with Ability over Appearance.)
Epileptic Trees: The website Movies Synced, which seeks out and lists movie/album combinations ala the famous "Dark Side of the Rainbow" combination of The Wizard of Oz and The Dark Side of the Moon, regards R.E.M.'s 2001 album Reveal (the first studio album they recorded and released after scoring this film) as an alternate soundtrack for this movie. There are a noticeable number of songs that use show business/theatrical imagery and metaphors ("All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star)", "Imitation of Life", "Disappear", "Chorus and the Ring") and/or are I Want (or You Want) Songs about longing for living out dreams or ambitions, especially those not understood by others, in effect carrying on the themes of this film's theme song "The Great Beyond". In a more specific oddity, the opening track "The Lifting" very closely approximates the length of the film's prologue (from the opening Universal Pictures logo to Andy starting the movie projector) and, if the album is played through multiple times, serves as a bookend by underscoring the final scene.
Fridge Brilliance: At one point Shapiro comments that Andy is doing all these jokes for his own amusement. This gives the movie a new meaning in that the audience finally gets to appreciate Andy's act from the best perspective, which also better justifies how heavily it incorporates Real Footage Recreations since it's not just recreation but a sort of Once More, with Clarity approach to his work. This ties into the Credits Gag: Andy trusts that anyone who stays through it is ready and willing to see things from his point of view...and since he's a Trolling Creator, he's ready to use Artistic License to the hilt. (As costume designer Jeffrey Kurland pointed out in the press kit, "where Andy Kaufman is concerned, he was theatrical license — he owned theatrical license!")
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Downplayed: When the film was released in Europe in 2000 it was not a box-office success, in part because Andy Kaufman's infamy didn't extend beyond North America. Still, critics were friendlier: It won Miloš Forman a Silver Bear for Direction at the Berlin International Film Festival, and the critics at beloved French film journal Cahiers du Cinema voted it the number three film of the year — the highest rank an American film managed.
He Really Can Act: Even after The Truman Show was a hit, some critics doubted Jim Carrey being a real actor because that film saw him Playing with Character Type. Of his A-list roles, this was the first one in which he couldn't use his established persona even in a tweaked way, so critics who thought he pulled it off were that much more impressed. Movieline, in a 2000 rundown of the ten best male performances of 1999, put it this way:
Carrey nails Kaufman to the wall with something beyond mimicry and bordering on channeling, thus allowing the crazed wonder of Kaufman to speak more or less for itself. But there are more layers to the onion. Carrey has been a wide-open, read-me presence up to now, and Kaufman was utterly opaque. So when Carrey comes before us as Kaufman, suddenly emptied of the cartoonish desire, rage and paranoia we know so well, he somehow appears nakedly innocent and fiercely unknowable at the exact same time. Which makes the movie, and Carrey's performance, profoundly Kaufmanic.
Humor Dissonance: Owing to the aforementioned Fridge Brilliance, the film inverts the trope in that the viewer understands the anti-jokes of Andy's act better than the in-universe audiences do — once the tricks are revealed, anyway. This inversion was actually a problem during filming: Milos Forman frequently had to tell the extras "not to love [Jim Carrey] so much" as they came in expecting to laugh at anything he did and thus saw things differently than Andy's actual audiences.
Periphery Demographic: Alexander and Karaszewski explain on the 2022 Blu-Ray commentary track that of all their films, this is the one they are most frequently asked about despite its box-office failure. Specifically, kids who grew up as Jim Carrey fans in The '90s caught up with it in cable airings at the Turn of the Millennium — many citing it as the first R-rated movie they ever saw — and were fascinated by both the story and the meta approach taken to telling it.
Questionable Casting: This was the reaction in some quarters to the casting of Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman when it was announced in April 1998. Many observers, up to and including R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, didn't think Carrey could pull it off. He had virtually nothing in common physically with Kaufman, and his reputation was that of a Slapstick performer and a Large Ham, not a real actor who could play a notorious performance artist. It didn't help that he beat out several such performers, such as Sean Penn and Edward Norton, for the part; also, The Truman Show hadn't yet been released yet, so only people who closely followed his early career were aware he could handle dramatic work. But these observers didn't know what the filmmakers did: that Carrey was a huge fan of Kaufman and saw this as a dream-come-true role.
Retroactive Recognition: David Koechner appears as the National Enquirer reporter tipped off to Andy's illness.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: For time reasons, large and interesting parts of Andy's life are skipped over, such as being declared 4-F^note by the Army for psychiatric reasons ^note, hitchhiking to Las Vegas to meet Elvis Presley (during which he claimed to have seen an actual lounge performer who inspired the Tony Clifton character), his second Dinah! show appearance as Tony Clifton (the footage of which was supposedly burned^note), and his short-lived movie career. Notably, Andy's father Stanley was disappointed that little attention was paid to his pre-showbusiness life.
Vindicated by History: While the film bombed in theaters, received mixed reviews — a common complaint was that it was too much recreation, not enough explanation/illumination — and was snubbed by the Oscars, it ended up doing very well on cable and DVD, to the point where not only is this the one film Alexander and Karaszewski are asked about the most, but eventually got an acclaimed follow-up documentary, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, which further illuminated the film's themes and astonishing Reality Subtext.

YMMV / Man on the Moon

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