Mr. Andy Kaufman's Gone Wrestling

Man on the Moon: written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; directed by Milos Forman; starring Jim Carrey (Andy Kaufman), Danny DeVito (George Shapiro), Paul Giamatti (Bob Zmuda), and Courtney Love (Lynne Margulies) (1999): Terrific biopic of enigmatic, innovative 1970's comic Andy Kaufman, whose often surreal bits helped inspire such acts as Pee Wee Herman and about a thousand others. Jim Carrey shines as Kaufman, though he generally plays the classic Kaufman performances scattered throughout the movie a bit more broadly than Kaufman did as seen in existing recordings.

The movie takes its name -- not to mention its musical lietmotifs -- from the 1992 R.E.M. song "Man on the Moon." The title refers to various conspiracy theories about the lunar landing as an oblique way to comment on conspiracy theories about Kaufman's death in 1984. Because of Kaufman's love of hoaxes and disguises, many believed that he faked his own death as yet another stunt. In an odd way, Kaufman's Hoaxy side put him in a proud American tradition dating all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe, another Hoaxy fellow whose early death seemed (and still seems) like a hoax to many.

At the very least, Carrey deserved an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Looking back at the 1999 Oscars, I find it hard to view Kevin Spacey's Best Actor-winning turn in American Beauty as anything other than ridiculous. It's not just that this is fine work from Carrey -- it's also tremendously funny work. The Academy may undervalue comedy, but in acting, comedy is the hardest thing to do.

Danny De Vito and Paul Giamatti are also great as Kaufman's agent and head writer, respectively. The movie plays a bit fast and loose with the order of events to create a more standard Hollywood narrative. However, the movie also mocks this rewriting of history in Carrey's opening monologue. So there is that. Milos Forman and the writers keep everything both brisk and information-packed. This is a surprisingly informative biopic. Certainly we get a much better grasp of Kaufman's life and work than we did of, say, Stephen Hawking's in The Theory of Everything. 

There's also a refreshing bit near the end that debunks New Agey mystical cures for diseases such as cancer, capping this film with a moment in which a dying Kaufman laughs at accidentally seeing behind the curtain of another performer's hoax. Highly recommended.

Barney, Rubble

Barney's Version: adapted by Michael Konyves from the novel by Mordecai Richler; directed by Richard J. Lewis; starring Paul Giamatti (Barney Panofsky), Mark Addy (Detective O'Hearne), Scott Speedman (Boogie), Dustin Hoffman (Izzy Panofsky), Minnie Driver (The Second Mrs. Panofsky), and Rosamund Pike (Miriam Grant) (2011): Paul Giamatti is pretty much pitch perfect in this adaptation of Mordecai Richler's last novel. Even his awesome 'fro in the 1970's sequences seems perfect, hideous though it is.

Barney is a pretty typical Richlerian superschlub -- funny, screwed up, occasionally self-destructive, possessed of a core of mushy romanticism that only occasionally manifests itself, often in spectacularly inappropriate ways. Oh, and he loves hockey. Boy, does he love hockey. And cigars. And hard liquor.

Over the course of the movie, Barney goes through three wives and three careers. He is accused of, but never prosecuted for, the (assumed) murder of his disappeared best friend Boogie, whose ultimate fate seemed a lot more prominently displayed in the novel. The main frame of the film, set in 2007, when Barney is 64, looks back on Barney's life in a mostly linear manner. In 2007, Barney is the successful producer of a long-running soap on Radio-Canada about a Mountie (played knowingly by Paul Gross) and a French-Canadian nurse. But he's divorced and somewhat miserable. And then back we go.

Then performances are all pretty much top-notch -- Bruce Greenwood is great as an earnest neighbour whom Barney instantly dislikes, Rosamund Pike is lovely and understated as the Third Mrs. Panofsky, and Dustin Hoffman seems to have a hoot playing Barney's retired Montreal policeman father. I'm surprised that this movie doesn't clock in at about 4 hours. It really plows through a lot, maybe a bit too much. Recommended.

Beware, Caesar, March 15th!

The Ides of March: adapted by George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon from Willimon's play Farragut North; directed by George Clooney; starring Ryan Gosling (Stephen Meyers), George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara), Paul Giamatti (Tom Duffy), Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns), Marisa Tomei (Ida Horowicz), and Jeffrey Wright (Senator Thompson) (2011): I figure George Clooney can just pick up a telephone, call five randomly chosen actors, and sign them to whatever project he's working on by the end of the day. Certainly The Ides of March has an All-Star cast. They've all got something to work with, too, in this smart political thriller.

To a Canadian born and raised in a parliamentary democracy, the Byzantine U.S. federal system will always possess a certain alien charm -- and, frankly, a simmering alien horror. The Ides of March lays out the joys and horrors of this overly moneyed, often paradoxical system of democracy without ever seeming preachy or too laden with politicobabble.

Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, 30-year-old second-in-command of Governor Mike Morris's campaign to win the Democratic primaries. We follow the campaign during a tumultuous week in Ohio, as deals and double-deals and betrayals and potentially career-ending events swirl in and around the campaign. The dialogue is mostly sharp, the performances lived-in and solid. No one here plays a dummy. And the actors are all up to playing smart.

Gosling shines in playing someone who's both savvy and idealistic. Honouring the audience's intelligence, the final scene leaves it to the viewer to decide how much that idealism has been shattered by the events of the film. It's a quiet, subtle, Oscar-quality performance.

Indeed, there isn't a weak performance in the movie. Clooney is utterly believeable as a charismatic candidate promising hope and change; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti make for crafty and rumpled long-time backroom opponents; even Evan Rachel Wood nails her role as a pretty, connected intern who gets caught up in the undertow of dangerous political depths. Highly recommended.

Soul Kaufman

Cold Souls, written and directed by Sophie Barthes, starring Paul Giamatti, Emily Watson (Claire), Dina Korzun (Nina), Katheryn Winnick (Sveta) and David Straithairn (Dr. Flintstein) (2009): Some reviewers gave this movie flack for being too much like a Charlie Kaufman film. I don't really see it. Kaufman's films (Being John Malcovich, Adaptation) tend to trade in multiple, meta-forms of reality, and to have a hard core of absurdity. About the only similarity here is that Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, just as John Malcovich played John Malcovich (or, somewhat similarly, Nicolas Cage played Charlie Kaufman in a Charlie Kaufman film...and his fictional twin brother).

Other than that, this movie is far more straightforward than a Kaufman film -- indeed, it actually works as science fiction in the Dickian comic inferno mode. I could see it appearing as a short story in a 1950's science-fiction magazine like Galaxy. That's a compliment.

Giamatti, playing Giamatti, is in rehearsals to play Uncle Vanya (in Chekov's Uncle Vanya) on Broadway. He feels that something's getting in the way of his performance -- his anxiety, if you will. An article in the New Yorker tells him about a new process which allows one to remove the soul from a person's brain and put it into cold storage. Intrigued, Giamatti visits Dr. Flintstein's office and ultimately gets his soul removed.

Giamatti's soul looks like a chickpea. Apparently, souls look like a lot of different things.

Into cold storage it goes, and off Giamatti goes to stink out the joint in his next few rehearsals. Back he goes to Dr. Flintstein, who rents him another soul -- that of a Russian poet -- for two weeks. Success! But when Giamatti goes to have his original soul put back in, it's gone.

Uh oh.

Cold Souls maintains a nice, and offbeat, mix of comedy, satire and drama throughout. The subtextual commentary (there are Russian black marketeers in souls, just as there are Russian black marketeers in human trafficking) is kept fairly basic; the parallels aren't forced. The science of the whole procedure almost seems to make sense, just as some of Philip K. Dick's odder pieces of technology had a strange sort of sense to them.

Giamatti is solid as usual, as are Straitharn as Dr. Flintstein and Dina Korzun as Nina, a sympathetic Russian 'soul mule' who brings black-market souls from Russia to the U.S. inside her own head. Sophie Barthes does a terrific job here as both writer and director, and I'll be interested to see if she continues in this offbeat, science fictional mode for later films. Recommended.