Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #54 Man On The Moon

Box Office: $34.6 Million

Oscar Nominations: None

Oscar Wins: None

MovieRankings.Net: 72/100

Available To Stream: YouTube, Amazon Prime

Jim Carrey's greatest scene as an actor is at the end of this movie. He's playing Andy Kaufman and is trying a last ditch medical procedure to save his life. He realizes that it's a hoax and laughs as the final prank of his life was played on him. It's an incredible scene that you can see in his eyes so much sadness but he intellectually sees the irony. 

It's awful that Carrey has never gotten an Oscar nomination. With the way his career has gone, he'll likely never get one. He's so fantastic in The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and this. If the Academy didn't have blinders for comedies, find me better comedic performances than his work in Dumb and Dumber and Liar Liar. I don't even think Liar Liar is that impressive of a movie but that's a Wilt Chamberlain 100 point effort.

If you watch the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, you'll see that Carrey must have been annoying as fuck to work with on this. Him staying in character the entire time must have been infuriating. It's weird because Andy Kaufman clearly wasn't "on" the entire time. You even see it in this movie. That's not what Carrey was doing off camera. He was being wildly obnoxious. Despite that, it's one of the best performances by anyone all decade.

I love this movie more than a lot of people. It checks all the boxes for me. Carrey in the 1990's! Andy Kaufman! Finally, Milos Forman directed it. You can make a very strong case that Forman is the most underrated director of the past 50 years. He has directed One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The People Vs. Larry Flynt and this. 

Universal. Shutterstock Images.

I find the comedy and motivations of Andy Kaufman to be so brilliant. I realized when this came out and opened at six and was out of the top ten in three weeks, that I might be more alone with these thoughts than I imagined. I'm not much of a fan of biopics and this does feel rushed at times. Anytime you have to jam 35 years into a two hour movie, that's going to happen. I see this as so much stronger than many other biopics like Ray or A Beautiful Mind. 

Maybe the biggest hurdle this movie had to try to deal with was bad timing. 1999 was one of the greatest years in movie history and this kind of got lost in the shuffle. It's not even the best true story to come out in the final two months of 1999. That would be The Insider (which I'll get to eventually). But just because it did come out during the one of the greatest stretches in movie history doesn't mean we should forget this movie or Jim Carrey's amazing work.

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54. Man On The Moon

55. Boyz N The Hood

56. Grosse Pointe Blank

57. Independence Day

58. The Rainmaker

59. Go

60. The Firm

61. Magnolia

62. The Talented Mr. Ripley

63. Tommy Boy

64. The Usual Suspects

65. In The Line Of Fire

66. My Cousin Vinny

67. Awakenings

68. JFK

69. Toy Story

70. Home Alone

71. Jerry Maguire

72. Titanic

73. Billy Madison

74. Apollo 13

75. Braveheart

76. Edward Scissorhands

77. Cape Fear

78. The River Wild

79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

80. 12 Monkeys

81. Stir Of Echoes

82. Mission: Impossible

83. Total Recall

84. Quiz Show

85. For Love Of The Game

86. Being John Malkovich

87. Men In Black

88. Scream

89. Alive

90. Three Kings

91. Glengarry Glen Ross

92. Die Hard With A Vengeance

93. The Blair Witch Project

94. Twister

95. Dirty Work

96. Election

97. Tremors

98. Any Given Sunday

99. The Wedding Singer

100. Clerks