`Man on the Moon’ offers no insight

MAN ON THE MOON. Directed by Milos Forman. Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Running time: 118 minutes. Rated R.

Those going to Milos Forman’s “Man on the Moon” hoping for insight into what made Andy Kaufman one of comedy’s more peculiar bit players will be disappointed. The film never explores who Kaufman was.

Instead, Forman uses his film to elaborately re-stage those performances that ignited Kaufman’s rise to fame — and those performances that ultimately cast his career into free fall before he died of lung cancer at age 35.

The result is as polarizing as Kaufman was himself.

At my screening, the audience was divided into thirds — those who got up and walked out, those who sat in dumbstruck silence, and those who clearly rejoiced in Jim Carrey’s uncanny impersonation of Kaufman’s shtick.

It may be fitting that this film perfectly mirrors Kaufman’s assumed lack of substance — Kaufman, an absurdist, would have delighted in the film’s complete emptiness — but anyone interested in people or in what drives pop culture will be left with too many unanswered questions: How did Kaufman become so popular? Why did he strike such a nerve? How did he get this way? Why did he intentionally destroy his career?

Those seeking answers will have no choice but to turn to the performances, which, in the end, just aren’t enough to flesh out this enduring enigma. Grade: C-

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Stone, John Logan and Daniel Pyne. Running time: 170 minutes. Rated R.

Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday” is a loud, showy, bone-crunching examination of the world of pro football — fans of the game should love it.

Other viewers hoping for something more substantial from Stone will be disappointed that the Academy Award-winning director has nothing new or insightful to say about the game or the values that drive it.

Steeped in a wealth of sports movie cliches, the film finds Stone trading the battlefield for the playing field, bombs for footballs, guns for testosterone, bulletproof vests for heavily padded gear.

The director, who once delighted in taking risks, now seems only content to refine the latest trend; indeed, he cuts his film as feverishly as a music video, a style that may spark this particular effort with a huge supply of chest-beating energy, but it’s a gimmicky, false sense of energy not created through sustained tension, but through a blitz of rapid jump cuts.

The film does have its triumphs. Stone seamlessly brings together the most unlikely of casts — including Al Pacino, James Woods, Cameron Diaz, Ann-Margaret, LL Cool J, Jim Brown, Dennis Quaid, Dick Butkus, and Charlton Heston as the league commissioner — and he does get a breakout performance from Jamie Foxx as a young quarterback who challenges Pacino’s grimacing coach, a man fighting for his career as he tries to turn around the fictional Miami Sharks.

But with Pacino once again playing Pacino, Diaz stretched to her limits as the team’s owner, “Any Given Sunday” exhausts itself in its second hour. This film is sometimes so drawn out, it feels like a month of Mondays, particularly near the end, when Stone takes the final nine seconds of a game and stretches them into a preposterous, never-ending ending. Grade: C

Christopher Smith’s reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”