For example, Ferris Bueller address the audience directly several times, acknowledging that he is in a movie. Also, in Goldmember, Micheal York
tells the audience something to the effect of “don’t think about continuity
errors, just enjoy the movie”. Are there many other examples of this?
Do you count movies about the characters making a movie, e.g., Silent Movie and Ma Femme est une Actrice?
In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the whole movie is narrated by a self-referencing narrator that makes several allusions to the fact that it’s a movie. He even apologizes for sloppy narration, plot cliches, and and a drawn out ending (“I promise this movie won’t end like Lord of the Rings”).
In Fight Club, at the end, the main character makes a subtle allusion to the fact. Since most of the movie is a flashback prompted by Tyler Durden asking the protagonist at gunpoint if he has anything to say, at the end when the movie returns to the present the protagonist answers that he still can’t think of anything, Durden chuckles and says “ah, flashback humor.”
There are a bunch more, I just can’t think of them at the moment.
Top Secret! - As Nick and Hillary are floating to earth in parachutes, there is a bit of dialogue that goes like this:
*Nick Rivers: Listen to me Hillary. I’m not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Hillary Flammond: I know. It all sounds like some bad movie. *
[Long pause. Both look at camera]
Hope/ Crosby Road To movies. Frequent references.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. At the end, hearing their awful playing, the time traveler turns to the audience and says “They do get better.”
The Blair Witch Project.
Blazing Saddles
Wayne’s World
The Great Muppet Caper
This is called “breaking the fourth wall.” One of my favorites (even if it does take you out of the film) is in the Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This was the first time that Bond was played by an actor other than Sean Connery (George Larzanby), and in the pretitle sequence he spots and follows a beautiful woman (Diana Rigg) who drives down on the beach and then tries to drown herself in the ocean. Bond chivalrously goes to rescue her, only to be attacked by several mysterious henchmen. While he’s fending them off, she steals Bond’s car, drives back up to her own car, and disappears into the night. Bond holds up a slipper that she dropped (making him Prince Charming) turns to the camera, and slyly intimates his status as the new James Bond by saying, “This never happened to the other fella.”
Stranger
Even though Ray Liotta is narrating during the whole movie, at the end of GoodFellas he talks directly to the camera.
Jim Carrey accepts an “Oscar” for his performance in The Mask.
Was there a Marx brother movie that did not break the fourth wall?
Not movies but George Burns and Gary Shandling took breaking the fourth wall to a high art. Flawlessly going in and out of the show.
Jim
Spaceballs. When Dark Helmet wanted to find out where the heroes had fled to, he had his underlings put a tape of Spaceballs: the Movie into a VCR.
Also, there was a point in the movie where the heroes stunt doubles got captured.
In Sixteen Candles, when Ted is driving around with the prom queen in the Rolls Royce, and she goes down on him, he turns to the camera and says “This is getting good!”
Airplane, at one point the protagonist turns to the camera and says something like, “What a pisser!”
For whatever reason there stikes me as being a difference between simply breaking the fourth wall and explicitly acknowledging that one is in a movie.
That being said, in “The Pirate Movie” Mabel breaks the fourth wall pretty continuously (as does the Pirate King I think, and possibly Frederic) and toward the end she starts demanding a happy ending for her story (which, since it’s a dream, may not actually indicate awareness of being in a movie as much as being in the dream within the movie).
More than once in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the actors acknowledge the audience and how they were suckered into paying to see a crappy movie.
The tail ends of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The School of Rock both tell the audience that it’s time to leave the theater.
The Sweetest Thing also had a scene where the women decide they have time “for a movie montage,” and proceed to have one. It’s bizarre.
The Last Action Hero – Danny Madigan goes into a move, and thinks he’s the hero and can’t be harmed, but realizes at the last second he’s only the comic relief. (It’s kind of hard to figure out what layer this is, of course – he knows he’s in the Jack Slater movie, but probably not in The Last Action Hero).
In one Monty Python skit, the Pythons discover they’re on film.
There’s also Duck Amuck and other Warner Brothers cartoons that referred to the fact that they were in a movie.
The clearest example of the OP in the Marx Brothers – where’s it’s acknowleging it’s a movie instead of just breaking the 4th wall – is in Horse Feathers, where Chico starts playing the piano and Groucho says to the audience, “I have to stay here, but there’s no reason you can’t go into the lobby until this all blows over.”
The actors in the film within a film in The Purple Rose of Cairo realize they’re in a movie.
Even before that, the plot summary is given during the Mr. Radar sequence, and Dark Helmet makes sure the audience gets it.
There’s also the part when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are filming Good Will Hunting II (Hunting Season) and they are talking about how sometimes you have to take a crappy role in a movie to pay back a friend.