Polanski followed Ira Levin’s book almost exactly as he wrote it. Stephen King wrote that if you read the book, you didn’t have to see the movie and vice versa. The photographer is in the book. The best explanation I can come up with is that taking typical baby pictures shows much Rosemary has accepted her baby. And it’s a really bizarre contrast that in a book like Rosemary’s Baby the photographer should be the ]most bizarre thing in it.
How about the musical ending to The 40-Year-Old Virgin? A great movie that suddenly went all WTF right when the credits started rolling.
Hmmm… it’s been a while, but I recall it as a one-minute lysergic dream sequence that was supposed to be a little game for the viewer – “Find the Fish” – but was actually a freaky interior landscape of men with elephant heads, distorted perspectives, and other strangenesses.
Excellent; thank you.
I know there’s a great example in the back of my mind. Somewhere.
The set-up is that, in the middle of the film, they have an audience participation puzzle. The audience is instructed to find a fish, and encouraged to shout out answers at the screen. The scene then cuts to a very posh manor, wherein a variety of increasingly bizarre characters wander on and off camera, repeating phrases like, “Find the fish,” “Fishy fishy fishy fish,” and “It went wherever I did go.” The “audience,” as recorded on the movie’s audio track, starts yelling out guesses as the location of the fish. The characters include Graham Chapman in a leather bustier, boxing gloves, and a pink bob wig, with water facets over his nipples, Terry Jones dressed as a butler with absurdly long, multi-jointed arms, and another butler with the head of an elephant. It’s incredibly bizarre, even by Python standards.
And don’t forget that bit with the aliens from Life of Brian…
Incidentally, here is a youtube link for “Find the Fish” if anyone wants to experience it in all its surrealist disproportioned nipple fondling glory.
In Hard Core Logo (perhaps not the MOST normal movie, but usually adherant to reality at least), there is a completely bizarre scene where two of the guys in the band are drinking in a bar and demontrate their ability to stop time. It’s extremely weird and I’ve never understood what its there for.
Ooh, that actually makes quite a bit of sense. I like that interpretation.
Also, I’d fall in a heartbeat for any guy who took me to see a sedated tiger. Best date ever!
Wow. I saw the stage version of The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds back in college when a cute girl I knew was the lead and asked if I would go see it. Was a good performance but I haven’t thought about that play in ages. Much less knew that there was a film.
In Cocoanuts, Groucho Marx makes probably the earliest aside to the audince, leaving the others and talking close in to the camera. Probably an ad lib or something meant to be a joke for the film crew and supposed to be cut.
That just may haunt me for the rest of my life.
Gee, and I was coming in to post about the weird musical ending to I Think I Love My Wife. I’m not sure that can really compare.
On a lighter note than most in this thread, there’ s the musical scenes in The Guru and My Best Friend’s Wedding. Particularly the former; theres no explanation for where the music is coming from, and it’s clearly not a dream sequence like the other musical numbers in the film. It’s just wonderful, goofy fun.
I know this wasn’t a really a good movie or anything but there was one thing that confused the hell out of me
In ** Get Rich or Die Trying** There is a scene in the movie where 50Cent is in teh showers in prison and get attacked by another naked by with a knife and another guys helps him out who latter becomes his manager after that incident starting there friendship.
I was wondered why did he have to have a naked shower fight scene? Could he have just been jump in the yard and someone comes to help him. And where did the knife come from, they had all these stuff including there closes removed from them before they got showered.
I thought that was some sort of “Chariots of the Gods” reference.
Similarly, the musical number in The Sweetest Thing is bizzarely out of place.
I don’t know if this ranks up there with “Find the Fish”, but …
In Singin’ in the Rain, right at the end there’s a long, drawn out Berkley Busby meets Federico Fellini dream sequence/dance production featuring Gene Kelly doing modern dance. Modern for 1952, anyway. I realize it has an obscurity to fame to obscurity theme similar to the rest of the movie, but to me it looks as tacked on as the Bela Lugosi scenes in Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Yeah, but The Guru is done in the style of Bollywood, where that sort of thing is entirely normal. 
First, to be fair, even though it’s a blast to watch Chungking Express isn’t really a “normal” movie.
That having been said, Faye Wong’s dance scene just came out of left field. For those who haven’t seen it:
Faye Wong works at a snack bar, where she meets and develops a crush on a cop who is in the middle of post-breakup depression. She decides to cheer him up by repeatedly breaking into his apartmentto clean, redecorate, hang out, and search his bed for hair from other women. Far be it from Wong to go all CSI on the place without a good backing track, though. Indeed, the entire scene is accompanied by the Chinese version of Dreams, by the the Cranberries. (Incidentally, Faye Wong actually sang that very song.)
The scene is right here, for anyone who is curious.
And I checked into this thread to say that the entire second half of Chungking Express was a bizarre scene in an otherwise normal movie.
Some times, it is my favorite scene from the movie.
The piano dance in Big.
The Grand Central Waltz in The Fisher King.
Sometimes not.
The scene where Frank Sinatra meets Janet Leigh in The Manchurian Candidate is just plain weird. Considering the mind blowing opening sequence, the fact that this scene is the weird one should tell you something about how weird it is.
I’m not sure how I feel about the dream sequence in The Hudsucker Proxy but I’m not sure that Hudsucker is a ‘normal’ movie.