Once happened to be watching “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. If you have it, or next time you see it, watch closely in the final scene. After breaking up with Bing and then making up…Clooney gives Bing a fairly ornate and expensive looking small horse (not sure what it was made of).
So what does Bing do? He opens the gift, looks at it, then he just tosses it into the Christmas tree so he can kiss her. If you watch it closely, it’s laugh out loud hilarious! It’s as if he doesn’t give two hoots about the gift.
Anything similar come to mind? Anything from any movie is fair game!
At the climax of Billy the Kid vs Dracula, in which the Count is played by none other than John Carradine, the Kid empties his six-shooter into him with absolutely no effect. He then tosses the gun, hits Drac square in the forehead with it, and knocks him cold long enough to drive a stake through his heart. One memorable moment from a movie chock-full of them!
Is this the kind of thing you’re looking for? :dubious:
Well, sort of…although it’s sounds like your example (which did make me laugh, as I hadn’t seen the movie) was likely written into the script. In my OP, I’m thinking that Bing casually tossing away an expensive gift wasn’t something the writers had planned on…it just happened, which—given that it comes during a supposedly emotionally uplifting part of the film–is what made it funny.
I’m trying to think of other examples, which is why I posted the thread…just wanted to see if others had any.
Perhaps a scene from Trading Places fits as an example?
At the end of Billy Ray Valentine’s early training at Duke & Duke, Billy Ray runs downstairs to return Mortimer’s “dropped” money clip before he can leave the building. He gives it to Randolph Duke, who shoots Mortimer a look (after Billy Ray leaves) and admonishes him, before lightly tossing it to his brother.
In the scene, Don Ameche was supposed to simply catch the clip and glare, but he fumbled it, bouncing the clip into the air a couple of times before catching it rather impressively before it falls. John Landis liked that move so much he kept the take.
At the end of ROCKY – the one that won the Oscar for Best Picture – they say that’s actually Sylvester Stallone breaking character to genuinely ask Talia Shire where her hat is; that’s not in the shooting script, she just showed up minus it and he goes from a character soulfully howling for Adriaaaaaan to the guy who wrote this very scene just wanting to know what’s up with the actress and her outfit.
Of course, that’s also something Rocky would be curious about, so it stayed.
I’ve heard two explanations, actually. The real answer is that the movie was getting a little too serious and suspenseful at that point, and the writer thought it needed some little bit of throwaway weirdness to keep the right vibe. Don’t remember where I read that, but I can see the point.
The after-the-fact, in-universe fanwank is that the Banzai Institute was trying to develop relief supplies that could be airdropped to starving regions of the world. The watermelon was being tested for its impact resistance.
Either way (or both ways, actually) it’s a wonderful example of some little bit of strangeness taking on a life of its own.
In “Dr. Strangelove”, during the scene where General Ripper and Group Capt. Mandrake are locked in Ripper’s office. The whole “the string in my leg is gone” bit was improvised by Peter Sellers when he forgot his actual line. You can hear Sterling Hayden’s “The what?” when he gets caught off-guard by the ad-lib.
The whole movie Riding the Bus with My Sister (2005). It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever seen Rosie do–and it was most definitely NOT intended to be.
I like when Viggo Moretensen breaks his toe in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
He kept trying to kick the helmet as close to the camera as he could. He got quite a few good kicks in when Peter Jackson told him, “How about one more?” Viggo really kicks this helmet and it lands really close to the camera and he yells, falling to his knees. He broke his toe in the final kick and used his pain to make his performance stronger.
This is both unintentionally hilarious and adorable. In the Matrix, they did not digitally remove the camera during a shot of a door knob, but they wanted the shot. What did they do? They put leather trenchcoat material over it and also striped it with a tie to match Morpheus. They lined it up so you would think it is Morpheus. Kind of a forced perspective trick and I love it due to it being real film-making craft.
Another one from Dr. Strangelove: George C. Scott’s fall wasn’t scripted. You have to give him credit for recovering from it so gracefully, while continuing to deliver his lines.
One unintentional thing that I notice every time I watch the movie: in Rocky III, during his rematch with Clubber Lang, at one point Rocky takes a swig of water from a bottle and spits it into a bucket. Or, he tries to spit it into the bucket that Paulie is holding, but he spits way too hard and instead spits a mouthful of water all over Paulie’s shirt. You can tell from Paulie’s expression that he did not expect that.
In the 1966 Batman movie, there’s a scene where Catwoman, in her non-villain persona of Ms. Kitka, is attempting to seduce Bruce Wayne. Just as Wayne is leaning in for a kiss, the other villains burst into the room. Wayne leaps up in surprise and action ensues.
The hilarious part is that either Adam West badly jumped his cue, or the sound editing was way off, because well before the sound of the villains bursting in, he pulls his head away from Lee Meriwether with a horrified look on his face. It left him looking like he really didn’t want to kiss her.
[sub]I may be misremembering who burst in and why, but the end result was still the same.[/sub]
It’s been awhile, but I’ve heard the DVD commentary in the distant past, and they were talking about how the studio was interfering with the shoot in ways that irritated and infuriated them. One example was Buckaroo’s eyeglasses, which were a little out of the ordinary. The studio heads didn’t like them and argued about how many times he wore them. IIRC, the filmmakers went back and forth with them and they negotiated the number of times Buckaroo wore his glasses.
So it’s clear that the studio was taking a bit of a hands-on, nitpicky approach to handling the movie. However at some point, they seemed to lose interest. They no longer did the vastly irritating things anymore, and the director, writer, etc, were both pleased and disconcerted by the change in attitude - so they decided to mess around and test the waters a bit. Hence, the non-sequiturial ‘melon in a press’ scene and the classic, “What’s that watermelon doing there?” They wanted to see what the heads would do, if anything. I guess they liked it enough to actually use the footage.
Now, this story was from Earl Mac Rauch, IIRC, so you can’t necessarily believe it. The man truly was, and probably still is, a true Hong Kong Cavalier in his own right. Secondly, it’s been probably 10 years since I listened to the commentary, so I might be spinning tall tales of my own, but I think that’s roughly what they said.
