Unintentional Comedy Award
Everything Tilda Swinton does, starting with the armpit washing; the baguettes; the horses; Arthur's Times Square bender montage; how kind and reasonable the loan shark Gabe is; the hitman who looks like Gordon Ramsay
In the discussion (3)
Approx. transcript time · 01:00:02Read transcript
- Everything Tilda Swinton does is right on the edge of comedy, which is why the performance is brilliant, starting with the armpit washing in her first scene; the baguettes are very funny, but since the choices illustrating Arthur's manic episode off his meds are so deliberate they may not count as unintentional; the horses toe the line, especially next to the Three Billboards parallel, and are definitely memeable according to the Michael Clayton Tumblr community.
- Where Arthur got the bread in Chinatown and how far he walked with it is wondered about; the Arthur montage is when the film most feels like a Satoshi Kon movie, a freed man on a surreal purifying bender through a long Times Square shot, cartoonish in an unexpected format, which drew laughs not because it is ridiculous but because every other character is repressed, hyper-professionalized and animated by anxiety.
- Amusing if not strictly unintentional, given how much evil is done in the film: how kind and reasonable the loan shark Gabe is, advising that paying only twelve thousand now would make them worry, far more accommodating than a Honda dealership; and one of the hitmen, at certain angles, looks so much like Gordon Ramsay that it was distracting but raised the image of Ramsay silently killing a rival chef.