Wednesday, February 12, 2014

34 - Top Secret!

    An American rock star gets mixed up in a resistance opposing the East German regime.
    I love this movie.  The Zucker brothers made plenty of classic comedies, and this one gets overlooked most of the time.  I strongly prefer this one over Airplane!, and it's a closer call comparing this to The Naked Gun.  That had Leslie Neilsen offering his comedic skills, but this one feels better.
    There's a lot of absurdity to the humor.  They're very surreal, but they aren't treated as anything unusual.  I guess that's the charm; no one treats the weird things that happen as anything unusual.
    I also find it remarkable that so much effort was put into some very brief gags, things that don't affect the plot at all.  Loads of sight gags.  Some of them are as cheap as a prop, or a sign.  But then there are things like shooing a bunch of bicycles away as if they were horses.  The sound effects are easy.  But they had to somehow put the bikes onto a rail system, and pull them along?  It's a lot of work for a pretty short joke.
    I admire this movie for a few reasons, beyond the humor.  There's a stacking of jokes that is completely remarkable.  I'm not sure how many times I've seen it, but this time, I actually noticed two new jokes.  The other thing that makes this movie work is that there's a solid story backing it.  This has been a problem with modern comedies.  A lot of them will abandon the plot in order to do a long sequence of jokes.

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