top secret starring val kilmer

"my uncle was born in america"

"oh really?"

"yes but he was lucky - he escaped in a balloon during the carter administration"

i saw this last night and was kind of amazed at how well it stands up - SO MANY movies in this style are barely watchable now

the trope of rock and roll being this instantly transformative thing that shakes uptight people out of their daze, shakes societies out of their funk, is one of the most dated things about it

Is this the one where someone is crawling on the ground to escape the enemy, but crawls right in a pair of jackboots - camera pans up and the boots are empty.

Also someone looks at their watch, a shot of the timepiece filling the screen - next shot is them putting their hand down, watch is the size of a dinnerplate on their wrist.

Describing visual gags = dud.

"it's no use, he won't talk"

"damn!"

"do you want me to bring out the leroy neiman paintings?"

"no! we can't risk violating the geneva conventions"

ledge: yes

One of my favourite comedies ever! I don't know about other countries, but this film has made the German sentence "Ich habe Sauerkraut in meine Lederhosen" really popular in Finland. My German friends told me that a lot of Finns have said it to them, because it's basically the only German sentence they know. This is especially funny if the German person you're talking to doesn't know where it comes from.

And yeah, this film probably has better visual gags than any other I can think of.

"i created one of the greatest inventions in the history of the world. a device that could desalinate fifty million gallons of seawater in a single day. can you imagine what that would mean to the nations of africa?"

"they'd have enough salt to last forever!"

Haven't seen it in a looooong time. It is Zucker/Abrams/Zucker and not too long after their golden period.

From IMDB: When Nick is leaving the East German checkpoint by train you can hear on the PA a voice saying "Der Zug der jetzt auf Gleis 3 steht.... hat uns alle überrascht!" which translates to "The train on railtrack three... surprised us all!"

Abrams Abrahams

Oh wow, this was my favourite movie as a kid and I haven't seen it since. Must amend ASAP.

Chocolate Mousse is cool.

"here are your torturers. this one is blind, and works entirely by sense of touch. and this one is a brain-dead moron, who believes only what he reads in the new york post."

the french resistance having a planning meeting at shoney's, and putting their guns on the hat rack

my favourite line: this is not Mel Torme.

i tend to say that a lot.

How silly can you get? Yeah, yeah
How silly can you get? ooh, yeah
I never ever meant to stray
But when she looked at me that way
The night was young and gay Paris made me forget
I went to Paris in France
I found a little romance
She was a-walkin' down the boulevard
I know I should've been good
I never thought that I would
Be double-crossin', baby cross my heart
Oh, a little rockin' and a little wine
Got me thinkin' 'bout a little Valentine
What's a lonely boy to do
She looked so fine

How silly can you get? Yeah, yeah
How silly can you get? ooh, yeah
I never ever meant to stray
But when she looked at me that way
The night was young and gay Paris made me forget

How silly can you get? yeah yeah
How silly can you get? Oh yeah
No more fooling around you bet
How silly can you get?

Next morning woke all alone,
Little birdie had flown,
Left a number on the telephone.
I walked right out in the street,
Spreadin' the hole in my jeans.
Found a paper with a message on it.
Should I call her up or should I tear it up?
If I call her up then we can rip it up.
What's a lonely boy to do?
She looked so fine.

How silly can you get?
How silly can you get?
No more foolin 'round you bet
How silly can you get?

How silly can you get? Yeah, yeah
How silly can you get? ooh, yeah
I never meant to stray
But when you looked at me that way
The night was young and gay Paris made me forget

I went to Paris in France
I found a little romance
She was a-walkin' down the boulevard
I know I should've been good
I never thought that I would
Be double-crossin', baby cross my heart
Oh, a little rockin' and a little wine
Got me thinkin' 'bout that little girl of mine.
How could I be so cruel my pet? How silly can you get?
No more foolin' 'round you bet.
How silly can you get?

Are you lonesome tonight, is your kitchen a sight
Is your wardrobe all rundown and bare
Is your lipstick all smeared, are your stockings not sheer
Do they make your legs show all your hair

Do the tears on your pillow roll down as you turn
Do they short out the blanket and make the sheets burn
Is your heart filled with pain, will you come back again
Shop at Macy's and love me tonight

best movie ever.

Latrine!

This reads all wrong:

Val Kilmer actually sings the songs in the movie, but not in the actual scenes. He would later perform the songs in The Doors. (wikipedia)

That is awesome just as it stands.

especially if he did I went to Paris in France
I found a little romance
She was a-walkin' down the boulevard
I know I should've been good
I never thought that I would
Be double-crossin', baby cross my heart
Oh, a little rockin' and a little wine
Got me thinkin' 'bout that little girl of mine.
How could I be so cruel my pet? How silly can you get?
No more foolin' 'round you bet.
How silly can you get?

in The Doors film.

"Nick, I've tried everything.
The Embassy, the German Government, the consulate.
I even talked to the UN Ambassador. It's no use.
I just can't bring my wife to orgasm.
That's a shame, Martin.
Have you tried one of these?(huge dildo machine)
Thanks. I'll give it a whirl"

Is the bookstore scene the best 1 min and 36 seconds on film or what?

"Wait. You dropped your phoney dog pooh.
What phoney dog pooh?
Souvenirs. Novelties. Party tricks.
"

"And now we conclude our ceremony
with the singing of our East German National Anthem.
HAIL, HAIL, EAST GERMANY
LAND OF VINE AND GRAPE,
LAND WHERE YOU'LL REGRET
AND TRY TO ESCAPE
NO MATTER IF YOU TUNNEL UNDER
OR TAKE A RUNNING JUMP AT THE WALL,
THE GUARDS WILL KILL YOU,
IF THE ELECTRIFIED FENCE DOESN'T FIRST."

the highest of the low...

how about when they escape from the opera house and nick runs towards the guards' parked bicycles going "shoo! shoo! go on now!" and the bicycles whinny and race away

or when they're in the park, with an enormous statue of a pigeon in the distance - as they talk, four people flapping their arms land on the pigeon from the sky and start peeing on it

I've only seen it once, but the scene in the bookstore blew me apart. I was confused for a bit, wondering what was going on, but when I realised what they were doing I was absolutely amazed that they pulled it off. That must have been so hard to film, and it looks absolutely awesome.

the male ballerinas.

the pac-man map.

the giant phone.

Pretty much all of it. Between this and Top Secret it's like Val started off brilliantly and then proceeded to have one of the worst movie careers known to humanity.

Between this and REAL GENIUS, duh.

oh!

Now you made me go and get one off e-bay!

that bicycle scene is the best. Great film!

Have you tried one of these?(huge dildo machine)

And the dildo machine is called Anal Intruder! In the Finnish subtitles it was translated as "Rear Prodder", which became quite a catchphrase among me and my friends when were like ten.

And yeah, this film probably has better visual gags than any other I can think of.

Do you think of comedies made before 1950 much, Tuomas? Especially silent shorts?

I remember being amused by TS! when it came out, but Airplane! and the Police Squad TV series are more consistently LOL. As for Val, yeah he's a fine funnyhunk in this and Real Genius, but he gave excellent serious performances in Tombstone, Thunderheart, and is the best thing in duds like The Doors and Top Gun.

And yeah, this film probably has better visual gags than any other I can think of.

Do you think of comedies made before 1950 much, Tuomas? Especially silent shorts?

Yeah, I was actually gonna add "...ever since the silent era".

This movie is so awesome.

"I'm sorry, I don't know German."
"I know a little German. He's sitting over there."

I looked for a thread on this a few weeks ago! So great. I love how a lot of the gags are sort of reveals on old-school filmmaking techniques.

And the fucking backwards scene!!

Bookstore scene

that "little German" joke has to date from 1920, seriously

Yes, it being older than that movie keeps it from being funny, you're right.

I don't know WHAT I was thinking.

LOL

the underwater saloon fight

xp

no, it's still funny, but before we anoint TS! as one of the key comedic works of the Pre-Ap*t*w Era, originality might be factored in.

TS: Originality vs Execution

for hit-rate alone TS is classic.

X's and O's in the window shoot out. Nice.

I've probably seen Airplane! too many times, so I'll say this is my favorite Zucker movie. So-dumb-it's-clever can hardly be done better.

Du Quois: This is Chevalier, Montage, Detente, Avant Garde, and Deja Vu.
Deja Vu: Haven't we met before?

(Thing I just learned from IMDB: Jerry Zucker, one and the same, directed Ghost. I'm surprised at that, and surprised again that I didn't know it.)

Dan, I think Weber & Fields' execution of the Little German joke on the vaudeville was likely spot-on.

The TS joke that got the most contemporary attention was the Pinto (amirite?) exploding on contact -- the car had just been recalled.

The Pinto joke was awesome. Also "But I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!" and the "Blue Lagoon" scene.

My point wasn't that the original execution of the German joke sucked, it was that the execution of it in "Top Secret!" was great.

So, I watched it with Amber and Alice.

OK, someone here should have mentioned the "wife to orgasm" and the "fist" um, thing.

Alice: "What's that"
Me: "It's a hand. On a gun. LOOK! OVER THERE!"

Will someone locate a YouTube clip of the Marx Bros.-style ballroom dance? I can't find it.

could be in here - "Top Secret in 10 minutes"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92R20ImGNCU

this is one of my all-time favorite movies and I need to see it again soon, it's been ages

"let me know if there is any change in his condition."
[Hangs up]
"He's dead."

"It's been a hard . . . day's . . . night . . . and I've been verking . . ."

VERKING.

hey, it's another oral history of an '80s comedy that the cinematically illiterate think is a CLASSIC!

(At least it has more laughs than Ghostbusters, tho)

Jerry Zucker: We did Val a disservice.

Jim Abrahams: Val was aware that Nick Rivers was kind of vacuous. And that was always a struggle for Val. He couldn’t figure out what would this character do – Val is an actual actor and we were just pretty much interested in people telling our jokes. But he was a true actor and was looking for something in that character to play. He did salvage Nick Rivers, but that was always his struggle when filming.

Jerry Zucker: That’s part of the problem of doing a second movie after a big hit, everybody says, “Well, you must know.” And the fact is, we didn’t. We knew how to tell jokes, but we didn’t understand yet how to make a movie. I don’t know why nobody said, “Hey, take a structure course.”

David Zucker: We thought we hit it out of the park, because it was so funny. We knew we had the jokes. But I think we learned a lesson.
Jerry Zucker: I think some of our best jokes are in ‘Top Secret!,’ but it’s really hurt by not having a story. It doesn’t have much of a story or a hook … joke-wise, we started to run out of gas at the end of ‘Airplane!.’ But the movie doesn’t run out of gas.

http://screencrush.com/top-secret-30/

does it annoy you that people like movies

Jesus Morbs, we're talking about the Mad Magazine of films here. No one's saying it's the Paris Review.

[Shetland pony coughing]

"What's wrong with him?"

"Oh, he caught a cold last week and he's just a little hoarse."

CINEMA!

Weird to be regretting the lack of story in your parody of Elvis movies

At the risk of being cinematically illiterate, the genre conflation in this movie is totally intoxicating. An Elvis story, set in a WWII film, with cold war references and musical numbers is wildly post-modern. 'Top Secret' always reminds me of 'Streets of Fire', another supposed failure from around the same time with a similar mashup sensibility ('Wild at Heart' too).

One of the biggest and best running gags is that the East Germans are just nazis - which makes fun of both Germans, and everyone else who automatically thinks they're all nazis. Also, the "Find Him and Kill Him" rubber stamp is amazing.

hey croup, THE GUYS WHO MADE IT KINDA REGRET THE LACK OF STORY.

I saw this once thirty years ago and still think "Is your daughter 18?" is funny.

I like how some of the jokes are just silly little two-second gags, like the goosestepping guards who fling their boots off, or the huge forced-perspective phone

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/screencrush.com/files/2014/06/Phone.jpg

I love that this gag takes juuuust long enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akLC_JMjpjA

I always thought this was funnier than Airplane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mr_XAM8CMw

morbz, shouting at me isn't going to make you understand things any better.

no shit they regret the lack of story, that's what i was referring to. i think it's a funny thing to regret when you're making fun of a genre that wasn't great on "story" in the first place.

Chocolate Mouse "Viva La France!"

love Kilmers sly grin in that backwards scene (although difficult to see in that small clip)

i wonder if by "story or a hook" he just means it doesn't have much in the way of zeitgeist. it's not like this movie really has more "story" problems than his scary movie sequels.

ok, reading the whole thing it looks like they really do regret not giving Val an emotional arc in Elvis Goes To Nazi Germany

so weird to have them talk about "figuring out the rules of comedy" as if anyone loves Mafia! or An American Carol more than their early stuff

hey, look YOU'RE READING THE PIECE I LINKED TO

Just forget relating this to their recent, posthumous work. Maybe to Lubitsch's instead.

(this might be Omar Sharif's 4th- or 5th-best film)

morbz, again, shouting won't help you comprehend other people's posts better

calm down

I AM MOCKING YOUR OBJECTIONS and don't call me Calmdown

acting like you didn't understand my comment in all caps, sure got me there

This is one of my favorite movies. So joyous. The zaz bros lamenting that it didn't have the character arc that airplane did is really bizarre to me-I mean does anyone that loves that movie care about that at all? It sounds like their minds have been warped by decades of story meetings with studio executives. They even mention the Marx brothers, whose movies are purely gag machines as well. do they watch horse feathers and wish that Groucho learned that his sarcasm was merely a defense mechanism

So, I watched it with Amber and Alice.

OK, someone here should have mentioned the "wife to orgasm" and the "fist" um, thing.

Alice: "What's that"
Me: "It's a hand. On a gun. LOOK! OVER THERE!"

― Mark G, Thursday, December 6, 2007 9:55 AM

lol

"wait at the Howard Johnson's on the corner of Der Fuhrer Strasse and Goebbels Platzen."

"Come, my darling, let me show you what I've done to the fallout shelter."

They even mention the Marx brothers, whose movies are purely gag machines as well.

they were for a while, but the enforced love stories in the mgm ones are kinda expressions of this inexplicable mentality too right? although weirder because they're assigned to entirely separate people. not even sure if that's better or worse.

look, I'm more than willing to rewatch this ahead of Ghostbusters.

also these are the only kindsa threads i see Spencer Chow in, hi SC.

Pauline Kael on A Night at the Opera:

There are also the vocalizing lovers, Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones, whom Irving Thalberg, the producer and a master diagnostician of popular taste, put in for people (what people?) to "identify with"

People like Eric H, I think.

ha seen this movie a bunch of times and never noticed this

http://38.media.tumblr.com/d796f6d27faee6574858de27bf9ab8e9/tumblr_mlgpw7sKBE1s7ynwqo1_250.gif

Morbz which marx bro do u most identify with

Gummo

Your perfect chance to say "Zeppo" when handed a straight line and you blew it. Why do I even get out of bed?

to brush out the cracker crumbs

do you even know who Gummo was? it's the same idea writ larger, chum

to brush out the cracker crumbs

Thread has like..

Thread has lols. Stupid spelling enforcer!

RIP Omar Sharif

Agent Cedric (Sharif): Wait. You dropped your phony dog poo.

Blindman: What phony dog poo?

Aww RIP

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 very slowly turn to the camera]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk

This movie was kinda therapeutic to me, during a period shortly after 9/11, when I happened to see a horrific internet photo of one of the tower jumpers' wrecked body on the Manhattan pavement. Viewing it was very upsetting, and for a couple of days I found I couldn't stop my mind from returning to the photo of that body...until I began to just mentally substitute the "Top Secret" gag with the German soldier falling from the battlements and shattering like pottery on the ground. Thinking about the absurdity of that comedic bit did a lot to ease my mind about the real-world horror in that real-world photo.

classic Morbs-in-crank-mode thread

as it happened i had watched "top secret" repeatedly before i ever saw "casablanca" so when i finally got round to watching that i kept going "oh shit so that's where that gag in 'top secret' came from" lol

there's probably a name for the phenomenon of being familiar with a classic movie/novel/whatever only thru parodies, but if there is i do not know it

i had, however, seen "blue lagoon"