Saw Top Secret! (thanks, Chris!) It was a spy farce. Although I usually stuffily disdain farces, this one hits the right level of inspired silliness for me. The jokes often draw from absurdity and genre spoofs, both great weaknesses of mine. At one point the male and female lead fall into each others arms and the camera demurely pans to a fireplace. Then they roll in front of the fireplace and the camera pans to another fireplace. Later there is a bizarre extended sequence where the film is played in reverse. There's no reason for it apart from the film just being silly.
The film follows an American singer visiting East Berlin for a concert. He gets caught up in the resistance after helping out a pretty female member. The plot is chosen, I believe, due to the abundance of inherent good and evil roles along with tons of genre conventions that can be spoofed. These spoofs are usually not the most inspired, but they usually blind-side you and are delightful in their stupidity (example: a man nobly throws himself on a grenade. Everyone around him blows up. It's not ingeniously clever but it's done so dead-pan you have to laugh.)
So a good farce all in all. It never takes itself seriously and keeps the goofy jokes coming at a dizzying clip. It's not clever or biting but it's hilarious and frantic and brilliant enough in its own way. It may be that I'm jus tin a receptive mood for once, but this was somehow just what I wanted today.
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