There was a time that parody films were actually good and it wasn't even that long ago.

The Zucker Brothers and Mel Brooks practically created the genre.

Their films are great because they were born from an appreciation of their source material.

Airplane is great because in addition to being a great comedy

it's also crucially a really good airplane movie.

And Spaceballs is hilarious in part because it's a real science fiction film.

The jokes are sharp, smart, and they get the details right.

These filmmakers saw comedy as a craft, something to hone and sharpen and use as a way to understand, engage with, and endure the banalities of life,

comedy, at its best challenges conventional ways of thinking, illuminating a truth that was there all along. That's what makes a laugh so powerful, it's involuntary and explosive.

Then Jason Friedmanberg and Aaron Selter came along to set fire to the entire genre.

The collateral damage that films like Date Movie, meet the Spartans and to a lesser, but

no less responsible extent the entire scary movie franchise has done to the genre

may be permanent. These types of films and their nihilist brand of reference humor is almost pathologically uninterested in comedy.

Sacrificing sophistication and a Faustian exchange for the half attention of theater or cable TV viewers known academically as the lowest common

denominator or to everybody else, idiots.

Which is to say that approaching top secret one really needs to lobotomize the memory of modern

spoo films out of themselves first. We're going back to a better time when the rivers

of comedy ran clear and crisp and refreshing before being polluted with common

shit and the Kardashians. Top secret is part spy movie, part war movie, and

all comedy.

It's a clockwork of visual gags, absurd situations,

and real jokes.

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