Our Man Flynt: holy crap this movie is brilliant!

The 60's had a way of making spoofs with a much lighter touch than we know today. You look at Scary Movie 4 or whatever, and it's appaling how subtle we aren't today. Watching Our Man Flynt, it took me a good long time to figure out it was a spoof. The off-handed mentioning of Agent Triple Oh Eight caught my attention, but it could almost be played as half-assed writing. The whole thing seemed exactly like what I WANT from a go-go spy movie, to such a degree, that I didn't really care that it was a spoof. Because it wasn't self-aware. It never REALLY broke the 4th wall the way Airplane and everything since it has done. Not that I don't like those movies (Mel Brooks is amazing, for example), but it's just that there doesn't have to be a twist on the premise of the film to make it new. Flynt isn't James Bond--he's an original character--but he occupies the same mindspace or whatever, and so is able to do things that are new and exciting, yet remind us of what we've seen before. It's balanced in how it is and isn't safe.

Watching it, it was clear that Austin Powers had directly quoted Our Man Flynt, but Austin Powers is still a good movie on it's own. Crappy Date Movie and whatever the fuck we have today is just the elbow in your side of a thousand universal in-jokes, and who the fuck cares. Anyway, James Colburn is the man.

The eagle that hates Americans is clearly the hero of the film, and Jerry Goldsmith provided the excellent score. So, overall, a wonderful experience.