AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY

Poffy The Cucumber — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:57:39 +0000

Swinging! Like a man, man!

Poffy ‘Danger’ Cucumber

He’s the sexiest, swingingest secret agent ever to combat evil – DOCTOR Evil, that is…. mwohahaha ha ha ha….He’s Austin Powers, arguably Mike Myers’s greatest, most memorable, most embraced, most quoted icon – in the film that made it all shagadelic, baby! AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY is a hip skewering of the spy movie genre, taking especial aim at James Bond. The more you know James, the more you’ll love Austin.

Myers is Austin Powers: superspy, posh Brit accent, smashing fashion sense, a Byrds wig, unruly teeth, and a gigantic male… symbol draped around his neck. We meet him dancing in the streets of 1960s swinging London, and I think he’s doing The Froog.

Austin Powers’s nemesis is Doctor Evil (also played by Myers), a marriage of Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld (from YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) and apparently, as Myers confesses, Lorne Michaels (his producer on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE). Myers whipcracks it out of the park with Dr. Evil, for as everyone knows, a hero is nothing without the villain who loves to hate him. And Myers immortalizes his hero and villain by imbuing them both with equal amounts of thunderball mojo.

In the opening 1960s sequence, Dr. Evil escapes Powers by cryogenically freezing himself in an orbital rocket. So Powers volunteers to freeze himself as well, to combat Dr. Evil should he ever return to Earth. In the 1990s, Dr. Evil returns to Earth, and Austin is unfrozen to combat him; an old-world-hero for an old-world villain. (Yes, it’s the plot to 1993’s DEMOLITION MAN, only more froogy.)

Dr. Evil sets up his underground lair in Nevada and tries to blackmail the world governments for “one MILLion DOLLars!” at which point his Number Two (Robert Wagner, brilliantly playing it straight) advises him that one million dollars isn’t much these days. When he changes his ransom to “one HUNdred BILLion DOLLars,” we start to twig to this movie’s hook. It is part spy spoof, part fish-out-of-water, all Swedish-made penis enlarger.

Meanwhile, Powers is having his own revelations – that the 90s are not as promiscuous as the 60s he left behind, and the slinky flirtations he engaged in with his previous spy partner, Mrs. Kensington (tightly leathered Mimi Rogers) are wasted on his current salubrious spyhard, Mrs. Kensington’s daughter, Vanessa (achingly beautiful Elizabeth Hurley), a 90s woman, i.e. repressed and uptight about her sexuality. (Which might explain Hugh’s wayward thrust with that Hollywood Boulevard skank. As Bill Maher has noted, “The most beautiful woman in the world – somebody’s sick of fucking her!”)

The innocence of both hero and villain in a world that has left them behind is this movie’s greatest hook. Snappily written by Myers and directed by Jay Roach like a man, man!

Mindy Sterling is Dr. Evil’s loudmouth secretary, Will Ferrell is a skin-darkened evil henchman, Michael York gamely plays Austin’s boss, Basil Exposition, Fabiana Udenio is evil siren, Alotta Fagina (still not as dopey a name as Pussy Galore), and Seth Green perfectly captures X-Gen angst as Scott Evil, Dr. Evil’s estranged son, whose pragmatic “Just-shoot-them” solutions to Dr. Evil’s diabolically creative “Bond Villain” snares are a constant source of vexation for Dr. Evil.

Does that make you HORNY, baby, yeah?!

END

AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY (May 1997) PG-13
Director: Jay Roach.
Writer: Mike Myers.
Starring: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Seth Green, Will Ferrell, Robert Wagner, Mindy Sterling, Fabiana Udenio, Mimi Rogers, Paul Dillon, Charles Napier.

imdb
Word Count: 530 No. 511

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PASSENGER 57

Poffy The Cucumber — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:35:26 +0000

Plain Plane Pain.

Wesley Snipes is airline security specialist Cutter, who is the titular PASSENGER 57 onboard a flight when it is hijacked by British terrorists trying to escape the FBI (Bruce Payne as Charles Rane (who falls mainly on the plane), and a strikingly beautiful Elizabeth Hurley as his Bad Girl). Wesley must use his patented Wesley-Kwon-Do to bring down the bad guys and the plane efficiently.

Too easy to say “DIE HARD on a plane” – because it is.

The only baggage Cutter has brought is flashbacks to when his wife was killed by a convenience store terrorist and he failed to stop it. Luckily, a black stewardess who looks like his wife (Alex Datcher) is serving plot device cocktails, so he can hook up with her after he shows off his smack talk and Wesley-fu.

When Cutter is on the phone to terrorist Rane, there is that exchange, forged from the cloth of inane, mustered on the fields of besides-the-point (but – we presume – totally hot for the stewardess):

Cutter: Do you play roulette?
Rane: Occasionally.
Cutter: Always bet on black!
(Stewardess soaked. Mission accomplished.)

We figure that since Cutter’s street-blackness has elevated what was simply Rane trying to escape from the FBI into a racial struggle, he is implying that the other color in roulette is WHITE? (Uh, it’s red, Wes.)

Cutter takes out the bad guys as reliably as “Come here often?” has been used as an unsuccessful icebreaker for centuries. Plane lands in hick town near a county fair; hick Sheriff chases Cutter cos he thinks he’s the bad guy (remember in those hick towns, all it takes is to be black and nearby); people running and screaming as bad guys invade county fair (ah yes, director Kevin Hooks leans on the old gambit of “confusion” for “action”), and the plane hostages go free so that plane can go up in Pretty Orange Explosion with – you guessed it – a vehicle transporting massive amounts of fuel that apparently has no failsafe measures not to explode if impacted; to wake audiences from the drowse they’ve fallen into by watching this movie.

In the climactic fight scene between Cutter and Rane, turns out Rane knows some Wesley-Fu himself, so battle is exciting enough for us to wonder who is going to win.

No, not really. Go back to sleep.

END

PASSENGER 57 (Nov 1992)
Director: Kevin Hooks.
Writers: Stewary Raffill, Dan Gordon, David Loughery.
Starring: Wesley Snipes, Bruce Payne, Tom Sizemore, Alex Datcher, Bruce Greenwood, Robert Hooks, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael Horse, Marc Macaulay, Ernie Lively.

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Word Count: 440 No. 497

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Elizabeth Hurley | Poffy's Movie Mania

AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY

Swinging! Like a man, man!

PASSENGER 57

Plain Plane Pain.