What’s Aged the Best?
Dr. Evil as Lorne Michaels; Elizabeth Hurley; Mimi Rogers as her mother; opening credits; musical interstitials; Will Ferrell as Mustafa; steamroller murder; the sequels; five stages of defrosting; head-loss jokes; Basil's mom; character names; the capitalism line
In the discussion (10)
Approx. transcript time · 00:42:51Read transcript
- Dr. Evil as Lorne Michaels remains hilarious; every Dr. Evil scene is lights out, from Bigglesworth to the finger to the mouth and the run, an all-time creation.
- Elizabeth Hurley is great and still aging well; this is really her only well-known movie besides Bedazzled; casting her as Mimi Rogers' daughter is a home run.
- The opening credits are praised as unusual for a comedy; a world-famous spy living through Beatlemania is a stupid paradox only noticed on this rewatch.
- The dance interstitials with close-ups of Austin's teeth are funny.
- Will Ferrell as Mustafa has aged best, and there is no Anchorman without this film: the flute sequence echoes the Burt Bacharach scene.
- The slow-motion steamroller murder, still ten feet away in the wide shot, is called the funniest thing ever seen.
- The sequels belong here, since some, including someone who might produce the podcast, find them better than the original.
- The five stages of defrosting, with cutaways to Michael York and Charles Napier nodding, and the FemBots are cited, though the FemBots' 60s parody may land less in 2022.
- Beating a dumb joke into the ground works in the five-straight head jokes ('a shame he wasn't more headstrong'), and punching Basil's mom kills.
- The character names (Basil Exposition, the name heard as 'A lot of vagina', Random Task) and Austin emerging from cryo with the capitalism line are highlights.