What’s Aged the Best?
The music and Hans Zimmer score; Charlie's Ferrari; the Rain Man would save me line; asshole Cruise; the Bonnie Hunt cameo; the old Vegas view from Caesars; the traffic, bathtub and smoke-alarm sequences; the autistic-savant premise; Raymond crashing the sex scene; Valeria Golino; The Hangover's parody; the Rain Man Suite; Cruise's 1988; Qantas
In the discussion (16)
Approx. transcript time · 00:44:16Read transcript
- The music holds up: a great 80s score, the Iko Iko use, and the two Hans Zimmer pieces.
- Asked for Hans rankings, the answer is Zimmer number one, Gruber being pretty problematic. — Chris Ryan
- Charlie Babbitt's 1983 Ferrari ("400 I") and the line "when I was a kid, I always thought the Rain Man would save me," framed as foreshadowing.
- Asshole Cruise ages best: telling Raymond to shut up, and ordering large pepperoni after being told pepperoni is not wanted; this is straight asshole rather than the cocky version in The Color of Money, Top Gun or Days of Thunder.
- A question is raised whether hotel room service ever let guests freestyle an order like beer for two and the closest thing to tapioca pudding.
- A weird, very young Bonnie Hunt cameo.
- Freezing on the view from the Caesars suite shows old Vegas: a "holiday in" across the street, none of today's casinos, and the Barbary Coast, thought to be the Cromwell now.
- The smoke-alarm scene was left out of the rewatchable-scene picks because it is disturbing; the traffic, bathtub and smoke-alarm moments are praised as tension-building sequences.
- The autistic-savant concept in movies and TV has aged well because it keeps being revisited.
- Raymond crashing the sex scene is weird but works, a 9.9 degree of difficulty; he just wanted to see what was on TV.
- Valerie Galena (as transcribed) is great in this; she became the queen of Hot Shots, made a couple of American thrillers, went back to Italy and appeared in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. — Sean Fennessey
- The Hangover's parody of Rain Man is an addendum that plays all the same notes.
- The Rain Man Suite lives on as a Vegas idea; the hosts recall being given a suite during a Summer League trip, with high ceilings and multiple rooms.
- Cruise's 1988, with Cocktail and Rain Man making him the biggest under-35 star in the world.
- Qantas is called the biggest pick: still no crashes, apart from early propeller crashes.
- Asked how often he has flown Qantas, the answer is never; only Air New Zealand. — Chris Ryan