For all of Austin Powers being a horn dog; he does understand the concept of consent.
In the first movie where the love interest gets drunk and tried to sleep with Austin. Austin tells her no, it wouldn’t be cool.
Also Austin was totally fine with interracial dating.
Austin Powers is within the canon of the film shown to be someone who lives his beliefs that a better world is possible through collaboration. he’s transported 30 years into future and finds himself to be outdated. but he also was in his era challenging what was believed to be outdated? so what does he do? he changes the things about himself that are unacceptable in modern society now and keeps the symbols and inspirations that modivate him to live a truly open-minded life.
a real life new Austin Powers would find him shocked to discover a date is a trans woman and would say some horrifically outdated thing, her telling him “that’s a stereotype” and storming off. Powers would take this on board as something he needs to change about himself. he would then find himself paired with a gender fluid partner and he would spend most of the movie learning not to be a chaser before ending the movie having a really fun night with a trans woman in Dr Evil’s employ that ends up being what turns the tide. the arc would be outdated transphobe -> problematic chaser -> acceptance and co-existance
Austin understanding consent was his character development in the first film. At the beginning of the film he did not; he was shown to be rambunctiously jumping on his partner despite her giving clear negative signals. He learns consent throughout the course of the film.
Thus, a good modernization would be for him to discover the importance of trans rights and respecting genders that do not align with those assigned at birth, over time. He would need to be misguided in the beginning and make some mistakes.
But we all agree it will end with shagging, right?
He was also very casual with sex, like he did drop a mention somewhere in the movies that, like under the sheets, he might have blown a dude. I can’t remember the specific reference tho.
If you’re gonna do it though, you need to pick some new reference material.
I’d go with a Pierce Brosnan 007 maybe, early 2000s, and then throw in some Tom Cruise mission impossible, maybe the odd Matrix reference. Main character spends all of their time looking cool and moody and never actually does anything while still somehow singlehandedly solving all of the problems, stuff like that.
Johnny English.
If you go back and watch the Sean Connery Bond films they were satirizing, Austin Powers was a much better person than James Bond. Better agent, too. Bond kinda sucked.
Also, those Bond films were thirty years before Austin Powers. If you wanted to make a similar movie today, you’d have to be satirizing Austin Powers. Maybe that could work, a meta-satiricial send-up of 90’s and early 00’s satirical movies. Maybe even the last third of the film gets ironically nostalgic for the first third of the same film. "Remember when we did that pre-opening action sequence?
Also notable, the book are even worse. Bond is an absolute prick in those and was toned down for the movies, at least in the firdt one from what I remeber.
Ian Fleming was unrepentantly misogynistic and racist in his books. People want to give him a pass because it happened so long ago, and it was a reflection of the attitudes of the time. But it wasn’t that long ago, and critics were pointing out how awful the books were when they were written.
It wouldn’t be satirizing Austin Powers; it’d be satirizing Pierce Brosnan’s Bond.
Remember when we did that pre-opening action sequence?
Absolute cimema
I was gonna say I’d watch that movie but it wouldn’t compare to my imagination so I’m just gonna thank you for the movie I just imagined.
Guaranteed there would be a much bigger meltdown about it being pro-trans than anti. Conservatives are the most easily offended clowns out there.
just call them fascists at this point, tbh. christian democrats, rockefeller reps, one nation tories, those are the real conservatives
fascists complain about others being snowflakes but when they get criticism they yell fire.
I’m pretty sure they had bisexuality in the '60s.
nah bro, it was invented on tumblr in the year of our trans Jesus, 2015.
Austin Powers vs The Naughty Nonces.
… just do it, parody Eyes Wide Shut, as a slapstick spy-comedy.
That’d be pretty bold, and also more or less the exact zeitgeist of the current moment.
Austin’s on his way to infilrate ‘The Party’, gets stuck behind some idiot ass hole broccoli hair MAGA bro infkuencers on the sidewalk, has a ‘comedy of errors’ fight with them, where neither of them can understand what the others are saying, Austin is trying to comply with what he thinks their requests are, accidentally environmentally defeating them.
After that’s settled, Austin is … something like gallavanting toward the Hotel that’s hosting The Party, a few blocks away, just straight up watches (Not) Luigi shoot a healthcare CEO, says something like ‘crikey!’, and makes a joke about copays.
He gets to right hotel.
Trump Tower.
… Onto The Party, where we find…
Seth Greene has been replaced by Tom Green, for no apparent, nor explained reason.
… He’s at the party too.
He’s trying to find Mini-Me, whose been gone for a while now… he dropped the criminal mastermind shit entirely, basically became Old Man Nightwing, less comic book superhero getup, more … the ‘protagonist’ from No Country For Old Men.
They have a whole "You’re gonna blow my cover! “No! You’re gonna blow my cover!” exchange, at the party, which is abruptly halted by a spoon against a glass revealing that the main course of the night is being served.
… Its Mini-Me.
The Party goers are all cannibals, and laughing about it.
… etc. You get the idea.
At some point you gotta work in Tom Cruise, but he’s his character from Collateral.
Makes a joke about thinking he’d seen some fucked up cult shit, but nothing prepared him for whats going on at The Party.
I think you have a gift, my friend…
There is a part of me, a part of my brain or my thought patterns, that just got too fucking stoned once, and it never reverted, never fully went back to sober.
… That’s my attempt at explaining… whatever it is I wrote up there, lol.
Permafried, but semi-rehabilitated.
There are a lot of well documented cases of very successful creative types who fit that bill. That it came from your head, presumably, without a lot of effort is the point worth paying attention to. 😉
Shame that quite a lot of the time when I speak my mind, people hate it.
Part of how I can ‘do’ that is that I tend to be pretty accurate at cutting to the functional core of what makes some concept tick, and well, a lot of people have really thin skin and big egos, and don’t appreciate being told, in considerable detail, the various ways in which they are full of shit, sre hypocrites.
… So thats the other side of the double edged sword, you could say.
Spontaneous idea generation?
Concept association/relation?
Meet ‘no filter’.
I am lucky, I guess, in that I have had a core group of very close friends for almost all of my several decades on this planet. With them…I sugar coat nothing. I pull no punches. To do so would run counter to both who I am, and who they expect me to be. Further…I expect no less from them.
Anyone outside of my circle needs some time to get it… Or they don’t get inside.
My point being, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that behavior as long as it’s genuine, comes from a place of love, and isn’t just, “Look how edgy I can be”-type bullshit.
I had a core group once.
They’re the ones that convinced me to get too stoned that one time, and then other times.
It broke my filter.
They did not like unfiltered me.
Fuck me, I guess, oh well.
At least I’m genuienly very very ok with being mostly a loner/introvert, that was always true about me.
I don’t need or miss other people. I don’t need their adulation, I don’t need to be constantly solving problems they cause, usually by doing the opposite of what I told them when they asked me for help previously.
But yeah, its not… trying to be lol xd random edgy annoying.
Its more like just not being able to not see things that most people don’t, or, in some level of their subconcious, are aware of, but are very insecure about.
Yeah, I get that. Learning people have blind spots they don’t like being called on, regardless of whether they’re aware of them, was a hard lesson for me. My instinct is to “help”. Most folk know their own brand of bullshit, though, and just want someone to say, “Man…that sucks!”, and move on. I have a hard time with that, still.
Austin Powers does Singapore.
