ON RE — SEEING AUSTIN POWERS’

Why do people see movies more than once? (This is not a casual question for Hollywood: Studios want to make blockbusters, and a movie becomes a blockbuster solely because it inspires repeat viewing.) One need only study the way small children can watch a video a hundred times over or be read the same book every night for a year to understand that it is part of human nature to find comfort in repetition. But there is also a more generous, less solipsistic impulse involved in repeat moviegoing. Consider the Sherpas of the Multiplex, those hardy souls who go alone, often on the first night a new movie is released, decide whether it passes muster, and then bring friends and family with them a second time. These trailblazers — I was one once — are people still bubbly with enthusiasm about the movies and eager to share their excitement with their loved ones.

For people who can take real pleasure in moviegoing — people like my friend Rick — it is not necessary that the movies they see again be perfect, wonderful, even wholly good. Often a single memorable performance, a single memorable scene, is worth the price of two admissions. That is true of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, which has an opening sequence and a title character so hilarious and lovable that you can’t help feeling fondly about the whole movie even during its dull stretches. It begins in London in 1967 — not the real London of the day, but the London we saw in countless movies at the time, a bright and cheerful metropolis in which mobs of painfully skinny girls in hideously colorful frocks are prone to breaking into the Frug right there on Carnaby Street. A zippy, catchy little tune plays on the soundtrack as these Twiggies spot glamorous photographer Austin Powers, the most popular man in all of London; they dance with him and then chase him, Beatles-style, through Piccadilly.

Austin Powers is an inspired creation, a sweet-natured little guy in blue velour with the huge, crooked, slightly green teeth that were once every Brit’s birthright. Only at a time of mass delusion like the 1960s could such a funny-looking creature be a sex symbol. Powers speaks in an amazingly stunted vocabulary made up of ’60s double entendres: His favorite word is ” Shagadelic,” and he flirts with women by baring his choppers in a crooked smile and offering the mock warning “Oh, behave!” It turns out his photography business is just a front; he’s actually a secret agent on the trail of a bad guy named Dr. Evil (also played by Myers with an outrageously thick Canadian accent). When Dr. Evil shoots himself into space for 30 years, Austin Powers agrees to be cryogenically frozen and thawed out in 1997 to fight his nemesis yet again.

When Austin emerges in 1997, the movie turns into a conventional fishout-of- water comedy: He discovers that his freewheeling expectations of casual sex horrify his new female sidekick; he tries to play a CD on a turntable. The movie has more fun with Dr. Evil and his difficulties adjusting to the new order. Dr. Evil’s favorite obscenity is “fricking”; and when he announces his plan to detonate a nuclear device that will destroy the world, he tells the world’s leaders that he expects a ransom in the amount of one million dollars! (His associate, who has been running the Dr. Evil empire in his absence, has to explain that their legitimate cell-phone business alone earns more than $ 9 billion a year.) Dr. Evil later attends a support-group meeting with his slacker son Scott and then has the group eliminated because it criticized his parenting.

Rick, I think, wanted to see the movie again just to hear Myers, as Dr. Evil, mutter the words, “I didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to have to listen to this.” For that, you ask, it was worth the ungodly sum of $ 9 (that was the price of a ticket at New York’s number-one moviehouse, the Lincoln Square)? The answer is yes. I’ve watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s many times just to hear Martin Balsam speak the words “Irving baby” and “Fred baby.” (You have to see the movie to understand.)

TUESDAY, MAY 6. I would never want to see the movie Breakdown again, but that’s not because I didn’t like it. I did like it, very much, but it’s a movie that depends on your having no idea where on earth it’s going next. Now that I know, it would probably seem tiresome and forced on second viewing. In Breakdown, a couple (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan) driving cross country find themselves stranded on a lonely highway when their Jeep Cherokee suddenly gives out. A friendly trucker comes by and offers them a lift to a nearby diner; Kurt decides to stay with the car while Kathleen goes. She doesn’t come back. No one has seen her at the diner; the friendly trucker denies ever having seen Kurt before; the police think Kathleen has run away from her husband; Kurt is alone, friendless, and terrified.

We know that Kurt and Kathleen are dead broke; what happens if the kidnappers demand money? Are the local cops in on it? How big is the conspiracy? This is a classic setup for a thriller; it worked 60 years ago in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and it works today, partly because writerdirector Jonathan Mostow turns the beautiful Canyon country of the Southwest into territory as unfamiliar, frightening, and alive as a haunted house. Mostly, though, it works because of Kurt Russell, who gives a masterful performance — without being in the least showy or histrionic, he lets you understand how his character is feeling every step of the way, makes you identify with him, like him, admire him, feel sorry for him, and ultimately, enjoy his triumph over the bad guys.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14. The new Bruce Willis movie The Fifth Element cost $ 96 million, which means that it will make money only if teenagers go to see it again. They just might. The Fifth Element is an almost unbelievably stupid science-fiction movie — mind-numbingly sentimental on the one hand and mind-numbingly violent on the other. So why would anyone go again? Because The Fifth Element is simply amazing-looking. In fact, there hasn’t been a movie this amazing-looking since the one on which it is clearly modeled, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The two movies are set in dirty, lively, beautiful futuristic cityscapes full of teeming hordes and feature ordinary men who must interact with engineered human-like beings superior to them in every way but one: their lack of humanity.

Like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element has an unsatisfying plot line, an ineffectual starring performance (Bruce Willis here, Harrison Ford in Blade Runner), and dialogue that is often inaudible. But where Blade Runner was concerned, none of that mattered; now, 15 years after its release, we can say with certainty that Blade Runner represents the most imaginative use of visual design in the history of the movies and is a classic for that reason alone. I don’t think The Fifth Element comes anywhere close to that, but unlike Ridley Scott, who thought he was making a masterpiece and therefore made Blade Runner too pompous and portentous, co- writer/director Luc Besson is basically just trying to show us a roaring good time. There are sequences in The Fifth Element that really don’t look like anything else you’ve ever seen. A flying-car chase through a New York City where the buildings appear to be 500 stories tall is the high point but another sequence featuring a blueskinned alien beauty bigger than Wilt Chamberlain who simply stands on a stage singing opera is almost as dazzling.

If I were 16, I would have seen it four times already. But I am 20 years older, and, like Rick, I think I would prefer to spend my money seeing the first couple of minutes of Austin Powers again.

By John Podhoretz; John Poshoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD