Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997); The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999); Goldmember (2002).
All Austin Powers movies are about super-spy Austin Powers battling his arch-enemy Dr. Evil and his plan to destroy the world. For instance, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin Powers and Dr. Evil - both played by Mike Myers - happen to have been frozen in the 1960s and unthawed in the 1990s. Dr. Evil figures he can defeat Austin Powers if he returns to 1969 in a time machine and steals the legendary sexual energy or "mojo" from Powers' still-frozen body. However, the mojo-less Powers remains determined to save the world and, along the way, recapture the mojo that makes him "deadly to his enemies" and "irresistible to women." He is assisted in his efforts by CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham). The film, like others in this series, is half satire and half tribute to the hugely popular spy movies and TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Sean Connery-era James Bond films.
Austin Powers films are funny because we are well aware of the enormous cultural changes that have taken place over the past 3 or 4 decades while Austin Powers is not. We laugh at his assumption that it is still fashionable - if not the height of sophistication - to don a velvet jumpsuit, frilly shirt, heavy necklace and big dark-framed glasses. We roar at his presumption that using the slang of the 1960s ("Yeah, baby!") will make him a "groovy" guy. And what of his efforts to prove himself an expert at "shagging"? We might regard his attempts at seduction as blatant sexual harassment. If he could read our minds, Austin Powers would no doubt call us "uptight."
Apart from being funny, the Austin Powers movies have sociological significance. For one thing, they forcefully remind us that no culture is static. Cultural changes that occur within even a few short decades can be profound. Many of the fashions, expressions and behaviors we take for granted and think of as "cool" today will likely seem ridiculous to us tomorrow. You might even consider putting together a scrapbook of today's fads and fashions, to be opened in just a few years. Inevitably, when the time comes to open your "time capsule," you will experience a mixture of nostalgia and amusement.
By making the contemporary world a foreign world to Austin Powers, these movies invite us to turn a critical eye on our own culture. This is no easy task. As the anthropologist Ralph Linton observed many years ago, "[t]he last thing a fish would ever notice would be water." Much of the sociological value of the Austin Powers movies is that they make us notice the water.