Time & Perspective Quote by Eva Mendes

Treating Anchorman like canon is the joke, but it’s also the confession. Eva Mendes is doing something slyly strategic here: she borrows the language of prestige cinephilia ("favorite movie of all time", "my Gone With the Wind") and grafts it onto a broadly stupid, proudly juvenile comedy about a mustached newsman and his cologne-drenched ego. The exaggeration works because it’s legible as hyperbole while still feeling emotionally true. Plenty of people do have a movie they rewatch like scripture, and for a certain generation, that scripture is a studio comedy you can quote at parties.

The "Gone With the Wind" comparison isn’t about matching cinematic craft; it’s about cultural real estate. Gone With the Wind is the old model of a monolithic, everyone-knows-it text. Mendes is claiming that same totalizing place for Anchorman, signaling how pop culture has replaced the shared classics with shared bits. Ron Burgundy becomes her Scarlett O’Hara: not a moral paragon, but a character you can orbit forever because they’re bigger than the story and endlessly replayable.

Coming from an actress, the line also reads as a subtle refusal of hierarchy. It’s a preemptive defense against the snob’s eye-roll: yes, she knows what a "serious" favorite is supposed to look like, and she’s choosing the one that makes her laugh. That’s not anti-intellectual; it’s a declaration that taste can be personal, not performative.