Sarah Silverman has been "upgraded" to Margot Robbie

I never really think that my little blog has any influence on the larger world, but sometimes I wonder. 

I've written a handful of posts with enough traction that they still get comments even sometimes a decade after I've written them. For some reason, these posts almost all seem to focus on a particular actress -- and not always in ways I'd like to have as part of my legacy, delving into some negative aspect of the actress in question. I don't regularly dwell on negative aspects of actresses, but over the course of 3,121 published posts, I'm bound to do it from time to time -- and these are the posts that seem to catch on with the internet. (Possibly a discussion for another day.)

If this current post "goes viral" within my own ability to do that, it could be for the same reason. But I can't help point things out like this when they happen.

Only two weeks ago, I wrote about how Sarah Silverman was an unlikely poster girl for a video repeatedly advertised to me on YouTube about the 50 most paused movie moments. Not only was I surprised at how frequently this comes up for me (the search term "trailer" has been enough to do so), but by the fact that they chose a picture of Silverman not looking very sexual suggestive as the enticement to click on the link.

Well, either someone read me or they came to the conclusion on their own that they needed someone more traditionally sexy in a more traditionally alluring pose, because the image you see above is now what comes along with this video.

And unlike with the picture of Silverman, I can tell which Margot Robbie movie this is from: The Wolf of Wall Street.

Where indeed, famously, Robbie appears fully nude from the front angle. 

There seems likely to be a little capitalizing on Barbie here as well, given that this is a pink outfit Robbie is wearing and that her appearance in Greta Gerwig's film has made her all the more famous than she was previously. Who wouldn't, I'm sure the thinking goes, want to see Barbie with her clothes removed in a movie they may not be aware of from ten years ago?

The market inefficiency has been corrected, as it always is. 

Incidentally this realization, attained while I was searching up the trailer for Rebel Moon (full review here), comes only a day after I saw Silverman in Maestro. Maybe appearing as Leonard Bernstein's sister was the thing that finally did her in as a spokesmodel for stolen glances at the exposed flesh of actresses? 

No one protecting the copyright

I almost gave up on being able to watch Europa Europa in the month of May.

It wasn’t some arbitrary deadline I placed on myself, though on this blog that would not be unusual. Rather, it was the movie I’d drawn in this monthly viewing challenge in which I participate through my Flickcharters Facebook group. There are some 30 of us doing it, and each month, the guy who organizes it draws a name for each of us from a hat. Our assignment is then to watch the highest ranked movie on that other person’s chart that we haven’t seen.

Europa Europa (I prefer to leave out the middle comma, though I’ve seen it written both ways) was the #17 movie for the woman I drew. And impossible to find anywhere, it seemed.

I tried the library. I tried iTunes. I tried all of my streaming services. It seemed like the kind of thing that might be available through Kanopy, but it was not.

Just before I was about to move on to her next highest movie I had not seen, Gaslight, I randomly decided to check YouTube, and there it was.

Considering that copyright holders regularly scrub YouTube of anything that infringes on their copyright, often within hours of when it gets posted, I found it strange to see a complete copy of Europa Europa staring me in the face. Strange but by no means unprecedented. I’ve watched a couple movies on YouTube before, and not only the ones that have lapsed into the public domain. The strangest example was when we watched The Room there last year, especially since I understood Tommy Wiseau to be particularly tenacious when it comes to making sure people pay to see his movie.

I guess I don’t have much to say about EE being available that way. It’s tempting to say that it represents some kind of neglect of a movie that people should be properly buying on Criterion or whatever you have to do to watch it these days. But maybe it’s just someone out there being magnanimous and allowing a great movie into our lives that isn’t widely available elsewhere. If you’re an artist you just want people to see your work, and maybe even if you’re a copyright holder rather than an artist, you feel that way too.

Or maybe it is just neglect.

I got all confident and tried to find Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 on there, as I would prefer this to be one of two Varda movies I see when I eventually get to her in Audient Auteurs. But in order to see this on YouTube – which you can do – you have to subscribe to their movie service.

Which, honestly, might be worth doing it if doesn’t cost too much and allows me to see the movie.

Sextube

Something I've been slowly realizing -- or maybe I should say, suddenly realized, but much slower than most people -- is that trailers on youtube are advertised with the most sexually revealing thumbnail possible.

Call me idealistic, but I think the best thumbnail would be something that, you know, captures the essence of what the movie is actually about.

For example, I still haven't seen This is 40, but I kind of doubt that this would be considered a typical still from the movie:

 

Then next to it, it lists the stars of the movie as Paul Rudd and Megan Fox. Is Fox even a significant character in this movie? I'm sure if I were Leslie Mann, I'd be pissed.

I'd say it's shameful, but it's also, sadly, effective. I just watched the trailer for the Kathryn Hahn movie Afternoon Delight because of this thumbnail:

I didn't know that was Juno Temple until I actually watched the trailer. She's 24, but I still think of her as a very young person. At least this movie is about a stripper who becomes a nanny.

I'm a heterosexual man, so of course I'm susceptible to this kind of thing. However, I fight it at every step of the way. In a Facebook discussion group in which I participate, I have recently been giving one of the others a hard time for making the physical appearance of actresses too much a focus of his discussions. It's a group comprised of both men and women, so I resent him talking, even in relatively harmless terms, about certain actresses being "hot."

He claims he's just being honest about the reasons we, as human beings, choose to watch or not watch certain movies. I argue that we may have those reasons, but it's part of an unwritten social contract of politeness that we don't refer to the appearance of an actress unless there's a specific reason for it -- like, the character is a sex symbol in the context of the movie.

If these trailers on youtube are any indication, he's being the realist and I'm being the old fogey. Sex sells, and sex leads to more views, and more views leads to certain computations related to advertising and the like. Sex makes the economy go round, and whoever posts these trailers on their youtube channels is only recognizing that reality.

It's inescapable, isn't it? The movies are even being specifically constructed to allow sexually suggestive thumbnails on youtube. Suddenly I have the urge to see Star Trek Into Darkness again ...