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? 

Sarah Silverman: the ultimate temptation for excitable movie nerds

As part of posting my reviews on ReelGood, I regularly go to YouTube to get the film's trailer for embedding in the post.

Almost every time, the first search result I get is the image you see to the right.

The title of the video being pushed on me is "50 Most Paused Movie Moments."

There are a couple things about this I find strange.

One is that the advertiser has apparently paid to have this come up in every YouTube search that contains the word "trailer." I have only a simplistic understanding of how the money works at YouTube, but I do know that to have something like this come up so regularly, in contexts that are so unrelated to it, there has to be money exchanging hands.

What I find strange is that it comes up with the word "trailer." If you are seeking to be titillated on YouTube, how likely is it that the word "trailer" is going to be one of your search terms? A trailer would actually, in most cases, be pretty clean, because most of them are going to be viewed by audiences of potentially all ages. 

Yes there are redband trailers, and you can see those on YouTube too. But the advertiser is overpaying for an algorithm that is not doing what it wants it to do, especially when the most recent trailer I searched for -- getting this result yet again -- was for the Eddie Murphy family Christmas movie Candy Cane Lane. (You can read my review here if you like.)

Then there's the poster girl they've chosen to try to titillate us.

Now, I have no idea which Sarah Silverman movie this is, but the image is barely suggestive of anything naughty. Silverman is in a pool and appears to be wearing a rather modest bathing suit. Is she bottomless? Maybe, but the image certainly isn't implying that. You have to really stretch to get there.

And then there is Silverman herself. I have always found her to be attractive, but never has she presented herself, or been really considered by anyone in the public discourse, to be a traditional beauty or to be traditionally sexy in any way. She's also now 53 years old. You'd be much more likely to use a picture of, I don't know, Megan Fox in an advertisement like this, or maybe Sydney Sweeney if you are trying to stay current -- which for this advertiser, it would really make sense to do to accomplish their goal.

Maybe they got a lifetime contract with YouTube for a relatively small fee, and I will continue to see a picture of Sarah Silverman in a pool wearing a modest bathing suit every time I search for a trailer on YouTube, from now until the end of time.