Netflix spoiler stills

I'm sure you've noticed that when a movie is loading on Netflix, a still from that movie accompanies the red progress circle spinning in the middle of the screen. It's a snapshot chosen, one would assume, to encapsulate what this movie is about and get you in the right frame of mind for watching it.

They are almost never a typical production still, the kind you'd get with a press packet. No, they seem to be a bit more random and quirky than that.

Someone is choosing these stills. Whoever it is, I want that job, because he or she sucks at it.

Twice now I have watched a movie on Netflix that had some key part of the plot spoiled by the still they chose to represent the movie. Twice is enough to write something about it here.

I think you'd agree that a still like this should be chosen carefully, so as not to give away anything crucial. At the very least it should follow the logic of those DVD menu screens that run through a looping ten-second montage of events from the movie, which usually don't tell you anything you wouldn't otherwise want to know. (Usually.)

Re-Animator was the offender the other night. When Re-Animator is loading up, Netflix shows you this (SPOILER ALERT):

Very strong on giving you a sense of what the movie is about. Not so strong on keeping elements of the plot a secret.

This still is from the last 20 or 30 minutes of the film. Without it, you might not know that this particular character gets decapitated during the course of the film's events. You might not care that you know, but you know, and Netflix didn't give you the chance to opt out of that knowledge.

Now, even though this is the occurrence that inspired me to write this post, it may be a particularly poor example in the sense that the poster above actually gives away this information. It's a drawing of the character and not a picture, so you might not put two and two together like a picture would help you do, but still, the poster is making no effort to keep the fate of this character a secret. So be it.

This, then, is a better example, and I suppose in the spirit of the very thing I am talking about here, it requires a SPOILER WARNING as well. So, read no further if you want nothing spoiled about the documentary Unhung Hero.

Here is what Netflix offers you while Unhung Hero is spinning up:

This is almost literally the last shot of the movie. It shows our protagonist, Patrick Moote, with his arm draped around the shoulder of a woman he met earlier in a shop selling sex toys. On a side note, him having a date with this girl is one of several parts of this movie I suspect might have been staged, to give it a serendipitously positive ending. But the movie worked quite well for me overall, so I'm forgiving it those (potential) sins.

The reasons why this is a poor still to choose from Unhung Hero are twofold:

1) It doesn't indicate anything meaningful about a guy grappling with the fact that he may have a smaller than average penis;

2) It reveals that things work out okay for him, even though the whole movie is about an emotional journey kicked off when his girlfriend publicly rejected his marriage proposal on a sporting event jumbotron -- blaming his small penis for why she didn't want to marry him.

The fact that my internet kept dropping when I watched Unhung Hero, meaning I had to load it up at multiple junctures of the movie, made the still even more problematic. We meet the girl pictured here early on in the movie, when Patrick surreptitiously tries to record his conversation with her at the sex toy shop, something her boss isn't having any of. At the time, we have no idea that she's going to re-enter the narrative, and in fact, she ends up pissed off at him because he gets her in trouble.

So reluanching this movie and seeing this still multiple times tells us in no uncertain terms that she will reappear, that she will become a potential romantic partner for him, and that if someone with her button-nosed cuteness is into him, then the size of his penis must not matter after all. The look of unambiguous contentment on Moote's face leaves no doubt about his triumph over his own fears of inadequacy. And the movie does derive much of its drama from the question of how things will turn out for Patrick, so this is problematic indeed.

My conclusion is that whoever does actually do this at Netflix does not take the task very seriously. That's a shame, because I think it would be a super fun endeavor for any true cinephile to undertake -- to review the movie for that one perfect image that captures its themes, tone and content, without spoiling anything.

Just give me that chance, Netflix. You don't even have to pay me if you don't want to. Just knowing I'm doing a service for other unsuspecting cinephiles would be payment enough.

Penis Week on The Audient

When you watch a documentary about penises on Netflix on a Tuesday night, and you know you have exactly one other documentary about penises remaining on Netflix, might as well watch it on Wednesday night and just get the two-night double feature out of the way.

So went the thinking that resulted in consecutive-night viewings of The Final Member and Unhung Hero -- both of which I liked quite a bit.

Both films, in very different ways, get at an obsession that is universal among men: size. You could say that almost all men are fixated on the size of their penis, or at least have been at one point or another. Unless you've been told you have a gargantuan member, there's likely a part of every man that wonders if he measures up, literally and figuratively. But even if you are grotesquely well-endowed, that might also create an obsession of sorts (as we shall see in the discussion of one of these two films).

Because it's also kind of embarrassing to be concerned about your own size, I had avoided watching the one I knew was more directly related to that -- even though Unhung Hero had been on my radar for almost a year. I just didn't really want it to show up among the recently viewed titles in the Netflix account I share with my wife. However, when I watched The Final Member the same day I added it to our queue (having heard about its existence on a podcast a few months ago), I figured the opportunity for a corresponding blog post was too good to pass up, and hit play on Unhung the next night.

The title The Final Member relates to the last necessary donation to complete a unique museum in Iceland: one devoted entirely to the penis. It's the brainchild of Sigurdur "Siggi" Hjartarson, who has turned his eccentric hobby of collecting samples of animal penises into a full-fledged tourist attraction. Although he's got specimens of nearly ever mammal known to mankind, the elephant in the room is that there's no human genitals to complete the collection. This becomes an obsession for Siggi, and the movie explores how he plans to get a willing donor -- perhaps one who will even part with his junk while still alive.

An odd conceit for a movie goes from strange to stranger when we learn that an American named Tom Mitchell is so proud of his unit -- which he has nicknamed Elmo -- that not only does he want the whole world to see it, he wants to see the whole world see it. Mitchell is that volunteer for the prehumous contribution to the museum, so enamored with what God gave him that he is willing to give it up entirely just so everyone can know how great he ... was. Especially if it will make him the first donor to the museum, getting ahead of a nonagenarian Icelandic celebrity known for numerous exploits, particularly having slept with around 300 women.

I shouldn't tell you too much more about the movie, except that it is a fascinating study of truly exotic forms of obsession that stem from the very mundane obsession we all experience. There's discussion in this film not only of the greatness of particular specimens, namely that put forth by Tom Mitchell, but the potential disappointments of others, like the increasingly shriveling sample offered by the 90-something Icelander whose impending death gives the film its strangely significant sense of stakes. There's even discussion of what qualifies as the historical definition of a "legal length" -- and whether the elderly man's penis will a) make the cut, and b) be something he remains interested in sharing with the world if it doesn't.

That probably makes for a good transition to Unhung Hero, which concerns a gentleman (the Mark Duplass lookalike you see in the poster above) who has already been told that his size doesn't measure up. Patrick Moote got the wrong answer on a Jumbotron marriage proposal, and his soon-to-be-ex callously gives the following explanation for her rejection: His penis is too small for a lifetime commitment. Reeling from his public humiliation (which quickly went viral on Youtube) and the private humiliation of being considered an inadequate lover, Patrick goes about making this latter humiliation extremely public as well, agreeing to explore the question "Does size matter?" in documentary format, with himself as the prime subject. In a bit of a paradox, Patrick embarks on a sequence of events that only someone with a lot more confidence and a lot less shame than he thinks he has would ever undertake: He seeks out exes to see if they considered him small, he consults experts to determine if he is small, and then he ventures out to find ways to make himself bigger -- from scientifically valid procedures to the suspect practices of witch doctors.

I certainly enjoyed this movie's playful presentation, which might remind a viewer of the films of Morgan Spurlock (without the knack for polemics that tends to divide people on Spurlock). Director Brian Spitz gets the tone of the graphics and the cutaways ("I was in the pool! I was in the pool!") down perfectly. But what kind of floored me about it was the courage displayed by Moote, who as far as I know is the only person in history who has told the entire world that he has a small penis. Oh, I'm sure Jerry Springer had a guest who said something like that once, but the audience for this documentary -- the prospective if not the actual audience -- is theoretically much greater. A television talk show is ephemeral, watched once and then discarded, but Patrick Moote has gone on record for all time as being "the guy with the small penis." Bravo for him.

This courage forgave some of the parts of the film that I thought seemed too convenient -- i.e., possibly staged. You have to wonder in a film like this if everything is perfectly legitimate, particularly one aspect of the plot that comes home in the final act (which I won't spoil, but which is kind of already spoiled by Netflix using it as the promotional still that hangs on the screen while the movie is loading). When you've got a guy willing to risk a lifetime of public ridicule and humiliation like this, I kind of don't care if a little bit of it is scripted. The fact that this guy actually has a small penis is something that I know is real, and the bravery of this kind of naked (pun intended) exhibition of our most fundamental masculine insecurities makes him, indeed, the very hero mentioned in the title.

I will admit that after this movie I went into the bathroom and looked at "myself" in the mirror. There was a part of me that hoped that we would have actually gotten to see Patrick Moote's offerings, so those of us who, you know, wondered a bit could compare and contrast ourselves.

But in the end I'm glad that it didn't, because what both of these movies really want a viewer to do is to love his penis -- no matter what shape, or size, or attachment to his body it may have.