The Hyper Specific Thirst Trap of the Week! Plus, This Week in Movie Posters.
A new segment, This Week in Movie Posters, and the latest update on the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni Saga.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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Hi, gang. I’m trying to keep up a schedule with the catch-up posts in between the reviews and meatier essays. The little #content snacks to tide you over. To that end, here’s This Week in Movie Posters, the latest on Baldoni/Lively, plus a couple other brief bits. A #content clearinghouse!
New Segment Alert: The Hyper Specific Thirst Trap of the Week
This is a trend I’ve noticed a lot online lately. Of course, porn and the internet have always gone hand in hand (dick in hand?), and it follows that there will always be a segment of all social media platforms consisting of porn and porn-adjacent performers promoting their work (good for them!). But the particular structures of these platforms have incentivized porn content to become impossibly niche. We already saw this with the PornHub-type platforms (see: my 2017 interview with Jon Ronson on the subject), but now it has come to Instagram (and TikTok and…) where the results are particularly hilarious.
Whatever your preferred hobby, you can probably find large-breasted women pretending to do it. Is there no “come to my OnlyFans” too obscure? Often times, impossibly niche fetishes collide with clumsy attempts at mashing up obscure memes, all marinated in broken English and careless typos, combining to produce some of the most fantastically unparseable language constructions in human history. See also: “day 47 of waiting for the men who's 59 yo brunette moms with with g cups and bearded clam to find my account”.
Anyway, you get it. It’s The Hyper Specific Thirst Trap of the Week! Please send me the best ones you come across (no puns allowed, stop it).
OnlyFish.DelRey writes, “i may not be a 10 but 12k anglers currently enjoy watching my ‘ice fishing tutorials’ with my dad’s bff.”
Ice fishing porn! (*Yakov Smirnov voice*) What a country!
I guess the gist is, “I’m hot, but not so hot that I wouldn’t pay attention to you, and I like to fish and have sex with fishermen. Specifically older fishermen (like you), which is why my fisherman-themed porn is so popular.”
Incredible stuff. How many hobbies do you think she tested before settling on angler porn?
Also, this is neither here nor there, but:
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Baldoni/Lively Update: Justin Baldoni is Threatening to Sue Over ‘Nicepool’
I wrote about the Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively saga recently (which saw one of my own posts artificially boosted, possibly as part of an orchestrated online influence campaign), and things have only gotten more contentious since then. Without getting too deeply into the weeds, everyone is lawyered up and threatening to sue and leaking to their various friendly media outlets, as well as accusing the other sides of unfairly leaking to friendly media outlets. Justin Baldoni is suing the New York Times over their initial story for $250 million. One of Baldoni’s former publicists is suing him and another of his publicists. And so on.
The latest is that Baldoni’s lawyers have demanded that Disney and Marvel “preserve ‘all documents relating’ to Ryan Reynolds’ Nicepool in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine.’”
To unpack that nearly impenetrable Variety headline, there was a character in Deadpool & Wolverine (my review) that Baldoni believes was mocking Baldoni. Deadpool & Wolverine starred Blake Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the supposedly Baldoni-mocking character (also played by Reynolds) was named “Nicepool.”
Baldoni’s attorney believes that Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds was flagrantly mocking Baldoni in a sequence in Marvel’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which was released by Disney in July. The sequence features Reynolds playing “Nicepool,” an oafish alternate version of the eponymous hero Deadpool, saying such lines as “Where in God’s name is the intimacy coordinator?!” and complimenting Ladypool for “snapping back” into shape after giving birth.
When Deadpool points out Nicepool’s misogyny in the scene, the latter replies, “It’s okay, I identify as a feminist.”
Baldoni, of course, had been accused by Lively of various kinds of inappropriate conduct on the set of It Ends with Us, from not having an intimacy coordinator to making unwanted comments about Lively’s post-birth body. Baldoni also had a male feminist-themed podcast.
So… yeah, I could definitely buy the argument that this character was making fun of Baldoni, specifically. Though it complicates that argument when your whole persona is already kind of a cliché. I also enjoy it when someone specifically inserts themselves into a joke everyone had interpreted as non-specific and mostly had forgotten about Hey! That unflattering parody was about me!
Also, I’m pretty sure mocking people is still allowed. Anyway, this information all comes to us as part of something called a “litigation hold letter.”
A litigation hold letter often precedes litigation. Baldoni has not sued Lively or Reynolds, but Freedman [Baldoni’s lawyer] has indicated that a suit is imminent, telling Kelly that he plans to sue the Hollywood power couple “into oblivion.”
Another wrinkle here, mentioned here as an aside, is that the lawyer’s house apparently burned down.
Freedman could not be reached for comment. He is believed to be one of the many industry figures whose home was destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fire that is still raging.
Hollywood, baby.
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This Week In Movie Posters
Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.
Holy hell, this poster for The Alto Knights has some intense “we pre-sold the foreign rights to finance this” energy. “The Alto Knights” sounds exactly like an Asylum-produced ripoff of The Sopranos. I can’t wait for The Tenors of Death, starring William Forsythe!
Incredibly, this one actually stars Robert De Niro. And it was directed by Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Wag the Dog, Bugsy), and written by Nicholas Pileggi! The producers are the children of Irwin Winkler, the famous producers of Rocky.
And even with an insane pedigree like that, this poster still makes it look unmistakably cheap. See, this is why we do this feature.
I’m hoping for the De Niro version of Gotti.
I’m heah, on da day of my daughtah’s wedding, ta talk to yous about la cosa nostra. Dis thing of ours. By which I mean of course, da mafia.
Here we move from Irwin Winkler’s kids to Samara Weaving and Ray Nicholson, aka Hugo Weaving’s niece and Jack Nicholson’s son. Hollywood, baby!
Anyway, cool poster. And if it’s anything like Cocaine Bear, the poster will be as good as it gets.
Pixar’s Elio! Did anyone else immediately think of Elián Gonzales? Or am I just brain poisoned?
Anyway, I’m getting that the kid likes space. And also that Inside Out 2 was called Intensa Menta 2 in Mexico. That’s such a better title! “Intensely,” but also “Intense Mind.” Why is Spanish so much better for puns?
Very cool poster for Love Hurts here, which seems to be a riff on the John Wick formula starring Ke Huy Quan from Everything Everywhere. Honestly, not against it. And I don’t even like the John Wick movies. Normally in a poster like this, you’d have lots of sparks or dirt particles in the background, which are movie shorthand for “lots of action.” Only in this case, the little sweet hearts are taking the place of the sparks. Pretty clever!
Even if I don’t entirely understand how the brokenhearted/jilted lover angle fits in. Maybe it’s about an incel who goes on a rampage beating up chicks.
I think my feelings about this upcoming Jason Statham vehicle are best expressed in the meme I made when I first saw it:
Ayer. Stallone. Statham. A less culture war-y take on The Sound of Freedom. I don’t know that a movie premise has ever been so firmly in my wheelhouse. And just because it’s a movie about human trafficking doesn’t mean the poster can’t have multiple phallic symbols and the star’s crotch as the focal point.
*Jason Statham crashes an Audi through the ceiling of a brothel*
Oi, deez ah da geezahs dat loikes traffickin', ain' dey Tommy?