Mark Felt, the Watergate informant known by a nickname derived from the most famous "adult" movie of his day, advised Woodward and Bernstein in the film All the President’s Men to "follow the money." And that is precisely what Ovidie, the French writer-journalist (and former porn actress-director) turned documentarian does in her film about the evolution of her former business as a result of the Internet. In effect, she mourns the demise of old-fashioned cinematic pornography, which she suggests held itself to certain standards (and was restricted to viewers of a proper age). Her focus is on the proliferation of porn websites that offer content for free to anybody--particularly YouPorn, which German entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann built into an industry colossus by gobbling up rivals, shattering old content taboos, sidestepping restrictions meant to insure that users were not minors, and employing convoluted business models to hide the enormous profits being made (not so much from online traffic, Ovidie concludes, but from money laundering). In trying to understand how the business has changed and disentangle the mystery of who is actually behind the companies that dominate Internet porn, Ovidie interviews producers who thrived making "adult" movies in the DVD era but have now left the business, women in Eastern Europe who are exploited making web content, and journalists who have spent years investigating YouPorn and others. Pornocracy is an intriguing study of a mega-business that operates mostly in the shadows, even if its notion that Deep Throat represents the good old days seems weird. Recommended, with the caveat that some scenes here are only a camera angle away from being sexually explicit. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Pornocracy
(2018) 77 min. DVD: $19.95, Blu-ray: $24.95. FilmRise (avail. from most distributors). Volume 33, Issue 3
Pornocracy
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