Money Shot: The Pornhub Story: Netflix doco far less salacious than you might expect

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Pornhub really hit the public consciousness in 2021, when a December 2020 New York Times piece called The Children of Pornhub was picked up around the world.

The piece detailed the inner-workings of the website, who actually owned it and what the dangers were in running a pornography provider on which anyone could upload their own content and the legality of footage was taken on trust by the site’s owners. Put like that, how the hell did we ever get here?

Pornhub is – as one interviewee puts it early on – the Netflix or the Spotify of the porn industry. It has been hugely successful at providing content at what seems like no or very little cost. But, as with everything that seems too cheap to be sustainable, someone else is paying.

Moneyshot: The Pornhub Story is a far less salacious or “adult” film than you might be expecting. It is actually a fairly sober-minded look at one industry player and what multiple investigations into its business practices have uncovered.

The company who owns Pornhub – now called Mind Geek – are Luxembourg-based with a head office in Canada. Pornhub was started by three college students, who sold it in 2010 to an internet entrepreneur who really, really understood search engine optimisation. Very quickly, Pornhub grew to dominate the market.

Director Suzanne Hillinger tracks Pornhub through various ownership structures and lawsuits, as performers, government departments and assault victims try to make the company accountable for its own content.

Hillinger is a documentary veteran and she brings sharp instincts to Moneyshot. There are no bombshells here, but the truth is told. Recommended.

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* Mads Mikkelsen regrets not speaking with Johnny Depp before replacing him in Fantastic Beasts 3

Luther: The Fallen Sun

Are you a Luther fan? I thought I was, right up until around the third series, when the whole enterprise began to feel like it was running out of sharks to jump.

I could just about accept the mutual infatuation with a serial killer – if only because Ruth Wilson was so goddamned good and hypnotic as the malignant Alice Morgan.

But by series four, I had switched off. All good things should know when to end and it seems to me that with most TV series based around serial killers and the cops who hunt them, that should usually happen after around three series.

But, the gods of Netflix, who now seem to own Idris Elba’s Luther and everyone who orbits him, will not let the great shaggy moppet rest without wresting a few more dollars out of their property, and so we get Luther: The Fallen Sun – a standalone, feature length story that does no one any favours.

Fallen Sun sees Luther back in pursuit of particularly nasty psychopath. The psychopath – played by Andy Serkis – is a tech genius of nearly bottomless funding, who is running a farm of hackers who are gathering compromising information on internet users all over the UK and beyond. Once he has the kompromat, Serkis’ David Robey uses the information to either lure his victims to their deaths – filmed and broadcast over the internet – or to serve him in his ever-expanding web of evil.

Which sounds like a pretty good idea for a story – if Fallen Sun had been a feature film released in 2008 called Untraceable. Or perhaps as a Black Mirror episode from 2016 called Shut Up And Dance – both of which are far too obviously embedded in the DNA of Neil Cross’s script.

Fallen Sun, perversely, might have made a decent three episode mini-series. That would have given Cross, Elba and co time to stretch out, find some grace notes in the story and maybe get around the most obvious creditability gaps. But as a feature film, Fallen Sun feels rushed, mostly ludicrous and too often gratuitous.

Casting Andy Serkis as the villain should have been a triumph, but the script then asks for the comparatively tiny Serkis to defeat the absolutely enormous Idris Elba in hand-to-hand combat. Also, someone has decided to give Serkis a wardrobe of tailored velvet smoking jackets and a hairpiece left behind by Parker, Lady Penelope’s butler in Thunderbirds. The effect is far less creepy and far more hilarious than I imagine veteran TV director Jamie Payne was hoping for.

I can watch and re-watch the first three series of Luther endlessly, but Fallen Sun is a fine reminder of why I stopped.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

This 2018 fantasy starts well, with the heinous wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) staging a break-out from the New York City headquarters of the American Department of Magic, located, as it surely would be, in the very top floors of the Chrysler Building.

Via an enchanted stage-coach, Grindelwald makes his way to Paris, where he believes Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) – the wizard teen we met in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) – is alive and in need of his dark mentorship.

Opposing Grindelwald in his nefarious scheme are our hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), the young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) and comic-relief Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler).

With the cast in place, the story set in motion and an over-two hour running time to play with, writer J.K. Rowling and director David Yates then get down to the real purpose of The Crimes of Grindelwald: giving the fans another long, warm wallow in the Harry Potter universe.

There are a few lengthy returns to Hogwarts, a few familiar names and backstories are inserted to reward the faithful, and the film retains the indulgent pacing that left a few of the Potter films dead in the water. Rowling loves her fan base, and loves to give them more – and then even more – of what they want.

Numerous sub-plots, including one hinting at a youthful romance between two lead characters, come and go. And any of them could quite possibly yield a film of their own.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is as spectacular as we expect a film in the Potter universe to be. This franchise has always embraced spectacle and visual invention and Grindelwald more than delivers.

Every scene is rendered as a set-piece. A simple conversation can only take place inside a shape-shifting room, full of delightful but pointless special effects and CGI creatures wandering around.

We only glimpsed Depp as Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts, but obviously he’s a major player here.

If Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean was modelled on 1990’s Keith Richards, then he is channeling David Bowie-circa-1983 so shamelessly here I was practically expecting a quick rendition of Let’s Dance. The voice, the mismatched eyes and the shocked white quiff are all in place, as is that brand of displaced roguishness Bowie once made his own.

In the very last moments, as Rowling finally pulls back the curtain and shows us the rise-of-fascism parable at the film’s heart, Depp reminds us briefly what a charismatic and formidable actor he can be. By the time the third part of the trilogy – The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) – was released, Depp had been replaced in the role by Mads Mikkelsen.