interesting but i can't help rooting for the losers
Me too, I don't think that is really the same issue as such, it neither agrees or contradicts what I am saying. I'm just talking about the cheapness and also the dubiousness of having silly looking people just to laugh at.
Like in that Beverly Luff Linn film, there is the Indian shopkeeper who is a very minor character and really, all he is there for is to laugh at, how he looks, particularly how he talks and I find that a bit lame. He feels like a cardboard cutout, a cartoon, just a freak for all of us non-freaks to point at together and celebrate our non-freakiness at his expense. So it's not about him winning or losing, it's just about him being more than a cardboard cut out, cos once upon a time we had freak shows and people went there to laugh at the bearded lady and be horrified by the guy who had no legs and walked on his hands
and then society sort of decided that maybe that wasn't very nice and it got less and less popular to call people freaks and stare goggle-eyed at them.... but now some film directors are smuggling something very similar through the back door but it's ok cos they are art films. I am exaggerating here of course, I don't want to sound hysterical, it's not the same thing, but it's something that does make me feel a bit uncomfortable. Especially when the guy playing the freak is actually some hollywood hunk, it feels like punching down.
Similarly, with sex scenes. Female actors used to be basically classed as prostitutes at one time and gradually that association was broken and even forgotten. But these days as sex gets more and more explicit and nudity is often demanded, and more than that, sometimes they have real sex in a film, and I think that that is somewhat unnecessary to say the least.
Suppose you're an actor and there is a big film part and you get offered it but you are told that the sex scenes are gonna be un-simulated, you gotta have sex with the other lead (or maybe several other people) on camera. You will be paid to have sex with a person (or several people) you would not normally have sex with... that sounds to me as though the link to prostitution is being reestablished. And why really? It's like Laurence Olivier supposedly to Dustin Hoffman when he saw him running to prepare for Marathon Man "My dear boy, haven't you heard of acting?".