"The Dead Don't Die": By-the-numbers Zombie Apocalypse with some gay subtexts and Josh O'Connor nude

 

Link to the NSFW review

The problem with Movie Night is, I'm asked to choose something from the "new selections" on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime,  and MAX, with no research, just a cover blurb.  Then, if it turns out to be awful, I get blamed: "You picked this!"  

Last night I selected The Dead Don't Die on Hulu, because it starred Bill Murry and it was about zombies in a small town.  I was wondering if anything new could be said about zombies after so many years of being blasted by Zombie Apocalypses.  

No. Other than a few absurdist touches, like characters being aware that they're in a movie and an alien spaceship that appears out of nowhere, picks up Tilda Swinton, and vanishes, it's the standard. Due to..um...fracking?,,, day and night get mixed up, cell phones don't work, and the dead re-animate.  

They crawl out of their graves, fully corporeal,  even though some have been dead for centuries -- and eat the living in a small Pennsylvania town.  Maybe everywhere in the world. The only suspense is wondering who will get eaten next.

This movie needs an editor.  Cop #1 enters the diner to look at the two zombie-eaten waitresses. We see one, then the other, with their innards turned into spaghetti.  Cop #2 enters to look.  We see one, then the other again.  Cop #3 enters to look.  We see one, then the other a third time!  

But on the bright side, there is no hetero-romance, and we see many gay subtexts.  Probably unintentional.

The main zombies and zombie-dinners are:

1.-3. Three big city hipsters:Austin Butler, top photo; Luka Sabbat; and Selena Gomez.  They stop for gas and for some reason decide to stay overnight in the town's decrepit hotel instead of continuing on to Pittsburgh. Selena flirts with every guy in sight, even when she doesn't want to get something from him, but there's no indication that she's dating either of the guys.

4-7. Police officers Bill Murray and Adam Driver, second photo.  Adam asks the female police officer at the station for a date, and Bill had an affair with town drunk Carol Kane.  But the two end up together, with a sort of buddy-bonding going on before they are killed.

8-9. Neither racist farmer Steve Buscemi or cat-loving hotel manager Larry Fessenden have wives at home, mention dead wives, or flirt with the gals at the diner.

10-12. Caleb Landry Jones, who runs the gas station/horror movie memorabilia shop, seems to have a crush on delivery  driver RZA.  He almost asks him for a date, but loses his nerve. Later he is trapped in a hardware store with Danny Glover, and almost grabs his hand before they are eaten.

13-14. Iggy Pop, who was famous a long time ago, is a hippie zombie who, along with a girlfriend, invades the diner, kills the two waitresses, and drinks coffee.

15. Sid O'Connell, a guard at the juvenile detention center

And the survivors:

1-3. Jahi Winston, an inmate at the town's juvenile detention center, keeps hanging out with two girls.  The guards punish him for it and ask if he wants to be a girl.  We can conclude that he's gay, hanging out with a lesbian couple.  The trio actually survives, or at least we don't see them being eaten.

3. Tom Waits is a grizzled old hermit who watches the events through binoculars, and ends the movie with an annoyingly self-rightous diatribe about how it's our own fault for...um...having stuff like tv sets and cell phones?

I thought the movie was a lengthy commercial for Sturgill Simpson's song "The Dead Don't Die."  It plays on the radio like twelve times, and everyone stops their zombie-fleeing to comment "This is a great song!"  They latch onto CDS as if they are the Holy Grail, even stealing them from zombies.  But it turns out that Simpson wrote this song for the movie, and only released it as a single, then an album, when fans started yelling for it.

So what's the point of everyone lapsing into orgiastic ecstasy over it?

My Grade: C

Nude photos of Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jack O'Connell on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Nude New Orleans: Eight Cajun cocks and bulging backcity boys for your crewe

  

Link to the Cajun cocks

So many of my recent profiles have been of guys from New Orleans that it seemed apropos to post a photo collection. I've been three times, once for spring break, once for a conference at Tulane University, and once for Halloween, so I've actually met two or three of these guys.  I'm not saying which.

The Halloween visit was my favorite.

I'm interested in the Afro-Caribbean religions, the religions that enslaved West Africans brought with them and kept hidden under their forced Christian practices.  When they were forced into Roman Catholicism, as in New Orleans and Haiti, they found a lot of statues of saints that could be used for venerating their orishas.  The result was what we now call voodoo.

But avoid the tourist-trap voodoo shops.

An actor, mostly in local theater.  He's not nearly as big as his photo suggests.

More after the break.  

Jacob Sartorius: Femme teen idol into heterosexism, cowboys, and frontal nudity

 

Link to the frontal nudity

I had no idea who Jacob Sartorius was, just that Kelton Dumont knew him, before I started the research.  According to Google, he's an American media personality and singer, born in October 2002, shoe size 5. 

Whoa -- 23 million followers on Tiktok, 12 million followers on Instagram, 1.5 million on X, 1.1 million on Facebook. Apparently a lot of people have heard of him.

"Sartorius" sounds like a pseudonym. It's a long, narrow muscle running across the front of your thigh.  Or he may have been thinking of sartor, "tailor" in Latin, as in the famous novel by Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

I don't do Tiktok, but Jacob the Muscle or Jacob the Tailor's Instagram is loaded-down with femme imagery.  Here he appears to be coming out as trans, or maybe showing trans solidarity.

Nice chest, girlfriend, and I dig the hot pink coffin.  You'll make a fabulous vampire.

Jacob the Muscle or the Taylor is so femme, one assumes that he's gay, but fan comments disagree:

"Jacob is not gay!  Haters gonna make these vicious accusations!"

"Why does everybody hate Jacob Sartorius? Jojo Siwa is a gay icon."

"Jacob Sartorius admits that he's gay."

"Jacob Sartorius is gay! 100% proof, real,  not clickbait!"

"Are you gay?   That's so awful, who's even gay anymore? You're just following a trend!"

More Jacob after the break

Kelton Dumont's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 2: Orson Welles, James Dean, Bam-Bam Rubble, and a naked Pontius

 

Link to the nude photos

This is a collection of cute/cool or hot/humorous photos of actor Kelton Dumont, best known as Pontius in The Righteous Gemstones.  As far as I know, he's over 18 in all but #2.  There are also some photos of his dad James and a few friends. 

1. "Punching or licking.  Your choice."

2. Boating at dusk. I like the cityscape in the background.

3. Kelton playing Orson Welles in a Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds. Why do you need to be in costume for a radio play?

4. Pontius is interrupted in media res

4. Back to War of the Worlds. Burgers with the rest of the cast.

5. A random photo with no connection to anyone in War of the Worlds, especially not the drama major on the left.

 6. James in Red

More Kelton, and maybe more James, after the break

Miss Peregrine's Home for Heterosexual Children

After he is bullied by some mean kids, 16-year old drugstore employee Jake (Asa Butterfield) received a telephone call from his raging, delusional grandpa, Abe Portman (Terence Stamp).

His deadbeat father, who doesn't have a job, can't get off work, so his boss drives him over. 

It's mid-afternoon when they leave but the middle of the night when they arrive, although in other scenes Abe lives close enough for Jake to bicycle over. 

Have you had enough inconsistencies yet?  Good-- we're just getting started.

They find Grandpa dead, with his eyes gouged out.  But he lives long enough to tell Jake to go to the Home.

Flashback to Grandpa babysitting the 5- and 10-year old Jake, and telling him about his childhood.  He lived in Poland before World War II, where there were "monsters" about, so his parents sent him to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, on an island off the coast of Wales, where he would be safe.

Ok, I get it.  Grandpa was Jewish.  Repeat:  Jewish. It's a perfectly legitimate word.  Why is everyone afraid to say it?

The Peculiar Children all had bizarro powers:
1. Emma was lighter than air.
2. Olive could start fires by touching things.
3. Fiona could make plants grow.
4. Millard was invisible.
5. Hugh (Milo Parker, left) was full of bees.
6. Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone, below) could project his dreams onto a screen, like a movie (how did he ever discover that one?).

Abe left the home in 1941 to join the army, but he stayed in contact with the Headmistress, Miss Peregrine. 

Back to the present: Jake tells the whole story to his therapist, who suggest that the Peculiar Children were actually mentally ill or physically disabled or something.  Since Miss Peregrine is still alive -- she would be well over 100 -- why not pop over to Wales and check? 

So Jake and his dimwitted loser Dad drop everything and fly to a tiny village in Wales, where Dad pays some local boys to hang out with the mortified teenager.  They take him to the Home, in ruins since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1941.

Why would the Nazis bomb a children's home in a tiny town in Wales?

By the way, Dad (Chris O'Dowd) is writing a book on birds, and the tiny town has some interesting specimens.  We get the idea that the bird book is a pipe dream, something he is writing endlessly but will never finish. 

He's also amazingly neglectful:  "I see that something is troubling you.  If you want to talk about it, call your therapist.  I'm busy."

No wonder Jake later drops out of the family without a moment's hesitation.

Back to the House: somehow Jake takes a step to the right, and the Home is still there, with Miss Peregrine and the children the same age as they were in 1941  After some shenanigans and missteps, they explain: they're in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over.  Every night, just as the bomb falls, Miss Peregrine resets time 24 hours.

And there are similar time loops all over the world, where other Peculiar Children are kept safe from monsters by reliving the same day over and over.

These time loops are presented as marvelous paradises, but can you imagine how horrible it would be to live 70 years with the same 11 people, never growing up, no movies, no tv, nothing to do all day, every day?  They don't even take classes.  They play, eat giant carrots for dinner, watch Hugh's dreams on a movie screen (here's hoping he doesn't have an erotic dream), and then go outside to watch Miss Peregrine reset time as the bombs fall.

And there are monsters, eyeless creepy things who are  trying to regain their humanity by eating the eyes of Peculiar Children.  I think.

It's all completely muddled and nonsensical, a mishmash of Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, H. P. Lovecraft, and nonsense.  Plus two -- count 'em -- two hetero romances.

1. The morose teenage Enoch, who hates Jake on sight, finally gets the gumption (after 70 years) to tell Olive that he is in love with her. They walk off hand in hand.

2. Jake falls for Emma, his grandfather's girlfriend.  After the adventure is over and the eyeless monsters subdued, Grandpa Abe (alive again for some reason) tells him "Go to her."  So the 16-year old drops everything, including school and his parents, and rushes to the ship and kisses her. 

Oh, I forgot.  The Peculiar Children raise the Titanic or something.

I don't know what was more annoying, the incessant heterosexism or the fact that the MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE.

By the way, the top photo is the hunky Bryson Powers, who is listed in the credits as "Surfer Boy."  I don't remember anyone surfing in the movie. 

Gemstones Episode 1.1, Continued: Blackmail, a bisexual orgy, double-dragon Ninjas, Scott Wolf's bulge, and Kelvin's cock

 

This is the censored version of the review, with no nude photos or explicit sexual discussions.

Link to the nude photos

The earlier scenes established one of the main plotlines of the season: Kelvin Gemstone is gay and an evangelical minister -- got to be some conflict there -- and interested in his former-Satanist friend Keefe.  Next we move on to introduce the other plotlines. 

El's Dead Wife:   We cut to megachurch senior pastor Eli eating dinner alone, just as lonely as Kelvin.  He stares at a painting of him and, presumably, his dead wife.  Later we discover that she is Aimee-Leigh, a famous Gospel singer who partnered with Eli in the ministry before her death in July 2018.  Trivia alert: a little over a year before Episode 1.1 aired.

The Sex-and-Drugs Party: Then on to Jesse in the master bedroom suite, brushing his teeth while his wife Amber waits in bed. Suddenly he gets a text: a video of Jesse in a hotel room, snorting cocaine with a naked lady, with a naked guy in the background. We see dicks!  So someone taped Jesse having a bisexual sex-and-drugs party! Wait -- is he bi, or were the guys at the party taking turns having sex with the hooker?

The sender wants to meet, so Jesse makes an excuse and drives to the deserted parking lot of a strip mall.  A red van appears, and a blackmailer in a Devil mask demands a million dollars by Sunday, or the video goes viral!  

Later, Jesse asks Chief Accountant Martin for the money, pretending it's for a new mission endeavor, but no dice.

Squeezing Out the Competition:  Eli is planning to open a new satellite church in Locust Grove. A fictional town, not the suburb of Atlanta.  The pastors of smaller churches in the area, especially Rev. Seasons (Dermot Mulroney, right, from a 1994 movie), fear that theit will draw away their members.  Tough. Eli admits that he's intentionally trying to steal their congregations.  In-joke: his name is John Wesley Seasons, but he's a Baptist!

Judy and the Atheist: The family meets at Aimee-Leigh's shrine to discuss their disapproval of Judy's boyfriend BJ, because he is an unbeliever; he's even pro-choice on abortion!  She argues that he doesn't support "killing babies" anymore.  How conservative are the Gemstones?  It varies from season to season, and even from episode to episode.

Plus they are living together, in spite of the church's prohibition of premarital cohabitation, so whenever someone visits, BJ has to hide. She argues that they are engaged, which is practically the same as being married.  No one mentions disapproving of Kelvin being gay; could they not know, or do they assume that he is not sexually active?

On the ride home, Kelvin becomes angry with Jesse for "constantly getting in my business, telling me what I should or shouldn't do."  Like what guys he can date? Jesse claims that he's just trying to protect Kelvin: "Dark forces are at work. Evil forces that want to destroy our family."  He means the blackmailers, but what does Kelvin think he's talking about?  An ex-Satanist that he attracted to?

We cut to Jesse's wife Amber meeting with the church ladies to defend the Gemstones' excessive wealth, 

Jesse's Crew Sees the Tape:  Jesse shows Kelvin and his crew, the guys who were at the party, the tape. Kelvin ignores the boobs, but wants to know who belongs to the cock -- Chad.  He points out that his cock is bigger. Everybody's cock is bigger, dude. 

Kelvin will be obsessed with his cock size through the series. I wonder if it is scripted as small, or the same size as Adam Devine's.

So, will Kelvin to chip in half of the million dollars?  He considers it, but after Jesse calls him "a shitty brother and a shitty minister," he refuses.  

We move on to a church service -- very money-grubbing.  Eli, Kelvin, and Jesse perform, while Keefe stands in the balcony.  Apparently he is working security.  After the service, they find all of the cars in the parking lot plastered with fliers about how evil the Gemstones are.  No doubt Rev. Season is responsible!  

Suck your Satanic boyfriend:  After a confrontation with Rev. Seasons about the fliers -- he denies responsibility -- Eli and his family head to dinner in a private dining room on the second floor of Jason's Steakhouse.  Trivia alert: Really the Liberty Taproom and Grill in Mount Pleasant, a suburb of Charlesotn.

The siblings are generally sniping at each other. disapproving of BJ for being a nonbeliever and Judy for planning to move away from the compound and buy a place in town.  They consider this a betrayal. Why do they care?   

Kelvin accuses Jesse of "betraying your family" in another way.  They stand, preparing to fight.

Kelvin: "How about you tell the family what kind of man you really are?"

Jesse: "How about you just go on and suck your Satanic boyfriend Keefe off?"  This is the first time Keefe is named on the show. 

"Suck your Satanic boyfriend" is a parallel to "what kind of man you really are," comparing two illicit sexual acts.  But what is illicit, sex with a boyfriend or sex with a Satanist?  From Jesse's statement that he has gay friends earlier, we can conclude that he means "Satanist," just as Judy is inadequate because of her non-believer boyfriend.  But Kelvin responds as if Jesse has criticized him for being gay: instead of defending Keefe, he throws a water glass.  

The Devil is a Top:  They start throwing things at each other. Jesse throws a water glass at Kelvin, but hits BJ in the nose.  Kelvin yells that they should have Jesse arrested for assault, and he responds "I hope the Devil fucks you dry!"  

Again we see parallel threats, getting arrested and getting "fucked" by the Devil, both humiliating losses of power.  It is interesting that Jesse adds "dry," that is, without lube. He assumes that Kelvin, being gay and into anal sex, would otherwise enjoy the act.  In Season 3,we learn that Kelvin is in fact a bottom, and Keefe a top.

Kelvin cock and Scott Wolfe bulge after the break

Asa Butterfield: A dozen "boy meets girl" movies, a dozen nude photos, and a boyfriend

 

Link to the nude photos

I keep thinking that Asa Butterfield is American due to his old-fashioned name -- maybe Moravian or Amish -- but he's actually British, born in Islington, 30 minutes by underground from the British Museum.  It has pubs called The Earl of Essex, The Duke of Cambridge, and the Pig and the Butcher.  Can't get more British than that.

He got his start in horribly depressing movies like After Thomas and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 2007, which of course were on my "run away fast" list.  

Then came Hugo, 2011, a fantasy with an ending that made me cringe -- the photo looks like two boys have the adventure, but it's actually a boy and a girl.  When Hugo announces that he's got a girlfriend, the adults throw confetti, high-five each other, and scream with joy.  That happened to me every time I mentioned a girl, no matter how casually: "A girl in my class did a book report on Finnegan's Wake."  "Hallelujah, he's straight!  He's normal!  We don't have to worry anymore!  Here, have some money and the keys to the car!"

Although it did allow me to get away with anything: "Sorry I left my jacket on the bus.  I was talking to this girl, see...."  "Hah-hah, of course, boys will be boys!  Here, have some money and the keys to the car!"

I didn't see Ender's Game, 2013, because the original novel was written by the horribly homophobic Orson Scott Card, or A Brilliant Young Mind, 2014, because the brilliant young math prodigy gets a brilliant young girlfriend. 

The novel version of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children contains no heterosexual romance, but in the 2016 movie version, there are three of them. It's boys and girls gazing into each other's eyes all the way down. 

Are you noticing a pattern here?

Then Came You, 2018: A boy falls in love with a dying girl. This seems to be quite a trope.  Why do girls never fall in love with dying boys?  Of course I'm not seeing it.

Time Freak, 2018.  At least Asa has a gay-subtext relationship with Skyler Gisondo en route to winning the Girl of His Dreams.

Your Christmas or Mine?, 2022.  Isn't Asa a little young to graduate to Christmas romcoms?

Asa's biggest role to date is in the tv series Sex Education, 2019-23.  He plays Otis, a boy whose mom is a sex therapist, so he and his friends get the idea of opening a clinic to solve teenagers' sex problems. There are some gay characters, but Otis is straight.  And naked a lot.

More after the break. 

10 Things I Hated About Summer (and Still Do)

Final are all submitted, graduation is over, the students and faculty have scattered.  Summertime is here.  Three months of boredom, sitting in the house all day every day except to go to the gym, nothing to do but prep for the fall and gain weight.

It was the same way when I was a kid.  My favorite season was fall, when school started, with new books and classes, and the leaves started to change, and there was a little chill in the air.  And it was marked the beginning of the great holiday season that began with Halloween, picked up momentum with my birthday and Thanksgiving, and careened into Christmas.

Winter was great, too, with bright skies and biting cold air, wrestling tournaments, sledding, and snow men. I even liked shoveling snow (my brother and I started a snow-shoveling business).

Spring was ok, but a little rainy and muddy, and no good holidays.  Valentine's Day?  St. Patrick's Day?

And summer -- don't get me started!

Here are the Top 10 Things I Hated About Summer  

1. With school out, there was nothing to do.

2. It was too hot.

3. But my parents insisted that I play outside, where there was nothing to do.

4. I could get sunburned in 10 minutes (in those days, we didn't use sunscreen).











5. There were thunderstorms almost every night, so we had to unplug the tv, thus missing our favorite programs.

6. There was nothing good on anyway, just reruns.

7. I had to go to bed when it was still daylight, and I could look out the window and see all the other kids in the neighborhood playing.

8. My parents kept holding barbecues, picnics, and other activities where you had to eat outside, off paper plates, with the bugs and the dirt, and the wind that  blew everything away.

9. We always went on a horrible week-long camping trip, with nothing to do but swim in muddy water, sit in a rowboat waiting for a fish to bite, and walk around in the woods.  What gay kid wants to mess around with that gross stuff?

10. And I spent another week at Nazarene summer camp, sleeping in drafty cabins, with nonstop sermons (mostly about boys liking girls) and sports, and the bathroom down a mosquito-ridden path

But there were a few things that made summer bearable (almost).

See also: the Kensington Runestone.

Aaron Goldenberg: Former fundamentalist, Cousin Karl's boyfriend, Mean Gay. With some underwear bulges.

  

Aaron Goldenberg is an Atlanta based comedian with 41.000 followers on Facebook, 294,000,  on Instagram, and 1.2 million on Tiktok. 

Link to "More of Aaron"

He is best known for his series of "Mean Gays" videos with Jake Jonez: they make snarky comments at your wedding, your baby shower, by the pool, at your dinner party. The "hookup" video, where the Mean Gays invite you over for "some fun" and discover that you're a little older and huskier than your profile photo, has gone viral, with over 4 million views on Twitter and Tiktok.

Well, we've all been there.

The Mean Gays went national in 2024 when they "invaded," or rather hosted, the Razzies, the annual awards for the worst movies and actors of the year.

Aaron also riffs, or rather comments, on his fundamentalist childhood -- hiding in plain sight, parents in denial, friends saying "Hate the sin but love the sinner," coming out to his pastor.  It did not go well.

More Aaron after the break

"We're Here": Drag queens spread love in homophobic small towns. With bonus small town guys hanging out

 

Link to the NSFW review

When I "figured it out," back in the 1980s,  I immediately started looking for a safe place, where you weren't asked "What girl do you like?" every thirty seconds, where your friends wouldn't run away in horror if they found out, where you didn't have to hide all the time.  

Everyone did. They called it The Great Gay Migration: every gay man who could afford it, and many who couldn't, fled from their homophobic small towns to the gay neighborhoods of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York -- that's all we knew about, at first.  Later, some chose smaller gay neighborhoods in Houston, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto.  We went home once a year, maybe, to field questions about the hotness of California girls at Thanksgiving Dinner.

We knew that some LGBT people stayed home, or made the Great Gay Migration, then changed their minds and went back.  We had no idea why.  I still don't, after watching several episodes of We're Here, a reality series where three drag queens sashay down the street in small, redneck towns like Selma, Alabama; Watertown, South Dakota; and St. George, Utah.  I'd be afraid to go near them, even as cisgender and masculine-presenting.  

Establishing shots minimize the horrified looks and screeching about the Book of Leviticus, probably because you have to get the screechers' release: most people seem delighted by the sashaying queens in their dull, colorless town.

The queens teach some of the locals the basics of drag, like how to hide your bulge, and put on a show with them.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, amid the Confederate flags and monuments, they help:

A femme guy who works the makeup counter at the drug store.  His only gay friend in town moved to Philadelphia.  Why didn't you?

A cisgender straight guy who wants to do drag as an ally.

A woman who rejected her daughter when she came out as bisexual -- "I just thought, 'she's going over to the enemy."  Then she found the daughter's diary, and wondered what she did to make the girl consider suicide.  Being rejected by the family, maybe?  She wants to do drag to restore the relationship.

More after the break

Kelton Dumont's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 1: Chanting. wrestling, growing a beard, going blond. With some grown-up dick.

 

This is a collection of cute/cool photos of actor Kelton Dumont, best known as Pontius in The Righteous Gemstones.  As far as I know, he's over 18 in all but #2.  There are also photos of his dad James Dumont, also an actor, and a few friends. 

Link to the nude photos 

1. "When I go blond, I go all the way"

2, Kelton and James practice Sokka Gakkai Buddhism, where you chant "Nam myoho renge kyo" and learn compassion, truth, and optimism: "We need to be able to continually direct our minds in a bright, positive, and beneficial direction and help those around us to do so, too."

3. Kelton and James at the WBC Main Event in New Orleans.  A blond Buddhist boxing fan.

4. Fam graduation.  Paul is now studying architecture at the Savannah School of Art and Design.

5. Random photo that has absolutely nothing to do with Kelton, James, or Paul.

6. Growing a beard

More after the break