"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

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. 

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

Maximillian Acevedo: From Tragic Childhood to Bodybuilder Bae

 

Maximilian Acevedo,  who plays the killer babysitter's boyfriend in the schlockfest Baby Sitter Killer Queen, seems to think that his character is nice.  He posts this photo of Jimmy insulting Cole with the caption: "Don't worry, Bro.  Jimmy will take care of everything."

Or maybe Jimmy turned out to be a good guy while I was fast forwarding.

Max has an instagram page with 18,000 followers, where he posts a lot of pictures with his shirt off and gets comments like "Shit!" and falling-in-love emojis.

And a youtube channel comprised mostly of workout videos.  "A Day in the Life" is sort of interesting.  He spends the whole day running and working out amid iconic L.A. landmarks.

According to his biography on IMDB, Max grew up in poverty in Las Vegas. At age 14, he decided to overcome adversity by "turning his body into a work of art."   

An interview on the podcast "Belly of the Beast" goes into more detail about his traumatic and scary childhood:

Looking at his dad through the glass window when he visited him in jail.

Hit, insulted, locked in a room, and "touched" by his mom's boyfriends.

Bullied in school due to his preference for bright colors and rainbows.

Being homeless; wondering why he was even alive.  

Like many bullied and abused kids, Max found salvation at the gym, and then on the stage.

He moved to L.A. in 2019, did some fitness promos and modeling, and then got an agent and started going on auditions for films and tv.

Maximilian has been on screen five times, which is quite a lot for someone who has had an agent for only about a year, during a pandemic where most productions were shut down.

1. The short "Super Hero Last Day of School,"  in which Batman, Spiderman, Deadpool, and others are high school students.  He plays the shirtless superhero Winter Soldier.

2. The tv pilot I Am, about a high school student's "thirst for power."

3. Lawn Ranger, an incompetent supervillain "here to cut your grass and kick your ass," on the Nickleodeon superhero spoof Henry Danger.

4. Also on Henry Danger, Mr. Nice Guy, a smiley-face-masked vigilante who punishes people for being rude.

5. The schlockfest Baby Sitter thing

According to his biography, Max also done a "true crime" show for the Oxygen Network, and he plays himself on the animated Thumpy on Cruise TV, but I can find no other references to these projects. Cruise TV was a British channel advertising holiday cruises.

Max doesn't mention dating anyone in any of his extensive biographies or interviews, or in the extensive comments on his instagram page, except for the caption to a photo of him in Santa Monica: "Bae Watch" (a bae is a romantic partner of any gender).  

Plus there's that rainbows and bright colors thing.

So I assume that he's gay.

Humphrey Bogart Comes Out of the Closet

I just watched Casablanca (1942) again, about a suave American exile in World War II Morocco who helps his ex-girlfriend and her husband escape the Nazis.  Everyone concentrates on the doomed hetero-romance, but I impressed by:
1. The war intrigue.  
2. The gay subtexts.  Every man in Casablanca is in love with Rick, and the fade-out scene shows Captain Renault offering to go away with him, as he quips "This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
3. The humor.  Humphrey Bogart tosses out sardonic one-liners with the ease of a Woody Allen.  He could easily have been a comedian.

Bogie was the most famous actor of his generation, winning five Oscars for 86 film roles, mostly as suave, sophisticated guys with troubled pasts and passionate hetero-romances.  Also strong gay subtexts, at least in the movies I've seen:

Dead End (1937): Baby-faced gangster (Bogie) and architect (Joel McCrea) compete for the body and soul of a teenage hood.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938): Same plot, only baby-faced gangster (James Cagney) and priest (Pat O'Brien).

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Detective Sam Spade (Bogie) wrests the mysterious statue from the hands of a gay criminal.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948):  Gold prospectors (Bogie, Tim Holt) get more than they bargained for.

Knock on Any Door (1949): Attorney Bogie is in love with his hunky young protege (John Derek, below).

I really should see Key Largo, The African Queen, The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina, The Barefoot Contessa, and We're No Angels.

There is also, apparently, a gay connection in real life.  Due to his lisp, sophistication, and feminine mannerisms, Bogie was often assumed gay.  Even if he wasn't, any male Hollywood star was bound to get lots of offers.  He rejected them with good-natured aplomb -- or, according to rumor, sometimes not.  After all, he had a prodigious sexual appetite, and even the most wealthy, talented, and attractive of heterosexual men sometimes has trouble finding enough women.  

The occasional guy amid his thousand or so women made Bogie wonder about his sexual identity, especially when he found himself impotent with second wife Mary Philips (1928-37).  Was he gay?  The thought filled him with self-loathing; he considered suicide.



Wait -- he had no problem with gay people, yet grew suicidal over the thought that he might personally be gay.  Something doesn't add up here.

This all comes from Darwin Porter's obviously fictionalized biography.  One doesn't find any references to Bogie being bisexual in earlier accounts of Hollywood "scandals."

But it's undeniable that Bogie was a gay ally -- or as allied as you could get in that era.  He frequented gay bars and had close friendships with gay men throughout his life, including Charles Farrell, Spencer Tracey, William Haines, Noel Coward, and even a young Truman Capote (who beat him at arm wrestling).

A life full of beautiful friendships.

Skyler Gisondo's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 3: Basketball, beach boys, wrestling, giving a guy his leg

 

This is a collection of cute/cool or hot/humorous photos of  Skyler Gisondo, star of The Santa Clarita Diet and The Righteous Gemstones, and Jimmy Olson in the upcoming Superman: Legacy. As far as I know, he's over 18 in all of them.  He doesn't have any verifiable nude photos online, but some of his friends do, and there are some interesting chatroom and hookup app possibilities.

Link to the dicks and bulges

1. Why is Skyler the only one with his shirt off?

2. "Homie wouldn't help me put sunscreen on my back."  

3. Why not?  Is the dude homophobic, or does he want you to lie on your back so he can see your abs?

4. Obviously they've been wrestling.  I have absolutely no idea what else they could be doing that leaves them on the floor, out of breath.

5. But we're not playing shirts vs. skins, buddy.

6. I dig the lesbian haircut, Sky Baby, but your sweater shrank in the wash.

More ginormous Gisondo after the break. 

Topkapi: A jewel-encrusted daggar, gay subtexts, and technicolor Turkey

In the early 1960s, before Google Maps, if you wanted to see southern Europe, you got on a plane for an expensive, once-in-a-lifetime trip, or you went to the movies.  Dozens of films had plots about glamorous, attractive people (except for an occasional comic relief lout) doing something or other that required them to drive mopeds through quaint hillside villages in Sicily or rush at breakneck speed through the Parthenon, giving viewers a bright technicolor Cook's Tour.  Usually you saw France, Italy, or Greece, but in Topkapi (1964) you got to see Istanbul.

Glamorous jewel thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) invites us to tour the  Topkapi, the palace complex of the Ottomans during the height of their empire, now open to the public.  Many tourists are drawn to the Treasury, with its displays of Turkish opulence, especially the emerald encrusted daggar of Sultan Mahmud (1730-54).  It was actually crafted as a gift for Nadir Shah of Iran, but never delivered, but she tells us that it was a gift from his lover. And she plans to steal it.

The caper requires her to assemble a band of experts:

1. The dashing, cosmopolitan Walter (Maximilian Schell, right)

2. Mechanics expert Cedric (Robert Morley)

3. Acrobat Giulio (Gilles Segal, left)

4. Muscle Hans (Jesse Hahn)

5. Stooge Arthur (Peter Ustinov), who will take the fall for them.

Beefcake: Hundreds of shirtless hunks engaging in Turkish oil wrestling.

Hans, Giulio, and Walter all have their shirts off (Giulio is ripped!).

Buddy bonding: Walter and Giulio (they definitely look like they are going to kiss), Arthur and a burly Greek cook (Akim Tamiroff) who becomes his confidant:

Cook;  You foreign, no?
Arthur:  No, I'm English.
Cook: (Puts his arm around him).  Everybody out there -- Russian spies.  I kill.  I get medal.
Arthur: (Suspecting that he is a spy.) Are you here officially?
Cook: Fishily?  No, I give  English friend good meat.
Arthur:  Good meat, I understand.  (Cook kisses him.)  Well, I thought I understood.

There are complications, some humorous, some suspenseful, and of course they don't get away with it.  But not to worry, they are soon out of prison and on their way to a new caper: stealing  the crown jewels in the Kremlin!

No sex, no romance, no violence,some buddy-bonding, lots of oiled-up Turkish guys, and location shots in Greece and Istanbul.

Not a bad way to spend two hours.