Unprisoned: Ex-Con Moves in with his Daughter and Possibly Gay Grandson

 

Hulu has been pushing Unprisoned, a sitcom about a ex-con (Delroy Lindo) who must re-adjust to life on the outside while living with his adult daughter and teenage grandson.  Doesn't sound promising, but the teenage grandson is played by 19-year old Faly Rakotohavana, as dreamy as a pop star (except for the gross feminine rings). If I was in high school, I'd be writing his name amid little hearts in my chemistry notebook.   It wouldn't hurt to check to for gay subtexts.

Scene 1: Marriage counselor Paige and her boyfriend/husband Mal (Marque Richardson, left) are flirting, kissing, and discussing her upcoming TED Talk, "How to Fix Your Picker."  She has fixed her own picker, and since he is incredibly wonderful, she has picked him.  Psych!  She's not proposing marriage, she just wants them to become an official couple on her social media. 

Scene 2: Grandpa Edwin (Delroy Lindo, below) and his buddy Fox (Edwin Lee Gibson) discussing the trip to Alabama he took with the family last episode.  Apparently Fox hired him to "move the car from Point A to Point B."  Maybe some nefarious doings are in the works.  He needed the money to fix daughter Paige's roof, but it was a one time thing: he refuses t continue the nefariousness.

Teenage Finn (Faly Rakotohavana, top photo) comes downstairs on his way to school, and asks Grandpa Edwin to take him to the card store later.  Edwin: "Finn has been driving Miss Daisy, 'cause Miss Daisy doesn't have a driver's license."  Wait, I thought randpa Edwin just drove all the way up from Alabama.

Scene 4:  Grandpa Edwin napping on the couch.  Daughter Paige enters.  They discuss the trip to Alabama. She's home early to prepare for the Ted talk; he offers to help her pick out a "fresh" outfit.  

Cut to her bedroom, and 11 shopping bags full of clothes, while Grandpa Edwin gives his advice: "Wear a dress, so you look friendlier.  And yellow, so you look happy."  

Scene 5: Grandpa Edwin and his girlfriend Nadine smooching, ear-nibbling, and nose-rubbing. Is that a thing now?  I've kissed a lot of guys, but I have never rubbed someone's nose.  He tries to tone down her horniness: he wants to talk about the crimes his buddy Fox from Scene 2 wants him to get involved in: he could make a lot of money for daughter Paige and grandson Finn, and to start his food truck business.  The Girlfriend advises him to stay clean. 

Scene 6: Daughter Paige in the bathtub, look over the comments to her social media relationship announcement.  A lot of them ask about their future wedding and kids, which disturbs Paige.   Suddenly she gets a text from a hot white guy: "I've been thinking about you.  Can we talk?"  Uh-oh, competition!

That's two smooching scenes with the two main cast members and their heterosexual partners.  The only one left is teenage Finn.  He'd better get a boyfriend, or at least display no heterosexual interest, pronto!

Scene 7: Grandpa Edwin helps Paige memorize her TED talk.  Bombshell: he gets her to admit that she's not actually in love with boyfriend Mal; he just "checks all the boxes."  So, who cares?  Lots of gay guys marry women that they're not in love with and not attracted to in any way, to get all of the rewards that come with heterosexual identity (like being able to mention your partner without awkward silences and assurance that "I don't have a problem with your...um...lifestyle.")

Scene 8: Grandson Finn's room.  He's got paintings of African masks, a Ninja master, and a side of beef on his wall: no bikini babes, a good sign.  Grandpa Edwin wants to buy him a birthday present, even though it's nowhere near his birthday, to make up for the ones he missed in prison.  Finn wants a "magic card" for his collection.  

He must mean Magic: The Gathering, a tabletop card game with a sort of heroic fantasy motif.  It has 35 million players, with over 3 billion cards in circulation!

Scene 9: Grandpa Edwin's Girlfriend visits Daughter Paige.  Plot Dump: the Girlfriend is apparently Paige's estranged stepmother (not mother, since they are on a first name basis).  Also, it sounds like she is not interested in Grandpa Edwin, anymore, even though they were smooching in Scene 6.  Is this another person?  No, there's only one blond-haired woman in the main cast.  They just have a very confusing back story.

Scene 10:  Daughter Paige's feet as she slowly gets dressed. She tells the guy she just screwed (maybe Bill, played by Tim Daly) that she's not in love with him.  "But I told Jean about you."  So you're both cheating on your respective heterosexual life partners?  "I don't care.  I can't fall in love with someone who is unavailable."  

Scene 11: Dark Lotus, a comic book and gaming store.  Full of teenage and young adult boys playing -- in the middle of the day?   While they are waiting in line, Grandpa Edwin tries to get Finn to talk about his feelings about his Dad being gone.  Not the right time, Dude.  

"So, which card will make your deck baller?" Grandpa asks. Increase the size of his testicles? "Collected Company: you can put down six mana worth of creatures for only four mana."  Sounds like a good deal.  

Finn only plays the game online, but Grandpa Edwin insists that he wants to watch, so play it at the card store!  

Tony (Collin Lee Turner), a long-haired redhead, not a teenager, is staring intently at Finn -- he looks exactly like he is cruising the boy.  Grandpa Edwin notices and says "That boy needs an ass-whomping."  Wait -- should he ass-whopped because he is cruising a minor, or because he may be gay?  

Scene 12: Neither. Tony just wanted to play the game, and Grandpa Edwin wanted to "ass-whomp him" as in win.  Finn and Tony play by themselves, with Grandpa kibbutzing. 

 Whoops, Finn plays the wrong card and loses!  "Then why did you play it" Grandpa asks.  "I never played it before, and I wanted to see what would happen.  I like to do things that I've never done before."  Well, exchange phone numbers with the guy!

Scene 13: Some stuff with Paige and her boyfriend Mal.

Scene 14: Finn and Grandpa Edwin are driving home, when they are stopped by the police.  Uh-oh, Finn knows enough about driving while black to realize that they are in danger of being killed.  Grandpa Edwin instructs him on how to maximize their chances of survival: keep your hands on the dashboard, look down, do not speak unless spoken to, and say "sir."  The killer...um, I mean cop...approaches. The end.  Wow, what a cliffhanger!  But I doubt that two of the three regulars will actually die.

Beefcake:  None.

Heterosexism:  I got really tired of the endless smooching, nose-rubbing, and ear-nibbling.

Gay Characters:  Finn displays no heterosexual interest, and his card game with Tony seems to have a deliberate gay subtext.  But I doubt that he is canonically gay.  Cute as a bug's ear, though.

Update:  I've gone through three episodes on fast-forward, and Finn never expresses any interest in girls, nor does anyone ever ask about an interest in girls.  

Update 2: In the entire season, Finn never expresses any interest in girls, nor does anyone ever ask.

Update 3: Season 2 is about to drop, and one of the episodes has Finn "trying to make a friend."  Uh-oh, I predict a girlfriend approaching.

Bug Hall: A lot of movies that no one has seen, some homophobic rants, and an enormous penis

Link to the enormous penis

 I'm always conflicted about posting nude pictures of homophobic actors. There's a little frisson of guilt that comes from looking at the penis of someone who hates you, as if you are somehow encouraging him. On the other hand, imagine how upset he would be to find himself the object of homoerotic desire.

And, to be fair, it is huge.

In this case, I'm talking about Bug Hall, who hit the big screen in 1994. at the age of eight.  He played Alfalfa in The Little Rascals, a modernized version of the Our Gang comedy shorts of the 1930s.  Having already seen some of the shorts -- no, not in the 1930s -- I didn't watch, but I heard that Alfalfa falls in love with a girl.  At age eight.

The original Alfalfa, Carl Switzer, had a hard life after Our Gang, and was killed in a bar fight in 1959, at age 31. 

Bug Hall had a hard life after The Little Rascals, too. Far less successful kid movies followed: The Big Green, The Stupids, and The Munsters' Scary Little Christmas. I don't think anybody saw them.

He sprang into a heteronormative adolescence with Skipped Parts, 2000, about having sex with a girl.  I didn't see it, but there's a clip floating around the internet where the 14-year old is getting undressed in preparation for the sex, and becomes aroused.  I can't tell if it was scripted, or an accident.  Either way, you don't want to see it. 

More heteronormativity with Get a Clue, 2002, about two high school journalists who solve a mystery and fall in love.  I didn't see it, but I like the theme song, "Get a Clue," performed by Simon and Milo, an animated gay-subtext couple.

Get a clue, there's nothing you can't do.

Nothing's ever quite what it seems

Just look a little closer at me

Wake up, who knew, it's me, it's you, get a clue.

More sex in Footsteps and Arizona Summer, which I didn't see, and then a fizzing out into guest spots on tv dramas: Strong Medicine, Charmed, Cold Case, The O.C.

Bug runs away naked in The Day the Earth Stopped, 2008: "Hundreds of massive intergalactic robots appear in all of the world's major capitals with an ultimatum: Prove the value of human civilization or be destroyed."  Holy cow, that sounds awful.

It features a man and a woman falling in love -- heterosexual romance is the value of human civilization, get it? 

At this point, you're probably wondering if I've actually seen Bug Hall in anything. I'm wondering about that, too. 

American Pie Presents the Book of Love. No.

Camoflauge: "A troubled teen-aged boy is sent to a boot camp in a secluded forest where he must survive the horrifying disciplinary tactics of a demented camp counselor."  No, and the blurb writer forgot the first rule of writing: minimal use of stupid, superfluous adjectives.

More Bug after the break

That 90s Show: We meet Ozzie's boyfriend, sort of. Plus nude photos of 90s teen idol Brian Austin Green

 

Link to the nude photos

16 years after we said goodbye to the kids smoking pot in the Forman basement on That 70s Show, their own kids have returned in That 90s Show.  The premise: Eric and Donna's daughter Leia spends the summer with her grandparents, and has humorous misadventures with Michael and Jackie's son (Mace Coronel) and some other teens.  Except now it's a more diverse crew: Ozzie, played by Reyn Doi, is Asian and gay.  

The grandparents are still around, the original gang pops in from time to time, and there are guest spots from a lot of iconic teen hunks from the  1990s , such as Seth Green, left, Kevin Smith, Kadeem Hardison, and Brian Austin Green -- bonus dick and butt pics below.

I reviewed Episode 2.4, where we meet Ozzie's Canadian boyfriend, Etienne. Sort of.

Scene 1: In the iconic basement, Ozzie is excited that Etienne is coming to visit.  The Hunk, Mace Coronel, sits with his arm around his girlfriend.  The Dumb One, Maxwell Acee Donovan, has broken up with his girlfriend.  A lot of heterosexual coupling going on.  

The guys offer to give Ozzie a ride to the airport in their van, but Ozzie asked Mrs. Foreman to do it: he doesn't want Etienne to get off the plane and hate America.  What about his parents?  Oh, regular cast only.

Gwen enters and introduces them to her new "not my boyfriend," Cole, played by Niles Fitch. 

Ozzie tells him that he ranks guys on looks, popularity, communiy service, and butt.  He's #1.  Cole: "I know.  I got your letter."  At least this isn't a neutered gay guy.

Everyone razzes Gwen: "Not your boyfriend, right!  No way you're not dating!" 

Scene 2: Red, the father from That 70s Show, is reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.  He asks, "Can you top me off, Honey?"  

"Sure, Babe," but it's not his wife Kitty, it's Ozzie, har har.  He wants to know where Kitty is: she agreed to drive him to the airport, and they have to leave soon. 

Next door neighbor Bob ( Don Stark),  also Leia's other grandfather, wants to show Red his rattlesnake eggs.  "No one will fall for that prank," Red complains.  But Kitty falls for it, and she's so surprised that she topples over the couch!

Scene 3: Kitty has sprained her ankle.  She told the neighborhood ladies about her injury, maybe exaggerating a little, or a lot -- "I may have said I had a collapsed lung" -- so they are bringing over casseroles.  

Neighbor Bob advises against lying about the severity of her injury: once you reach a certain age, the number of available men goes into sharp decline, so if they think that Kitty is dying, they'll latch onto her husband...

Scene 4: Gwen, the one who's not-dating the new guy Cole, yells at the other girl -- about that "boyfriend" stuff.  "Now he wants to have a talk about us! He wants to be my boyfriend!"  

The other girl doesn't understand what's wrong with that.  Isn't it the goal of life? 

"I....um...have never been in a relationship before.  I'm nervous."   

"Just hold his hand and leave your heart open." Ugh.

Scene 5: Since Grandma Kitty can't drive, Ozzie has to allow the guys to drive him to the airport in their van. They agree to "no hot-boxing, no Dutch Ovens, no mooning, and no Jay Leno impressions."

Scene 6:  One of the girls reports back to Kitty about the ladies flirting with Red: Pam is cooking him chicken.  Kitty imagines her as singer Carmen Electra hanging all over him and cooking seductively: "Do you want to shake or bake?"  She forces the girl to piggy-back her downstairs and yells "Get away from him, you slut!", but it turns out to be an elderly lady.

Scene 7: At the airport, Ozzie is nervous. The passengers from Quebec arrive. The Dumb One: "I never realized how much Canadians look like us."  But boyfriend Etienne isn't there!

Meanwhile, Gwen tells Leia that she broke up with "not my boyfriend" Cole. 

"But he could be the love of your life. My parents met in high school."  Eric and Donna?  Aren't they divorced?

Suddenly Cole appears. They have a heart-to-heart: "I'm scared," yada yada yada.  Why does the straight couple get a happy ending, while the gay guy gets left at the airport door?   

More after the break

Jose Pablo Cantilo: Walking Dead Beefcake

We've been watching The Walking Dead, a postapocalyptic zombie tv series.  It's aggressively heterosexist, eliminating or "straightening out" characters who were gay in the original comic book series, forcing you to depend on subtexts.

It also eliminates every romance between characters who are over 40, and almost every interracial romance.  What is this, Lost?

But it does offer a lot of beefcake.  Like this stunning sight, a muscleman fighting as a form of evening entertainment in colony of survivors.

He's Martinez, one of the allies of the mysterious Governor, who later becomes the leader of his own band of refugees.  No heterosexual romances during his 13-episode run, so maybe he's gay.

The actor is Jose Pablo Cantilo, born in 1979 in Marshfield, Wisconsin, on screen since 2003, mostly playing gangsters and thugs.

This seems to be the fate of most Hispanic actors in Hollywood; according to one study, over 60% of Hispanic tv characters are "immoral" or "despicable," as opposed to 33% of black and 12% of white characters.

But Cantilo has managed to break out of the mold a few times.  He played Marco, who has a one-night stand with a hooker in the relationship comedy After Sex (2007).  

And in Virtuality (2009), a tv movie about a killer loose on a deep-space probe, he played Manny, half of a gay couple, with Gene Farber's Val.   As far as I can recall, they were the first gay non-villains in any American science fiction movie.

It was a pilot for a tv series that didn't get picked up.

Today Cantilo spends most of his time going to Walking Dead fan conventions.  He is a gay ally, and an ally of Emma Watson's "He for She" campaign for gender equality.

Matt Smith: Who doesn't want to see the penis of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Manson, Superworm, and Dr. Who?

Link to the nude photos

We've been watching the 2011 series of Doctor Who, the seemingly endless British sci-fi series that sends the last remaining Time Lord through time and space to save Earth, an alien planet, or the entire universe.  Again and again.  Oddly, when his world-saving takes him to modern day Britain, there are plenty of exteriors, but when it is a distant planet or the far future, all we see are endless corridors. 

Doctors regenerate every few years, getting new bodies and personalities.  Right now it's Matt Smith, an effervescent, jokey type, with an inner trauma that sometimes comes out.  After all, he saw the destruction of his people, and he's over 1,000 years old, so dozens of human companions have died, gotten lost, or left him to go on with their lives.

Matt Smith has appeared as the Doctor in dozens of projects outside the show itself: videos exploring odd corners of his universe, video games, a lot of four-episode miniseries, spin-offs starring former companions Sarah Jane and Amy Pond

The children's program Blue Peter. 

Comic Relief: Red Nose Day, An Adventure in Time and Space...I got tired of counting.  You have to be British to really understand his amazing popularity.

The Doctor would be enough for a career, but Matt has played a wide range of other characters, mostly based on real people:

Christopher Isherwood, the gay author of A Passage to India and Maurice, in Christopher and His Kind, a 2011 adaption of his memoirs. Left, the one without the biceps.

Rowing star Bert Bushnell in Bert & Dickie, 2012.  Neither was gay.

More after the break

Throb: How We Watched TV in West Hollywood

The 1980s were extremely homophobic.  If you could manage it, you took refuge in a gay neighborhood, and rarely spoke to a heterosexual.  You absolutely never came out to any heterosexual. If anyone found out accidentally, you could expect, at best, a deer-in-the-headlights stare and a stumbling protest that "I'm...I'm...not gay."  More commonly they would rush off in horror, never to speak to you again.

And you absolutely stayed away from mainstream media.  Newspapers were full of shrieking editorials about how "They're sick!!!!  They're disgusting!  Put them in concentration camps!"

Movies couldn't go five minutes without a homophobic slur.

TV was a little better, generally presenting a world where gay people did not exist.  Still, most programs were incessantly heterosexist, so it was best to keep the tv off.

So in high school and college, I watched eight or nine hours prime-time network tv shows every week, but when I moved to West Hollywood, the number decreased to a non-heterosexist two or three:  

21 Jump Street: Buddy-bonding among undercover cops, including Johnny Depp (left).

Night Court: Buddy-bonding among the denizens of a night court.

Head of the Class: Buddy-bonding among high school overachievers.

 The Golden Girls: Four heterosexual women live together and form an alternative family.

Kate & Allie: Two heterosexual women live together and form an alternative family.

But you had to be careful: even the most "gay friendly" could turn on you at any moment, with a limp-wristed hairdresser swishing in or a visiting relative coming out to horrified gasps and "I just don't get it." 

I don't remember any limp-wristed hairdressers or visiting gay relatives on the workplace comedy Throb (1986-88).

It starred Diana Canova of Soap as Sandy (right), the decidedly unhip newly-divorced 30-something who finds herself a fish-out-of-water in the young, ultra-cool, hipster office of a New Wave record company.

She was heir of Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the precursor of the dozen or so women in workplace comedies of the 1990s, such as Caroline in the City and Just Shoot Me.  

Her coworkers included:

1. The boss,  diminuitive go-getter Zach (Jonathan Prince) channeling Michael J. Fox.  Today a writer and producer, Prince was at the height of a brief 1980s acting career: he played Johnny Depp's buddy in the sex comedy Private Resort and Clark Brandon's buddy on Mr. Merlin.

One of the cutest guys on the planet.  

2.  Hip business manager Phil (Richard Cummings, Jr., later to star in Northern Exposure).

3.  Spaced-out former singer Blue, probably based on the Andy Warhol superstar Ultra Violet (Jane Leeves, who would go on to play psychic therapist/housekeeper Daphne on Frasier).

4. Sandy had a 12-year old son at home, played in the first season by future screen hunk Paul Walker, and then by Paul Walker lookalike Sean de Veritch.

I actually don't remember any particular episodes, just the jazzy theme song, some buddy-bonding moments between Sandy and Blue, and the super-cute Jonathan Prince.

But I remember watching, and finding it a moment of freedom from the incessant homophobia of 1980s tv

The Top 10 Hunks of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

All three seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are up on Netflix, giving us the complete saga of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), who runs into her grade-school crush Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) one day on the street, and drops everything to move to West Covina and stalk him.

It turns out that Rebecca really is crazy; she has Borderline Personality Disorder, characterized by extreme mood swings, impulsivity, obsessions, and relationship problems.  She moves too fast and overreacts violently to rejection or just "let's slow down."  People who suffer from BPD in real life have praised the show for its realistic portrayal, finally "getting mental illness right."

In addition to Rebecca's ongoing pursuit of Josh Chan and other guys whom she believes will make her life perfect, the palette of the show expands to include subplots.  Josh and his posse don't have perfect lives, after all.  Nearly everyone is involved in a toxic parent-child relationship.

It's one of the most diverse casts I've ever seen, and one of the most beefcake-heavy.

1. Josh (above) is riddled with insecurities, indecisive, and rather dimwitted (not quite Joey Tribbiani, but close).  He still lives with his mother, in spite of her entreaties for  him to move out.

2. He works for an over-accommodating boss (Johnny Ray Meeks) and seeks advice from an over-accommodating priest (Rene Gube, left).

3.  Josh (David Hull), who is gay, has a major inferiority complex.  He can't understand why someone as great as Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) would be interested in him (um...have you looked in a mirror lately?).


By the way, Vincent Rodriguez III is gay in real life, and David Hull is straight.

3. Hector (Erick Lopez) has an unhealthy dependency on his mother.  He's dating Heather, a perpetual student, taking every class at her community college, sometimes twice, afraid to graduate and move to the next stage of her life.













4. Greg (Santino Fontana) dates Rebecca for awhile, then realizes that he's an alcoholic, and goes away to get help.

5. Nathan Plimpton (Scott Michael Foster), Rebecca's boss after Darryl sells the company, is an amoral schemer constantly trying to win his dad's love.

More after the break

"Bullet Train": 11 assassins, Logan Lerman, and queerbaiting on the train from Tokyo to Kyoto. With some nude dudes

Link to the nude dudes

Friday's Movie Night movie was Bullet Train (2022), starring Brad Pitt as a professional assassin assigned to do an "easy" job, grab a briefcase full of money, on the bullet train that travels the 440 km (220 miles) from Tokyo to Kyoto in two hours. He doesn't realize that the train is crowded with other assassins, professional and amateur.

1. The Father, Andrew Koiji, wants revenge on The Prince, a gang lord who had his son thrown off a building.  

2. The Prince is also on the train, but he doesn't recognize her. She forces him to retrieve the money and load it with explosives, to assassinate her estranged father, #6, below.

3.-4. Tangerine and Lemon, Andrew Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry, a queerbait couple.  After nearly two hours of the two bickering, being affectionate, and discussing their life together, director David Leitch loses his nerve and makes them brothers.

They have rescued...

5. The Son, Logan Lerman, top photo, from kidnappers, and also retrieved the ransom money that Brad Pitt is supposed to steal.    But the Son is killed, I forget by whom, so....

6. The Son's father, Russian crime lord The White Death, Michael Shannon, shows up to kill Tangerine and Lemon and whoever else he thinks flubbed the job. 

More assassins after the break