"Men": N*ked men and paranormal peril in a quaint English village. What could go wrong? You'd be surprised.

  

Link to the n*de photos

Browsing for a movie to watch this week, we came across  Men  (2022) on HBO MAX.  Imagining musclemen lounging by the pool, and maybe the old magazine Advocate Men, we eagerly clicked "play." Without any prior research...

The Landlord:  Young, extremely successful business person Harper Marlowe drives 4 1/2 hours from London to a village in Herefordshire, where she will be renting a huge mansion from landlord Geoffrey, who has bad teeth (an important character trait).  He is shocked that Harper can't play the piano, and upset that she reserved the mansion as "Mrs.," but there's no husband with her.

The Screaming Being:  Harper takes a walk through the woods, and finds a huge tunnel going nowhere.  Suddenly a being appears at the other end, and runs toward her, screaming in anger or terror.  She runs.

The N*ked Man: On the way back, she walks through an abandoned village.  There's a n*ked man following her: a mid-40s bear type with a hairy chest, a little belly, and a nice c*ck.

She runs back to her mansion, but the N*ked Man follows.  He peers in the windows, pulls apples from the tree, and shoves his hand through the mail slot, trying to get in.  He appears unable to speak.  He is not threatening, just curious, as if he's never seen a house -- or a human being -- before.

Harper calls the police.  They arrive, handcuff the guy, and lead him off. 

The Green Man:  Harper takes another walk, and stumbles across an old church.  Strangely, the altar contains a stone carving of the Green Man on one side, and on the other a man giving birth. 

The Green Man, a face covered with leaves, is often found carved into the stones of old English churches.  He is thought to be a pagan fertility symbol.

The man giving birth turns out to be Sheela na Gig, a woman with masculine features but an exceptionally large birthing part, a common "grotesque" in English churches. 

The Back Story:  Harper kneels, starts sobbing, and flashes to her back story.

In an elegant apartment near the Tower Bridge in London, Harper tells her husband (Paapa Essideu) that she wants a divorce.  He begs, pleads, yells, and threatens self-harm.  Finally he punches her, and she kicks him out.  A few moments later, he comes plummeting past the window.  Apparently he broke into the apartment upstairs, and either jumped or tried to climb down to her balcony, and slipped.  Either way, he glares at her accusingly as he falls.

The Mentally Disabled Boy:  Outside the church, Harper encounters a person wearing a creepy Marilyn Monroe mask.  The mask comes off -- it's a mentally disabled boy, asking her to play hide and seek. She refuses, so he calls her nasty names.

 More after the break

The Beefcake Paintings of Nikos Engonopoulos

Nikos Engonopoulos (1903-1985) was a Greek painter of the surrealist movement, a colleague of Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali.

But the work of other surrealists rarely depicted beefcake (even though Dali was gay).

Engonopoulous stayed away from beefcake during the 1930s and 1940s, and filled his poetry with images of desirable women rather than men.

  But near the end of his career he began to paint stylized, faceless men with broad shoulders and narrow waists, a reflection of standards of male beauty of his childhood.  And they all have penises.

Most were not put on display, but given as gifts to his friends, as if they were private visions.

Cafe, les pallicares (1956) depicts soldiers in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1828) standing beneath a Greek flag in a cafe.  The swordsman, the waiter, and the toga-clad philosopher suggest icons of male sensuality like the leatherman and the cowboy in the U.S.

Two Soldiers and a Philosopher (1951) are three other types of Greek masculinity, one nude.

Hunter and Watchmaker (1975).  I don't know the significance of the hunter and the watchmaker, but time is passing, and through the window we can see the sea.  Maybe they're a gay couple.

The Death of Archimedes (1950-60).  Archimedes was a mathematician and inventor who died at the hands of the Romans during the Second Punic War (Syracuse is visible in flames through the window)

Hero (Philopoemen), undated, but probably from the 1950s.  Philopoemen was an ancient Greek general (strategos).

I don't know why Engonopoulos experienced such a burst of masculine energy late in his life.  Maybe he was coming out.  Or maybe he just wanted a hero.