"The Unlisted": Come for the Australian-Indian Culture, Stay for the Gay Subtexts

In The Unlisted, twelve-year old twins Kal (the cool one) and Dru (the smart one, signified by his glasses) are...

Did I say twelve?  They are played by sixteen-year old Vrund and Ved Rao, who could easily be mistaken for college students, and look decidedly out of place in a school full of 12-year olds.

If you can get past the jarring age discrepancy, the setting in the Australian-Indian community is interesting.  In the first episode, everyone is in a flurry to prepare for Divali.  I liked the scene where the jar of ghee breaks, so they have to run from store to store, but everyone is sold out, except for one shop which won't sell to Kal because he doesn't speak Hindi: "You can't pick and choose your culture."

In the second episode, a mean girl is spying on them,so they invite her into the family store and disgust her with Indian snacks like chili banana chips and nimboo pickles.

In the third episode, it's Multicultural Day, so Grandma introduces the school to the Indian sport of kabbadi.

Why not just make it a sitcom about clashing values of modern and traditional Australian-Indians? But instead we have dystopian sci-fi:

A corporation called The Infinity Group is providing free dental exams to all students, but Dru  is afraid of dentists, so he talks Kal into taking his place.  Tim (Otis Dhanji), whose parents refused to permit the checkup, goes missing.

Later everyone who got a "checkup" freezes in place.  They are being controlled by dental implants!  Plus they are super-strong and fast.

 Dru must pretend that he is being controlled, and get Kal to take his place for the athletic tests, while the boys try to unravel the sinister plot.

Eventually they find allies in their aunt, a doctor who got a job with the initiative without realizing what it was about, and Jiao  (Zachary Wan), whose implant never worked.

And four refugees who knew too much and are now on the run:  three girls and Jacob (Nya Cofie, right), although Gemma (Jean Hinchliffe) is so androgynous that I thought the character was meant to be nonbinary.

Originality of the plot: C-.  It's been done before.  See:  The Tripods.

Beefcake: D.  Most of the actors are too young to be of interest.

Gay characters: A.  The twins have a built-in gay subtext, two of the refugee girls are in a romantic relationship, an adult ally says she was "queer before there was a word for it," and lack of expressed heterosexual interest abounds.

Fade out kiss: C.  Dru states that he and Chloe are "just friends," but Grandma goes on and on about which girl thinks the boys are handsome and wants to date them.

Australian-Indian culture: A+.

Zip and Zap, Peter Pan, A Crush on Dad, and A Gorilla Sherlock Holmes

The Spanish bad boys Zipi y Zape, sort of Dennis the Menace squared,  first appeared in a comic strip in Pulgarcito magazine in 1947, and have since spun off into many more comics, three movies, a television series, a video game, and tons of merchandising.  But Zip and Zap and the Captain's Island (Zipi y Zape y la Isla de Capitain, 2016) is, as far as I know, their first appearance outside el mundo español.

Zip (Teo Planell) and Zap (Toni Gómez) are lanky androgynous teenagers who remind me of the Sprouse twins on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, except that they're constantly insulting and yelling at their parents: stick-in-the-mud novelist Pantuflo (Jorge Bosch) and his wife (who is so mousy and withdrawn that she doesn't get a name in the cast list).

At Christmastime, they visit an isolated island to meet with a publisher.  They get lost, and end up at a children's home run by the enigmatic Miss Pam (Elena Anaya), a sinister butler, and a cackling, demented nun.

The next day, Miss Pam tells Zip and Zap that, due to all their mischief, their parents have abandoned them. They will live at the children's home forever.  Oh, and won't you meet two other new residents, the too-cool-for-school Macky (Máximo Pastor, top photo) and super-inquisitive flibbertigibit Flecky (Iria Castellano).

Zip immediately starts a gay-subtext buddy-bond with Macky, while Zap gets a goofy hetero-crush on Flecky.

Did you figure it out?  Yep -- Miss Pam has lured the family to the island. She is using a retro Frankenstein machine to regress "troubled parents" to their 11-year old selves, before they lost their primal joie de vivre.  She's Peter Pan, making her own crew of lost boy-adults who shouldn't have grown up.

The children's home is occupied mostly by regressed parents, except they're not really regressed.  The parents are locked in a chamber while their young selves...but not really.  At the end of the movie, all of the regressed parents leave the island to rejoin their parents.

Wait -- Zap gets a crush on his own mother?  Why does that bother me, when Zip crushing on his own father seems fine?

But we're not done.  Miss Pam is also collecting people who look or act like literary characters...then...turning them into other things. So she turns a detective who acts like Sherlock Holmes into a gorilla.

Why not turn him into Sherlock Holmes?

A girl who looks like Pippi Longstocking has an octopus-submarine like Captain Nemo's Nautilus

The children are being controlled by a magic snow globe kept in an aquarium.

Did I mention that it's Christmastime, for no apparent reason?

I think you're just supposed to give your brain a rest, let the bizarre imagery flow over you, and wait for the father-son and mother-son couples to hug. 

By the way, in the 3 years since the movie came out, Toni Gomez has lost his androgynous long hair and hunked up a bit.  He does mostly modeling.

And Maximo de Pastor has hunked up quite a lot.  Look for him in Lucas in 2019.

Wait -- why is it the Captain's Island?  There is no captain.....

"LIving with Myself": A Techno Take on the Identical Cousin Trope

Miles (Paul Rudd) is a middle-class heterosexual shlub with problems out of a John Updike novel:  he's bad at his job selling amalgamated sprockets, bad at his marriage, overweight, under-appreciated, and probably infertile. 

His jerk coworker Dan (Desmin Borges, below) tells him about a spa where, for $50,000, you get a "full cleansing," body, mind, and soul."  So, in a midlife-crisis desperation move, Miles decides to empty his savings and go.

Even after it turns out to be in a dingy galleria, run by two sinister-looking mad scientists playing on anti-Asian stereotypes, who strap him to a guerney and administer an anaesthetic.

He awakens in his underwear, in a plastic bag, buried in a shallow grave in the woods.

Wait -- if he was in the plastic bag for a long time, wouldn't he suffocate?

Just go with it.

Miles finally makes it home, only to discover a doppelganger in bed with his wife.

Turns out that the spa produces a clone of their clients, ages it to adulthood, adds all of its memories, and fixes all of its genetic defects, resulting in a duplicate who is stronger, smarter, more enthusiastic, more confident, and better in bed.  Then they kill the original.

Just go with it.

Except somehow original Miles survived, so now there are two Miles: the original, signified by his bad hair, belly, glasses, and slouch, and the fresh-scrubbed, powerlifting, green tea-drinking, first-name-using clone.  They will have to learn to live together while hiding their secret from the world.

So Living with Myself  turns out to be a "my secret" comedy. I've only seen two episodes, but I can imagine the others from Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Patty Duke Show.
"Take my place at the big presentation"
"Go on a romantic weekend with my wife,but don't have sex with her."

There is a deliberate gay subtext:  Miles and New Miles are often mistaken for a gay couple.  When determining if New Miles has an appendectomy scar, Miles gets on his knees, and a passerby thinks they are having sex and yells "Get a room!"

When New Miles decides to go off by himself, they "break up," complete with returning the wedding ring.

But no gay characters.  Even  Miles' ultra-butch sister (Alia Shawkat)  has a heterosexual partner.

Miles visits Left (Rob Yang), one of the mad scientists, and finds him living with his small daughter.

"And wife?" Miles asked.

Left hesitates.  "No." Does he mean his wife is gone, or that he never had a wife because he's gay?

The wife is gone. Gay people don't exist in this world.

Other than Paul and Paul, the male cast seems rather limited.  Desmin Borges (left) as previous clone Dan.

 Tom Brady, whoever that is, playing himself ("I've had the treatment six times.")

Rob Yang as the mad scientist.

Hopefully there will be some buddy bonding down the line, or some gay references other than jokes.

The Borg Twins, Kurt and Cody Wetherill

I've been watching Star Trek: Voyager.   Dreadful stuff.  A Star Fleet ship is zapped across the galaxy, 70,000 light years from home, and have to find their way back. They come across many species that are identical to humans in language, culture, and physiology, except for little things on their foreheads.

Earth today has far more cultural diversity than the galaxy as a whole.

I hate Seven of Nine, the most annoying of the endless "learning to be human"  characters.

But I sort of like Azan and Rebi (Cody and Kurt Wetherill), the twins who are rescued from the automaton Borgs wearing the male equivalent of Seven's bunny suit. They spend six episodes in 2000  learning to be human (that is, entering a school science fair and hearing ghost stories).

Cody and Kurt were born in Wyoming in 1986,  and then moved to Battle Ground, Washington.

They were originally planning to become tennis pros, but they got bit by the acting bug in 1998,and were soon cast as 12 year old Mitchel and Michael Loring in the pilot of Safe Harbor (1999). They did not make it into the series, as Aaron Spelling felt that there were already enough twins on tv.

Then came Voyager; small roles as Chet and Russell Lucre against Michael Angarano in The Brainiacs.com (2000); and Philip and Victor Kiriakis on a 2001 episode of Days of Our Lives.

And that's all.

But sometimes a short acting career is better than a long one; it gives you a chance to be a kid and a star.







They graduated from high school and majored in film studies at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. 

For their senior projects, Kurt wrote, edited, and produced Rock Bottom (2006), about a homeless man who meets a woman; and Cody wrote, edited, and produced Garden of Weedin' (2007), about a gardener.

Then they returned to Hollywood for some behind-the-scenes work, as production assistants, cinematographers, and so on: Meteor, Family Holiday, Be My Friend, and The Amazing Race (2006-2009).

Now they're back in Portland, where they own CinePrints, devoted to movie and tv posters.

Cody is on Facebook, but he mostly likes bands I've never heard of and may be married to a woman.

Or maybe they're gay.

"Candle Cove": Another "Channel Zero" Zero

Well, I got conned again, with another season of the Sci-Fi series Channel Zero.  But this time wasn't my fault.

 It was based on a very cool creepypasta, written in the form of posts to a message board, in which people vaguely recall a local children's show that aired for a few months in the 1970s: Candle Cove: a poorly produced puppet show about a little girl who finds herself living with pirates.  As they continue to remember, disturbing details arise.

Creepy calliope music. Pirate Percy, a puppet created from parts of old dolls. A villain called the Skin-taker.

A grinning boat who says "You have...to...go... INSIDE!"

An episode with nothing but the characters screaming: "No plot or anything, literally the characters just standing in place and screaming."  Who would produce such a scary program, and why?

It doesn't sound much different from real psychedelic "lost boy" series of the early 1970s, or the horrible children's shows of the 1950s.  Kukla, Fran, and Ollie still gives me nightmares.  And for that matter, what about the horror-fest, The Wizard of Oz? It could happen.

Fans are up to the task.  They've produced clips and full episodes of Candle Cove, a nearly complete episode guide, fan art (does it count as fan art if the original never existed?), and interviews with the producers and actors (who thought they were doing a good job).

Enter the Sci-Fi network's Channel Zero:

In this case, the show began airing in the fall of 1988, when 12-year old Mike and his twin brother Eddie (Luca Villacis) are being horribly bullied by Dane Yolen (Liam Marchand) and his cronies.

During the next few weeks, five kids are murdered, including the bullies and the nice but slow Alex (Keenan Lehmann).  Eddie vanishes.

Thirty years later, Mike (Paul Schneider) returns to investigate the mystery, and reunites with his mother and the relatives of the dead kids: the bully's ugly brother Gary (Shawn Benson), now the sheriff; the mega-ugly doofus Tim (David Lawrence Brown); and his old girlfriend.

They don't want old wounds dredged up....but, then the show starts to air again, kids start disappearing, and Mike is the prime suspect.

Then his daughter shows up, and becomes one of the imperiled kids.  Uh-oh.

Spoiler alert: Eddie killed the kids, and now has returned for Mike.

Eddie is a quintessential gay villain. He can't stand the fact that Mike has a girlfriend.  He says "We're supposed to be together always," and "Tell me that you love me more than her." He has returned for Mike, so they can be together forever.

Add to it the fact that boys and men in this world are uniformly suspicious, belligerent, angry, and violent, while women are nurturing, caring, understanding, and compassionate, and you get heterosexist garbage.

Add to it the fact that the adult male actors are some of the ugliest I've ever seen, so there's no beefcake potential, and you come up with something decidedly unpleasant.

Candle Cove has only two redeeming features:

1. This actor with the great name Greyden Bohutchuk

2. The puppet show itself.   "You have to...go...inside!" may become this generation"s "Down here, everything floats."

See also: Butcher's Block

Lucas and Marcus Dobre, the Kissing Twins

19-year old twins Lucas and Marcus Dobre-Mofid are the sons of former Olympic gymnast Aurelia Dobre and coachBoz Mofid, who now own the Dobre Gymnastics Academy in Gaithersburg, Maryland (about 20 miles north of Washington). .

Lucas and Marcus grew up on the mat.  They began posting videos of their gymnastic stunts and dance moves to Vine in 2011, under the name Twinbotz.  By 2014 had 300,000 subscribers.

They moved to California to join Jake Paul's Team 10,but soon got homesick and returned to Maryland.  .

They bought a house with their two older brothers, Cyrus and Darius, and started two youtube channels, one for all four brothers, and the other for just the twins.















The four Dobre brothers record their own rap songs and music videos, mostly about how rich they are.

Meanwhile, Lucas and Marcus post mostly pranks, comedy, and dares: "Destroying our Friend's Computer", "Grocery Store Dares," "24 Hours Under Lucas' Girlfriend's Bed,"  "My Brother was Kidnapped by Scary Clowns."

Here they pose semi-naked in the snow.

They take their shirts off in most of their videos, and when they don't, they post shirtless pics to advertise it anyway.

Some of the pranks and dares involve gender bending, like the four brothers' "High Heel Race Through Wal-Mart" (with their shirts off, naturally).  The prank was about the shocked reaction of the uptight Wal-Mart shoppers rather than the problem of running in heels.

Lucas and Marcus both appear to have girlfriends, but like many zoomers they like playing with our expectations concerning sexuality.

Fan 1: "Are you..."
Marcus: "Yes."
Fan 2: "What if they were going to say gay'?"
Marcus: "Yess."

The twins post many photos of them kissing, hugging, cuddling, and otherwise acting like a gay couple.

Cyrus and Darius have girlfriends, too, but the four brothers have released a music video encouraging bullying victims to stop thinking that they aren't good enough.  That's sort of pro-gay.

High School and College Wrestling Twins

I had so much success with swim team twins that I tried it out with wrestlers: twins on the same wrestling team in high school or college, preferably posed together in their singlets.

There are quite a lot of them.

1. Jack and Luke Bokina wrestle for Mattituck High School on Long Island.












I could only find singlet pics of Jack, but here they are wrestling each other. Jack in yellow, Luke in blue.












2. Jeff and Justin Holm from Harper Creek, Michigan, wrestled for Olivet College in 2014-2015 (not Olivet Nazarene College, another one).  Jeff transferred to Ohio State, and Justin, to the University of Nebraska, splitting up the team.

3. Finally, a picture of the two together, in singlets.  They are Marco and Gator Groves (Gator's real name is Bobby), who graduated from McClintock High School in Tempe, Arizona and went on to Arizona State.

4.In 2013, Ethan and Grayson Dolan of Long Valley, New Jersey won the "Beat the Streets" Championship at Madison Square Garden in New York. They were 8th graders at Long Valley Middle School.

In 2018, they are the Dolan Twins, internet celebrities who have had a comedy program on Awesomeness TV for 3 years.

5.Saxon and Brayden Lyman  (carrying the coach in their arms) placed in the state competition in Des Moines, Iowa  in July 2018.  They also play football at Eagle Grove Community School.

More after the break.

Small Town Swim-Team Twins

After posting on the four twins wrestling for Duke University, I started looking for more twins who competed on wrestling or swim teams together.

Turns out that twins often choose the same activities growing up, so there are quite a lot of twin swimmers, memorialized in articles with titles like "Seeing Double" and "Double Threat."

1. Ben and Josh Rudgayzer of Hewlett High School on Long Island.

1. Cale and Shane Blinkman  (#1 and #3) represented the St. Croix Swim Club of Stillwater, Minnesota at the USA Swimming Speedo Junior Winter Nationals in Iowa City in 2016.

3. Todd and Charlie Boaz swim for Bloomington High School in Illinois.  Todd also plays football.

4. Jay Litherland (right) of the University of Georgia made the U.S. Olympic swim team.  The other triplets, Kevin and Mick, tried but didn't make the cut.

5.Back in 2009, Bill and Dan Jones from Fremont, Michigan swam for Harvard.


More after the break

Four Wrestling Twins at Duke University

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina is the Harvard of the South, with an 11% acceptance rate and tuition of $53,000.  The Duke University Press publishes impenetrable, jargon-heavy books with titles like Abject Performances and Infrahumanism.  So I didn't expect to find much beefcake there.

But it turns out that all of that money can be channeled into extensive media promotion of Duke athletes.  Wrestling is especially well represented.

Team superstar seems to be Jacob Kasper, a Redshirt Senior from Lexington, Ohio. We even get a list of "fun facts," like his favorite karaoke song is "Don't Stop Believing."

Matt Finesilver is a prominent newcomer, a freshman from Greenwood Village, Colorado, where he was a four-year letter winner at Cherry Creek High School.

Matt's three brothers are also on the Duke team.

Matt and Josh (left) are twins, and Junior Redshirts Zach and Mitch (below) are twins.

Imagine the tuition!

No, I'm not imagining anything else.

There are some team members who don't have twins.  Alec Schenk is a Redshirt Junior from Perry, Ohio.

While rich white guys are disproportionately represented, there are a few minorities on the team.  Kaden Russell is a freshman from Medina, Ohio, where he lettered twice at St. Ignatius.















And Freshman Maliik (two i's) Marcin is a townie, from Durham, where he lettered four years at Charles E. Jordan High School.  He also lettered in football.

Here's the whole crew on a run at the beach.

I don't know if any of them are gay, but Duke athletes participate in a "Sports and Social Justice Initiative" to teach them how to advocate for gay rights, and the 80+ "Athlete Allies" march in the Durham gay pride parade.