The I-Land: "Lost" Written by a Writing-School Dropout

10 people on a desert island, with no memory of who they are or how they got there.  Sounds interesting, sort of Lost light.

We discover almost immediately that this is a computer simulation (the title I-Land is one clue.)  But that's ok, maybe a combination of Lost and The Prisoner.   Does someone want in-for-mation?

Except: the people are complete jerks.  They immediately start bickering, hooking up, and trying to rape each other instead of looking for food, water, and shelter.

For plot complications, there is a cannibal among them, and two bounty hunters named Bonnie and Clyde (Clyde played by KeiLyn Durrel Jones, left).

We learn all the details in Episodes 3 and 7 (the finale),  which are all long plot exposition discussions.  Hey, did anyone take Creative Writing 101?  Show, don't tell?

Due to global warming, Texas is now mostly underwater, so the crime rate has increased, and the prisons are full:   "So many more people are criminals, now that the water has reclaimed the land, that we have to find a way to redeem them."

Um...we've had rehabilitation programs for over 180 years.  Job training, GED classes, life skills classes, drug treatment, counseling....

 So they are trying out a program to give parole to murderers if they can prove that they have been reformed.

Um...what about the non-violent inmates?  Maybe parole them first?

So the murderers are memory-wiped, put into young, hot bodies, and dumped on a hologram-island to see what happens.  This group consists of:

1. Chase, who killed her husband and children
2. KC
3. Cooper
4. Moses (Kyle Schmid, left)
5. Blair

6. Mason, a mass murderer
7. Donova
8. Taylor
9. Hayden
10. Brody (Alex Pettyfer, left)

It would be very interesting to see the back stories of all of these people, to learn how and why they became murderers, but nope, the writer never took Creative Writing 101.  We learn nothing about the lives of most of them.

Therefore I have no idea if any of them are gay.  Some shy away from hetero-hookups, but that's as far as it gets.

I sort of liked the scenes set back in real life, with Bruce McGill as the Warden channeling the Rich Texan from The Simpsons.  He is so incredibly over the top that I thought he must be a parody.  After all, Bruce McGill has been in a lot of movies.  He must have taken acting lessons, right?

Now, if we can just get the writers into Creative Writing 101....

Super Mario Brothers

When I was a kid, we had arcade games (for which you went to an arcade), but no video games.

In college we played Asteroids, in which your space ship shoots asteroids and flying saucers.

Mario Brothers appeared in arcades in 1983, and the Nintendo home game Super Mario Brothers in 1987.  Oddly enough, my parents were fans.  I have fond memories of summer nights in the 1990s, living in West Hollywood but back in Rock Island for a visit, the screen door open to let in a breeze, hearing the theme music coming from the living room.

There was also a Super Mario Brothers All-Stars in 1993, a Super Mario Brothers Deluxe in 1999, and various games devoted to other characters in the Mario universe, but by that time my parents had lost interest.

Nearly all of the game plots are sexist.  A princess is kidnapped, and the brothers Mario and Luigi, drawn as stereotypic Italian-American plumbers, must rescue her.

They are sometimes accompanied by Yoshi, a sentient dinosaur, and Toad, a sentient mushroom who wears a turban.

The only game without a princess to rescue is Yoshi's Island (1995), in which Baby Mario, accompanied by a clan of Yoshis, must rescue Baby Luigi.

However, none of the games involve a fade-out kiss: neither Mario nor Luigi display any heterosexual interest, leaving them open to gay subtexts.  Maybe they're a gay couple, not "brothers."

Mario cosplay is common, with some muscular Marios, Luigis, and Toads strutting about.

A film version, Super Mario Bros., appeared in 1993.  It stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, plumbers in real-life Brooklyn who are zapped into a parallel Earth run by the descendants of dinosaurs,  They rescue Princess Daisy, as expected.

  Of course, Hollywood movies must always have a heterosexist plot, so Luigi and Daisy fall in love.

But, on the plus side, John Leguizamo has a shirtless scene (top photo), before he got all craggy and bizarre.

Mike Erwin: Home of Phobia

When you do a google keyword search on "Mike Erwin" and "gay," you get 30,000 gay websites discussing how hot he is.  Hard to determine if he's played any gay characters, or if he's gay in real life.

Ok, he's hot.

He got his  start in collegiate sex comedies like American Pie 2, The New Guy, and Home of Phobia (2004), aka Freshman Orientation, where he played the gay roommate of a straight guy pretending to be gay in order to win the Girl of His Dreams (are gay guys that much better at heterosexual romance?).

And sex dramas, like She's Too Young (2004), about a girl with multiple sex partners, and Pretty Persuasion (2005), about two girls who accuse their drama teacher of sexual harassment.

But he's most famous for the tearjerker Everwood (2002-2004), as the teenage Colin Hart, who got into an auto accident while drinking, fell into a coma, awoke, and then died during surgery.

Since Everwood, he's played some iconic adventure characters: the teenage Bruce Banner in Hulk (2003) and Don West in The Robinsons: Lost in Space (2004). 


And he's starred in gay-themed episodes of Jack and Bobby and The War at Home, but not as a gay character.

He's also known as the voice of the video game character Jak, who accidentally turns his bff Daxter into an ottsel (an otter-weasel hybrid).    I haven't played it, but I understand that they have some gay undertones.