Unfamiliar: Spy vs. Spy in Berlin, with a Mongolian guy, a gay oldster, Kramer's d*ck and the drag boy grown up

 

Link to the n*de photos

Unfamiliar (2026) just dropped on Netflix.  You can tell by the random one-word title that has no connection to the story: it's about spies.  It stars Aaron Altaras, who I just profiled, and Felix Kramer, who plays a gay guy in Dogs of Berlin, so I'll give it a try.

Prologue: A man (Aaron Altaras) walks through a graffiti-strewn bad neighborhood of Berlin, by the Spittelmarkt Square, digs a microchip out of his stomach, and shoots himself in the leg.

Scene 1:  In a fancy restaurant kitchen, a Chef (Felix Kramer) and his assistants are cooking.  Meanwhile, a teenager girl opens a present and her Mom smiles.  A banner says "Happy Birthday" in English.

When the meal is done, the Chief and his assistant Yul bring it in...wait, the apartment is right off the restaurant kitchen?   Chef gives a speech about how he grew up over his dad's restaurant, then became a doctor.  So are you a chef or a doctor?

Uh-oh, a phone call.  The guy from the prologue says that he's been shot and stabbed, so he need medical and transport to a safe house.  Hey, you gave those wounds to yourself!

Chef grabs Mom, and they pick up the guy in their van (which is equipped with ambulance supplies) and drive him to a nondescript building. 

Left: Yul is played by Anand Batbileg Chuluunbataar, which sounds Mongolian.  He has nine acting credits on the IMDB.

Scene 2:  In the safe house, Mom complains that she can't find the guy online. No face recognition, no nothing.  His story doesn't check out either, and he won't tell them who his handler is. 

They discuss whether to believe his story, and then whether their daughter is old enough to go out to the clubs by herself tonight (it's still the night of her birthday dinner).

 "She isn't alone -- Yul is with her."  The guy who was helping Dad cook.  Is he a servant or a boyfriend?

Scene 3:At German Foreign Intelligence Headquarters, the Boss (Laurence Rupp)  asks for intel on both key players. 

Vera Koleev is set to become the Russian ambassador to Germany, although she has no diplomatic experience.  They think she is just a cover for her husband Josef's espionage activity.  But the German higher-ups need evidence to have them deported.  

An old acquaintance is coming in to help them gather the evidence.

Cue a shoe getting out of a car.  I figured it would be the Chef, but it's Grigor Klein (Henry Hübchen), their former Department Head. He looks at surveillance footage of Josef Koleev, the suspected spy, at a Berlin bus station half an hour ago.  He was scheduled to come in legally in a few weeks anyway, so why sneak in now?  Grigor has no idea.

Laurence Rupp's backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Scene 4: At the safe house, Mom interrogates the wounded agent.  He explains that he worked for a high-end security firm, and stole something.  They objected, and shot him.  Now he needs to vanish. 

Why did he call Chef?   "A lady I knew needed to vanish once, and she told me about your service."

They flirt with each other.  Or else Mom is flirting with him to gain his trust.

She feeds him.  "This food is good.  Did you or your brother make it?"

This surprises Mom, so she makes an excuse to leave the room, and calls Chef: "He thinks we're brother and sister.  The last time we played siblings was on the mission to Belarus 16 years ago!"

Meanwhile, the Agent grabs her fingerprints off her water glass. She watches the action on her spycam. 

Scene 6: The mission to Belarus.  They enter a farmhouse, but Russian Spy Josef (Samuel Finzi, left) is gone, and everyone is dead except Grigor, who was shot in the stomach. They manage to save Grigor -- and the baby of a pregnant dead woman.  It's their daughter, who is going out to the clubs to celebrate her sixteenth birthday!  So this happened exactly sixteen years ago.  

Back to the present: Mom tells Chef that she'll interrogate the Agent to find out who he's working for, but meanwhile their daughter is in danger.  "Go find her and bring her home."

"But she's not answering her phone, and I don't know which club she's going to"  So use your spy skills.

More after the break

Kenton Duty: The "Shake It Up" star shakes it up with Christian soap operas and n*de videos

  

Link to the n*de photos

Some former teen stars retain their cuteness through their 20s, 30s, 40s, and on.  Others move from "dreamy" to "meh," and an unfortunate few turn into gorgons.   I'll leave it to you to decide what happened to Kenton Duty.  

Yes, that's his real name.

Born in 1995, Kenton began acting at the age of nine, and first appeared on screen at age eleven.  He drew fan attention in 2010 for a ridiculous background story on the paranormal Lost: in the first century CE, a Roman woman is shipwrecked on the floating island, has twin sons, Jacob and ___.  Christians and Jews were a tiny minority at the time.  How does she know the Jewish name?   For the rest of the plot arc, everyone refuses to say the name of the other brother, although it obviously has to be Esau.  

This led to Shake It Up (2010-12), a slight variation on the usual Disney teencom format.  Instead of a girl who wants to be a singer, it featured two girls who want to be dancers. Kenton played the German-stereotype Gunther Hessenheffer, who dances with his sister Tinka.  According to the fan wiki, he is "flamboyant, fashion-conscious, theatrical," with a gay-subtext firendship with Ty Blue (Roshon Feagan) but straight, dating and crushing on a number of girls.

You might expect some gay characters or subtexts in Contest (2013), where a  bully and his queer-coded victim (Kenton, left, Daniel Flanagan, not shown) work together to win a contest, but the victim gets a girl.

We do see a lot of Kenton's physique, and Phil of the Future's Raviv Ullman appears.

Don't get excited. It's Guys Night (2015) is a two-minute short in which the guys get a girl to join them.  Why would two guys want to spend time alone?

Kenton's most significant role in the post-Shake It Up era is in the Christian soap Hilton Head Island (2017-19). Michael Swan stars as the dying patriarch of a clan scheming to get their hands on his media empire. Kenton plays a grandson. 

He's done some other Christian tv series, like The Encounter (Jesus steps in to solve people's problems), but also some secular stuff, like Filthy Preppy Teens and A Housekeeper's Revenge.

More after the break

"Journey to the Beginning of Time": Four boys fight dinosaurs in the early years of their lives, before Jules Verne, Sinbad, and "What girl do you like?"

During the 1970s, our local afternoon kid's show, Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat, played a serial called Journey to the Beginning of Time, about four boys on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York who find a secret passage leading to a mysterious river. They paddle down the river through different geological eras, rescuing each other from mastodons and dinosaurs, learning to survive in the prehistoric wilderness.  

Finally they pass the Precambrian Era and see the dazzling psychedelic fireworks of the Earth's creation.

The serial made no sense.  The boys' costumes and hair styles changed; they got taller and shorter; the voice-over narration didn't match the action; no one wonders how they're going to get back home again; and where did boys visiting a museum get a boat, anyway?

Still, it became one of the iconic images of my childhood, maybe because it made no sense.  It was a puzzle, a mystery to be unraveled, and that puzzle involved boys facing the world together.

  In a pivotal scene, Doc loses the diary with his scientific notes of the journey, and Jo-Jo fights off a dinosaur to retrieve it.  Their subsequent moment of emotional intimacy reverberated through my childhood.

Turns out that in 1955, Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman wrote and directed Cesta do praveku ("Journey to Prehistory"), based on Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth: four boys find a living trilobite, which should have gone extinct 251 million years ago.  This propels them to their journey through time.

In 1966, William Cayton took the river sequences and filmed then filmed new opening and closing segments in the United States with different boys, figuring that the dumb kids in his target audience would never notice.  He then chopped it into installments to rent to after-school cartoon shows like Garfield Goose in Chicago -- and Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat.

 I noticed, but I didn't care. I was busy watching the boys bonding with each other through science fiction adventure.

1. Doc/Petr: Josef Lukás (born 1939).  This is is only film appearance.

2. Jo-Jo/Jirka: Vladimír Bejval (1942-2011) has 17 acting credits, all between 1949 and 1957, except for a 1995 tv series, where he played a doctor.

3. Ben/Tonik: Petr Herrman (1938-2018). 14 acting credits, ending in 2009.

4. Zenda: Zdenek Hustak (1940-2015).  This is his only film appearance. 

There is little or no information about any of them online, but I doubt that they would have any gay-subtext roles in Communist Czechoslovakia.

What about director Karel Zeman (1910-1989)?

He is lauded as one of the greatest animators of the 20th century; there is a Karel Zeman Museum near the Charles Bridge in Prague.

His other works available with English subtitles are:

Vynález zkázy (1958), based on Jules Verne's Facing the Flag, translated as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.  Some pirates capture the inventor of a fabulous weapon. who falls in love.

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 3.2: Kelvin's buddies, gay Percy, two toxic families, and some n*de soldiers

Link to the NSFW version

Episode 3.2 introduces Eli's estranged brother-in-law Peter Montgomery, his sons, and a disturbing super-macho mirror of Kelvin's God Squad.

Title: "But Esau Ran to Meet Him," from Genesis 33.4.  Jacob has tricked his father Isaac into giving him the inheritance.  Esau is furious and vows to kill him, so he flees.  When he returns after 20 years, Esau behaves as if he is happy to see him, but....

Stephen's abusive wife:  Stephen, who was fired as Judy's guitarist after her brothers discovered their affair, is trying to tell his wife Kristy that he was "laid off," not fired.  She doesn't buy it.  It's a highly abusive relationship: she calls him "an unemployed, cokehead piece of sh*twho sulks all day."  He screams "Fuck you!", and she hits him with a glass blender.  Shattered glass all over his face and head, in front of the kids!  Whoa, scary.  The Gemstones and their partners argue, but they never use abusive language or physical violence.  Except for the time that Amber shot Jesse in the backside 

Later, Judy meets Stephen at Spanky's Cafe, a real restaurant in North Charleston, and offers him $10,000 to leave her alone: "I don't want to see you no' mo'."  But he still wants her.  Judy points out that he's married, but it doesn't matter: "I'd leave my family in a second if I could have you.  I'd murder them." Say what?  This guy is a psycho. Of course, he should leave his abusive wife, but murder her...and the kids?

Kelvin's Buddies:  Jesse and Amber's adult son Gideon, who moved to California to become a stuntman, is back, lying on the veranda in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette, holding a box of Lucky Charms cereal, and sulking.  The background song by Buddy Knox tells us: "I think I'm going to kill myself."  He injured his neck, and may never do stunt work, tumbling, or martial arts again.  At least he's displaying a nice chest.

Background alert: Skyler Gisondo injured his neck in real life in 2022, when his hair stylist gave him a "little neck massage."  They wrote his injury into the script.

In a much, much nicer parallel to the Stephen-Mandy confrontation, Gideon's parents order him to stop feeling sorry for himself, get off his backside, and go to work for the church.  But he doesn't want to preach.  Ok, so he can become Eli's driver. Remember that the long-term driver, Walker, was fired.

We cut to Gideon on his first assignment, driving Eli and the siblings to see if May-May's kids are ok.  They are living with her estranged husband, Peter Montgomery, and his militia, the Brotherhood of Tomorrow's Fires: they expect end of civilization, like Eli's Y2K scare back in 1999.   Eli calles them preppers: "They want to make sure they don't run out of toilet paper."

Usually Evangelicals believe in the Rapture, when Jesus zaps everyone who is saved to Heaven, leaving the unsaved to suffer through seven years of the dystopian Tribulation before being sent to hell.  To this day, I will not let anyone stamp my hand for re-entry into an event, because  the Mark of the Beast was drummed into my head.  But Eli and Peter apparently have a different belief system.

On the way to the compound, at the defunct Boy Scout Camp Wooden Feather, the siblings discuss their cousins, Karl and Chuck.  Kelvin says that he always found them "kind of dumb and strange."  But you haven't seen them since 2000, when you were ten or eleven.  How much do you remember?

Judy: "That's why I'm surprised you weren't b utt buddies with them."  

He gets annoyed, not because she alludes to him being gay but because she implied that he's also "dumb and strange," and therefore perfect for the Montgomerys.

Not the God Squad:  Bizarre signs like "Now we will see" greet the family, along with multiple armed guards.  They pass Jacob (Stephen Louis Grush) cutting up a deer.  Kelvin smiles at him -- think he's hot, buddy?.  Then a military-style obstacle course;  guys practicing martial arts; a guy taking a shower outdoors (no beefcake); and finally the mess hall, where about thirty militia men are having lunch.

Wait -- no women and children?  The actual far-right militia movement has many female participants, but this is a male-only space, like Kelvin's God Squad in Season 2, but with scruffy guys in military fatigues instead of flexing musclemen.  It is dedicated to phileo instead of eros, buddy-bonding instead of homoerotic desire. An article on Doomsday Preppers notes that these male-only groups "cultivate a dangerous vision of apocalyptic manhood that consummates a fantasy of national virility in the demise of feminine society."  Women are weak and fragile, their civilization doomed. Only the "manly love of comrades" can survive the Apocalypse. 

May-May's son Chuck ushers Eli and the siblings in. They are greeted by Cousin Karl (Robert Oberst), who is delighted to see them; and Uncle Peter (Steve Zahn, below), who is not.  It's time for church, so get out!  No, the siblings offer to help lead the service: Jesse will preach, Judy will sing, and Kelvin will  perform some "feats of strength" for the kids -- the only time he references his muscles during the season.  No kids around, but maybe the militia guys would like to see some masculine beauty.   

Uncle Peter rejects the siblings' offer.  They are "phony fakers," entertainers, interested in making money rather than saving souls. 

More military guys after the break