Ibrahim Eloouhabi: The "I Killed a Kid" kid tells us his pronouns, models some Liberace outfits. Is that enough? With nude Costner and Moroccan dudes

 

I felt like I should profile one of the actors from In the Hand of Dante, to get something of value from it (other than picking up my bilingual edition of The Inferno again).  So  I checked the actors who played teenage Dante, the murdered Bartender, the guy who killed his father,  the boy with a big knife (who was killed), and Mephistopheles, but none of them were suitable.  How about the boy who tells his uncle, "I just killed a kid"?  It's not clear in the movie (nothing is), but he grows up to be focus character Nick (Oscar Isaacs, right).

Ibrahim Elouahabi gives his pronouns (he/his), and speaks Arabic.  That's enough for a profile. 

Not just Arabic.  He also speaks Turkish and Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and he is studying French. 

Left: Moroccan guy.

Darija is not intelligible with Modern Standard Arabic: it has reduced the number of vowels, adapted its grammar to Tamazight (Berber), and borrowed much of its vocabulary from French: forshita (fork), tabla (table), boulis (police).

Ibrahim's family is from Morocco, but he was born "on the vibrant streets of Brooklyn," according to his hyperbolic IMDB bio.  He began his career in 2019, as a fashion model for Zara, Nike, and Macy's.  Soon he was performing in commercials for Brawny paper towels, Magic Spoon (upscale cereal), and Marriot Vacation Club.

His on-screen performances begin with two shorts, The Prescription (2020), no description available, and Roque (2022), about Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton.  Ibrahim plays Roque as a boy, and Jaden McKnew (left) as an adult.

Next came a small role in Audrey's Children (2024), a biopic of Dr. Audrey Evans, who developed "revolutionary treatments" for sick children.

In Ebenezer the Traveler (2024), the ghosts of Scrooge, his sister, Jacob Marley, and a grown-up Tiny Tim are assigned to help an aspiring singer in modern-day Oklahoma.  I think Ibrahim plays her son.

More after the break

Researching Adam Christian Clark's Celebrity Cock. With a Big Brother, a Chunk, and a lot of arthouse indie angst

The main reason I check out the Celebrity Cock subreddit is for cock shots of actors I've never heard of in movies I've never heard of.  Like this one, Adam Christian Clark in Newly Single (2017).  

Nice lascivious grin, buddy.  

Next to him we see the back of someone's head and part of their backside.  They have a man's haircut but no torso definition, so I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman.

Here's Adam backside.  He doesn't have any torso definition, either.

But he's got a big one, so I'll let his butt deficiency slide, and check to see if he's playing a gay character here (or in another movie), or if he's gay in real life.

Bad news: Adam is a director and filmmaker.  He's only acted in three movies:

Stasis (2010), a sci-fi short about a solder in a futuristic dystopia (Reshad Strik) who is asked to fight for The Girl.  Adam plays "The Eye."

Face in the Crowd (2013): A woman searches for human connection.  Adam plays one of 17 Faces that she encounters.

And Newly Single (2017).

Well, maybe he's directed some movies with gay content.

Adam's directing career began in 2002, when he was still a student at the USC School of Cinematic Art, and hired for the reality show Big Brother.  He stuck around for Seasons 3-5  (2002-24), then moved on to direct other reality shows, like XTreme Sports Television, Fine Tuned (cars), and Fashion Star (wannabe models from China).

Left: Josh Feinberg, whose stay on Big Brother Season 3 got him a nude photo spread in Playgirl.

During ths period, he wrote and directed two shorts:

The Editor: A Man I Despise (2008), with hung chub Richard Riehle as the editor, and characters named Museum Girl #1-3, Waitress, Woman, and Young Woman.

I get the impression that Adam really likes the ladies.

Goodbye Shanghai (2010): Two Western bankers embezzle $14 billion from the U.S. government. They spend their last night in Shanghai partying with girls -- lots of girls -- before things go wrong. It won a New Media Award.

Adam has written and directed three feature films:

The art house indie Caroline and Jackie (2012): two sisters have a terrible night, beginning with Jackie's  birthday party that turns into an intervention, as Caroline and her friends confront her anorexia, drug abuse, and "sexual promiscuity."  With men, of course.  It got mixed reviews

More after the break

Everybody Loves Greg: Vincent Martella grows up, plays Phineas, dates some guys. With some d*cks and Skyler Gisondo

 We've been watching Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009) on Hulu: a nostalgia sitcom featuring the  childhood adventures of comedian Chris Rock, who provided the commentary.  In the 1980s, young Chris (Tyler James Williams) attended an all-white middle school, where everyone hated him, except his teacher, who pitied him for..stereotype of the week.  

He had a bully with an endless supply of racist terms (Travis Flory), a white best friend (Vincent Martella), and at home, Dad with about 35 jobs (Terry Crews), way overbearing Mom (Tichina Arnold), bratty little sister (Imani Hakim), and a little brother (Tequan Richmond), who was bigger, and far more attractive: everybody was in love with him, which was usually fine,but a problem around Valentine's Day, when the truckloads of cards, candy, and wedding proposals arrived. 

It was quite homophobic, even for the 2000s.  Chris Rock's commentary displayed revulsion and disgust whenever he could: "Hey, this ain't Brokeback!"  One episode featured Chris befriending a gay student, but they called him "androgynous."

Nearly 20 years later, the cast varies on their level of homophobia, from Terry Crewes and Tyler James Williams (ugh!).

To Tequan Richmond and Imani Hakim (allies)

 To Vincent Martella, seen here at a Clippers game with  Mikey Reid.

After Chris, he became the voice of Phineas in the animated Phineas and Ferb, which is endless: 140 episodes from 2007-2025, plus thousands of movies: Christmas Vacation, Across the Second Dimension, Mission Marvel....

Vincent has done some other animation work, like the video game Final Fantasy XIII, Batman: Death in the Family, and Disney Infinity

Left: Vincent and Mikey have fun during the COVID quarantine.

Vincent's live-action work includes Patrick in three episodes of The Walking Dead: he is a member of a zombie holocaust survivor community in an abandoned prison. Then he get sick, dies, zombifies, and creates a new zombie infestation.

I have a question about this Cupid costume.  

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

"In the Hand of Dante": Film noir about an original Dante manuscript, set in a 1950s-era 2001. And it gets more confusing. And homophobic

I love the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno, where Virgil guides Dante through the stages of hell.  He puts the sodomites in the Seventh Circle, where fire rains down on those who "do violence against nature," but at least it permitted me to
mention LGBT people in an Italian class in the 1980s, when otherwise the rule was "Don't mention them, they don't exist."  

So I'm going to watch the new movie In the Hands of Dante, about the discovery of an original Divine Comedy manuscript.  Maybe there will be gay characters, probably not, but I'll still get to hear that beginning phrase again: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (at the midpoint of life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark forest).

We've all been there.

Scene 1: Dante climbs a rocky cliff.  Meanwhile, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, an obnoxious novelist (Oscar Isaacs) complains to his friend that his books are too brilliant to be edited. "I'd rather the stableboy f*ck my wife than see my work edited." Heterosexual identity established immediately after his obnoxiousness.

Oscar Isaacs' backside

"So, what's your book about?"

"It's a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I've been working on it for ten years." 

Friend squeezes his shoulder.  "You're still hot after ten years."  Wait -- are you flirting with him?

" By the way, who is Dante?"  Say what?  Who doesn't know Dante?

"An old dead guy.  But he got trapped in the cage of rhyme and meter.  I'm breaking out, so my translation will be far superior to the original."  The greatest work in Italian literature?  You planning to improve on "Hamlet" next?

Scene 2:  Newark, 1969.  A young boy enters a middle-class house and tells his Uncle, "I just killed some kid."  He explains that the boy (Gavin Weingarten) had a big knife, and asked if he wanted to die.  He tried to defend himself, they struggled, and he managed to stab Knife Boy.  

Since he doesn't know who the boy was, and no one saw them, Uncle says that he should forget about it.  But don't make "malarkey" a habit in the future.  Are you going to grow up to be Our Hero? But you're way too young. That would make the "I'm a better writer than Dante" conversation sometime in the 2000s, and it was obviously in the 1950s.  Maybe Uncle is Our Hero?

Scene 3: Bora Bora, seaside, 2001. Our Hero on a hammock, writing in his notebook about "creamy white gardenia blossoms" and "faded petroglyphs."  So you must be the Boy who killed someone, now middle aged, but it's a parallel world with the look and feel of the 1950s: no computers or cell phones, men wear hats and smoke constantly, writers use pencils. 

Our Hero tells us that the Nine Heavens of the Paradiso is a bad translation; It's really Nine Skies.  The last and rarest of them is the Sky of Illimitibleness.  Or you could say "Endless," if you weren't a pretentious jerk.

Cut to the Young Dante sitting under a tree, looking at the Illimitible Sky.  

Scene 4:  New York, 2001, "That time when the daylight sky was an oppressive, low-lying glare of white, and the dark of night was..."  So, summer.  Is this one of your stories, or really happening in-universe?    A greasy-haired guy named Louie (Gerard Butler, but blond and greasy) saunters into a closed bar and orders a Dewars and water.  He criticizes the bartender's moustache: "You see a guy with a moustache, he's either a cop or a (homophobic slur)."

I expected L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and the stars, and I'm getting Charles Bukowski, homophobia, and a parallel world where the 1950s never ended. 

"By the way, you ever take it up the ass?" Louie asks.  "Might make a man out of you."  But then he calls him a c*cksucker.  Twice.  Are you homophobic or not, buddy?  

He criticizes the Bartender and his wife for being excessively ugly, and threatens his nine-year old daughter.

Next topic of conversation: the Bartender's Uncle, "a real fuckup," who opened the bar, but pissed his money away gambling.  Wait, is that the Uncle from 1969?  So the Bartender is Our Hero?  But he's supposed to be in Bora Bora, writing pretentious crap.  And the Uncle was elderly in 1969. No way he's alive in 2001.  

Unc owes the gang a lot of money, so his nephew the Bartender is going to provide it.  Louie takes tonight's proceeds, $1,200, then orders the Bartender to go down on him.  But he shoots him as soon as he gets on his knees.

What does this have to do with Dante?

More after the break.  Caution: It gets more confusing, but there are cocks.