"After the Hunt": Pretentious philosophy professors have problems, with some penises and Will Price

After the Hunt (2025), on Amazon Prime: A college professor with a dark secret. I'm in academe, and I love movies set in The Halls of Ivy.  Plus it stars Will Price, who I've had a crush on since I saw his gay-subtext role in The Chair Company (seen here with his favorite drag outfits).   I'm in, even with the two minutes of commercials that Amazon Prime makes you watch before the movie (in addition to the $100 per year fee).

Scene 1: Maggie, a middle-aged black woman, stares forlornly at some African art that shows a man and a woman getting it on. Actually, she's bored stiff at a faculty party while icy cool, incredibly pretentious Alma (Julia Roberts) is lecturing on how there are no universal standards of morality.   Uh-oh, she's going to be a murderer.

Horndog Hank (Andrew Garfield), who is sprawled across the couch with his legs spread, grabs Maggie and says that her dissertation on performative dissent will be the best thing ever written, sure to become a classic in philosophy. But she's only given them a few passages.  "You're too tight.  You need to loosen up."  

This shocks Arthur (Will Price) so much that he drops his drink.

Left: Garfield butt.

"So, when are you going to defend?" Maggie's elderly mentor (Michael Stuhlberg) asks.  (Defense is where your committee asks biting, unnerving questions about your dissertation and then decides whether to grant your Ph.D. or send you home with four to six years wasted).

"I haven't decided yet."

He chides her for having self-doubts.  This dissertation will make her name as the greatest philosopher of our generation, so why wait?

Hey, Michael Stuhlberg played a 26-year old grad student in Call Me by Your Name (2017). . Eight years later, he's playing a guy in his 70s?  Correction: Google said that this was a picture of Michael Stuhlberg, but it's actually Armie Hammer.  Stuhlberg played the boy's dad.

Maggie has to use the restroom. Incredibly Pretentious Alma says: "Don't use the usual one -- Frederick has a project in there. Use the guest bath at the end of the hall."  I'm guessing that Frederick is her son.

Scene 2: Maggie drifts folornly down the long, scary hallway, finds the bathroom, and slowly shuts the door.  Whoa, horror movie tropes.  Something sinister is waiting for her in there!

Back at the party, Alma and Horndog Hank are grabbing and fondling each other.  Apparently they're married, and going up for tenure at the same time. 

Elderly Mentor tries to talk them out of it:  "I don't want to be a contrarian, but sometimes a wish fulfilled can be more baffling than the longing."

Alma disagrees: "It's not some egoitic teleological pursuit, it's a threshhold."  Professors don't talk like that.

"If you get tenure and I don't, I'll be rageful," Horndog Hank jokes while grabbing and fondling her.  "Well, if you get it, and I don't, I'll be furious."

I'm expecting a scream, as Maggie is eaten by a monster. Or maybe she has offed herself, and the maid discovers her body. Nope, no scream.  The only problem: No toilet paper.  Looking for some, Maggie finds an envelope taped above the cleaning supplies.  Inside, a handkechief, a photograph, a letter, and a newspaper article.  But someone is coming, so she pockets some and puts the rest back. 

More after the break

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye": A gay-positive light in the homophobic 1980s, with nude photos, not of the televangelists

 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) takes us back to the golden age of televangelism, when the big names were world-famous celebrities with huge political and social influence.  They had dinner at the White House.  They were parodied on Saturday Night Live.  

1. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio) turned his Moral Majority into a seething- ground for anti-gay hatred.  He blamed them for everything.  An airplane crash in Peru -- must have been some gays on board.  Rise in teen pregnancy -- gay rights make our kids think they can do anything they want.  Your basement is flooded -- God is punishing you for not hating gays enough.  "A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you."

2. Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) proclaimed that God was punishing all of the gays by giving them AIDS, but they wanted to infect as many straight people as possible, with the goal of destroying society before becoming extinct.   They had special rings that, when you shook their hand, would prick you with a little of their blood, so you would catch AIDS and die.  They would spit on your food or cough on you on purpose

3. Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) said that he would kill any gay man who looked at him romantically.  He saw his huge tv ministry decimated after two prostitution scandals, in spite of his famous "I have sinned" speech. 

4. Oral Roberts managed to build a whole homophobic university with sleazy fundraising techniques, like claiming that if viewers didn't send in $8,000,000, God would kill him.

More after the break

Under the Banner of Heaven: Murder and crisis of faith in a fundamentalist Mormon familiy with five brothers (and five dicks)

 Under the Banner of Heaven, a Hulu series about corruption in the LDS Church, was written and produced by Dustin Lance Black, who is gay, so there's bound to be some gay characters or subtexts.  Besides, who isn't interested in cute Mormon missionaries?  

Scene 1: Establishing shot of Salt Lake City.  Jeb (Andrew Garfield), a super clean-cut nuclear family Dad, is listening to "Let's Hear it for the Boy."  A gay anthem!  So the protagonist is gay?   His preteen daughters, who wear long pioneer dresses, ask him to do loving-father activities, like lasso them.  Wife, who wears a modern t-shirt and cut-off jeans, calls him to the phone.  He has to go to work, so everyone has to do the evening prayers early.

We hear all the prayers: for the Mormon missionaries (how about a visual?), for Church President Kimball, for Grandpa in heaven, and for an Easy-Bake Oven.  "Let's Hear it for the Boy" came out in 1982, and Spencer Kimball died in 1985, 

Scene 2: Continuing to pray, Jeb the Cop puts the siren on his car and heads to a house surrounded by yellow tape and police cars.  Inside: the tv on, bloody footprints, scattered toys, a dead lady, and something in a basinet that makes him say "Evil."  The dead lady's murder was not evil?    He goes out to the yard and arrests the bloody young man who happens to be walking around.

Scene 3:  At the police station, Jeb the Cop and his Gentile (Non-Mormon) Partner do the good cop-bad cop routine on the blood-splattered suspect, Allen Lafferty (Billy Howle), who happens to belong to one of the most important familiies of the Church.  He claims that for the last year, "peculiar men" dressed like Mormon prophets have been stalking his family, so no doubt they did it.  They are probably after his brothers and their wives and kids, too.

Left: Billie Howle, Dick #1

Scene 4: While they book and strip Allen, Jeb watches, flashing back to someone he saw at church (was this a flash of same-sex attraction?).  They send a squad car out to check on the only brother whose address Allen knows: the others all moved to hide from the humiliation of having a brother who left the Church.

Scene 5: Jeb is too disgusted to continue the interrogation, so his Gentile Partner continues alone.  Stunt casting: he's played by Gil Birmingham, a bodybuilder who appeared in Diana Ross's music video "Muscles" in 1982.

Allen: if you want to know who did, check out the Mormon saints.  

Flashback to his future wife Brenda winning runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls, Idaho contest in 1980, then going to Brigham Young University, to stay away from the "Democrats and crazies," and studying broadcast journalism.  She meets Allen at church.  

Back at the interrogation, Allen blames the Church on his wife's death: "My only regret is that I didn't drive her out of Zion (Salt Lake City) to protect her from our people."  

Scene 6:  Jeb the Cop continues to ruminate about how evil Allen is, to do that to a baby (and an adult?).  They're still having trouble tracking down the addresses of his brothers and their wives/kids, so Jeb calls his wife -- they went to church with the Lafferty family, so maybe she has some of the brothers' addresses.  

He returns to the interrogation: Jeb: "So, you despicable monster, was there anyone besides you who hated Brenda enough to do it?"  Allen:  Everyone hated her because she was so perfect."  Yeah, I heard that a lot in high school.

Scene 7: Flashback to Allen introducing Brenda to the family at a picnic. "Just don't say much," he warns. Patriarch Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl, Dick #2) wants to know why she abandoned Twin Falls, Idaho for the evil Big City (Provo, Utah?).  There are an endless number of boisterous brothers, Stepford wives, and staring kids to meet. 

More Lafferty boys after the break