Justin Berti: The Movie Rewards Godfather finds his niche in Shakespeare and softcore porn. We see his butt a lot, but what about his cock?

 

If you've been to a movie theater within the last year, you've seen this commercial: A moviegoer stumbles upon three Godfather-parodies discussing what seems to be illegal activities.  The movie premiered over 50 years ago, but it's been parodied so often that the guys and their mannerisms are instantly recognizable.

She asks, "Are we going to make somebody sleep with the fishes?"

"Aee-oh," the Head Godfather protests. "We just do Movie Rewards."  He explains: "Maybe a free ticket falls from a truck.  Or the online fees just...disappear!"  Laughter.

They settle in with their voluminous snacks.  "It's an offer you can't refuse."

This commercial has made actor Justin Berti more recognizeable than anything else in his career.

Wait -- what else has this guy been in?

According to his resume, Justin was born in Connecticut, spent time in Texas and California, and then attended Columbia University. After graduating in 2003, he moved to Japan, where he modeled, played semi-pro baseball, and performed in Fiddler on the Roof, Little Shop of Horrors, and Macbeth.  

And he had a guest spot in The Ramen Girl (2008), about a woman stranded in Tokyo who trains to become a ramen and takes off her clothes a lot. 

Back in New York in 2015, Justin appeared in King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus & Cressida, and the non-Shakespearean A Fool for Love, Glengary Glen Ross, and The Full Monty

His American on-screen roles begin with some video game voices and music videos, but he quickly finds his niche in softcore porn: Submission, The Love Machine, His Secret Past, High Heel Homicide, Secret Life of the Surgeon's Wife, Forbidden Love, Lethal Desire, My Dark Romeo...

It's softcore, so no dick shots, and his butt is on display only when he's doing stuff with a lady.

I don't see a lot of gay content. The Stepbrother I Hate to Love (2026) is about two stepbrothers who get with each other during a three-way with a girl, but Justin is far down the cast list, playing someone named Victor.  Matthew Campbell (left) is far down the cast list, too.

Torn Between My Stepbrothers (2026) shows a bisexual three-way with two stepbrothers (not the ones in I Hate to Love), but the plot description is quite different: "a young man faces many challenges after losing everything."  Justin plays their dad.

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.1 Continued: Keefe's kiss, Kelvin's boner, and a thug with broken thumbs. With Jonah Hauer-King and some boners

Previous: Episode 2.1: Junior likes dicks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!

In the last scene, Keefe is excluded from Sunday dinner with the family.  Now we see what he missed:

Judy and BJ accused of betraying the family because they got married at Disney World (by Prince Eric, the "hottest guy in the Disney catalog").

There's also a jab at Kelvin's muscle obsession. But it’s not just homoerotic desire.  Heterosexual desire is also incompatible with the family: when Jesse disses Judy for not being a mother, she argues that she's trying to keep her body "foine" to incite BJ's desire.  Nope, they need to have a family. 

Left and below: Jonah Hauer-King, who played Prince Eric in the Litle Mermaid movie.

More Disruptions: We cut to Eli playing croquet, gazing at women's butts, and flirting with a lady.  Suddenly Junior, his friend from his wrestling days, appears amid sinister music!   Eli ignores him and drives away.  A homoerotic disruption of Eli's heterosexual dalliance, parallel to the God Squad disrupting the nuclear family procession earlier. 

Next, the Jesse-Amber plot, a new Christian-themed resort, Zion's Landing, proposed by their megachurch pastor chums, Lyle and Lindy Lissons.  Jesse doesn't have any money of his own, so he'll have to convince Eli to invest.  He's got a job at the church; he should get a salary.  Daddy Eli is super over-controlling, like his daddy was, and like Kelvin will be with his homoerotic Band of Brothers.

My Mans:  The family flies to Florida to inspect the site of the Lyssons' proposed resort.   When they return, Keefe and the God Squad meet them at their private airfield.  The family is shocked: didn't they know about the God Squad? 

"Uh-oh, my mans!" Kelvin exclaims, rushing forward to tell Keefe "You are looking great!"  In Southern Coastal grammar, "mans" is singular, "mens" plural.  He means Keefe.

Keefe tries to move in for a kiss, but Kelvin blocks him with an awkward hug.  He tries again, and Kelvin blocks him again. Finally he makes a blatant "enough!" gesture and backs off.  Judy finds this little dance hilarious.   It reflects the couple's conflict this season: Keefe wants to join the family as Kelvin's partner, the equivalent of BJ, sitting at the dinner table being criticized, while Kelvin isn't sure that same-sex romance is even possible.  His muscle cult is about desire: no love allowed. 

We cut to Eli in his office, watching a tv news show: Thaniel Block being interviewed about the "salacious scandal" story that took down Pastor Butterfield.  How famous was this guy?  I thought he was just the anonymous pastor of a satellite church.  They preach "sex only between married heterosexual partners, or you're going to hell," but privately they do everything under the sun.  Who will he target next?   Maybe Kelvin-- "Secretly gay youth minister holds wild orgies with his stable of muscle boys."  Ulp.   

Damn, we got old: Later, Eli is standing at the docks, worrying, when Junior approaches him and grabs him from behind, another homoerotic intrusion into his heteronormative life.  Junior complains that Eli forgot that he existed. 

Then: "We got old.  I look like a piece of shit, but damn!  You look sturdy!  Still got that mass going on!"  He grabs Eli's butt to check. Sort of presumptuous, dude, thinking that your ex will still be into you after fifty years. 

Eli thinks that Junior plans to blackmail him over revealing their days as loan enforcers (and lovers?), but he claims that he's just there for nostalgia, looking up an old friend.  "Why you all nervous, Eli?  Why are you bein' all weird?"  In this series, "weird" usually refers to sexual frustration.

Junior tries to hug him again, but Eli pushes him away.  On a scale of 1 to 100, how certain are you that these guys spent the psychedelic 1970s enjoying free love?  

As Eli walks away, Junior guilts him into a dinner invitation.

Sticky Stephens:  Nuclear families are  eating at Sticky Stephens, a parody of the Sticky Fingers Restaurant in Charleston that closed down in 2020.  Both sound dirty. The 1972 Rolling Stones album of that name  depicted a pair of jeans with an enormous bulge, leaving no question about why the fingers are sticky.

Junior points out a kissing couple: "Damn, look at that piece of tail he's with!" Ok, so he's bi.  Everybody watches as the man, Randall (Rene Rivera), lifts his girl onto the counter so they can have sex right in the restaurant!  Why doesn't someone on staff intervene? Eli yells at him to "tone down romance," and Randall yells "Suck my dick, Grandpa." But the couple leaves.

Over dinner, Junior reveals that he's now a wrestling promoter: "I got a stable full of fellas I keep working."  Tell me more, tell me more.  What do they do besides wrestling? Stripping?  Sex work?

"I wonder what my Daddy would think about you and me being reunited," Junior says.  Eli answers: "He put us together, so he would think he did a pretty good job."  Except they were separated for a lifetime.  That's not a great job of matchmaking.

Junior says that his Daddy just disappeared one day, setting up a major mystery of the Season: Did Eli murder Glendon Marsh?

Proper erections after the break.  Warning: explicit

Steve Antin: radical gay representation and beefcake, from "The Last American Virgin" to "Girlicious." With lots of bulges and butts

Steve Antin's bio on the Internet Movie Database claims that he "broke all the girls' hearts" in The Last American Virgin (1982).  Same old story: gay people don't exist, so all girls and no boys swooned over his character.

Spoiler alert: Steve is gay.  

Born in 1958, Steve broke into film playing the Jesse whose girl Rick Springfield longs for in "Jesse's Girl" (1981).  Next came The Last American Virgin (1982).  In his first major screen appearance, he plays high schooler Rick, who has sex with dozens of girls, like "every high school boy" in the 1980s -- except for his his buddy Gary (Lawrence Monoson, below), the "last American virgin."  So he and a third buddy, David (Joe Rubbo), strive to get Gary laid.  

This is not the typical 1980s "sex with girls is the meaning of life" teen comedy. Horndog Rick gets Diane pregnant and dumps her, so Virgin Gary pays for the abortion and falls in love with her, but Diane dumps him!  Then Gary dumps Rick and drives off in tears. Rather a downbeat ending. 

But there's a obvious gay subtext relationship between Gary and Rick: Gary seems to like Diane only because Rick was intimate with her.

And there's a lot of beefcake.  Far more semi-naked male bodies than female bodies.  Muscle hunks in their underwear. Jocks stripped down in the locker room. Steve with a boner (left).

There is even a penis size contest, with the boys gleefully evaluating packages while their classmates parade by naked.

When was the last time heterosexual male teenagers were so happy to gaze at a row of naked men?

You might almost think that this movie with a gay star had a gay audience in mind.

Steve went on to play some teenagers on tv, the spoiled rich kid/horndog in The Goonies (1985), and some action/adventure and dramatic roles, all heterosexual.  But when he became the boyfriend of mogul David Geffen, he got some gay-positive roles.

He wrote, produced, and starred in the dramedy Inside Monkey Zetterland (1992), as a retired child actor turned screenwriter who lives with his overbearing mother and wacky/sad relatives.  He's straight, but he is friends with a gay man (Rupert Everett) and a lesbian posing as a married couple.  They are plotting to bomb an insurance agency that is denying coverage to people who are HIV positive. 

It's My Party (1996), although extremely downbeat, was a classic of gay representation.  Nick (Eric Roberts) is dying of AIDS, with only a few days of mental awareness left, so he decides to kill himself.  His family and friends come to his "going-away party," including ex-boyfriend Brandon (1980s tv hunk Gregory Harrison).  Steve plays one of their friends.  Christopher Atkins, one of my friends in Los Angeles, also appears.

Brian To appears nude.

Bonus butts after the break

Eric Roberts: a lifetime of sleazebag killers, hung hunks, and noble gay guys

 

Eric Roberts has had a long career  -- 667 acting credits on the IMDB -- in serious roles, late-night sleazefest killers,  and beefcake stars, beginning at age 22 with King of the Gypsies (1978).

An underwear bulge in Star 80.  Eric plays a sleazebag who murders his wife (a Playboy star)

No bulge but some nice pecs and abs in Final Analysis (1992), an "erotic film noir" also starring Richard Gere.

Eric's butt, from Love is a Gun (1994)

In 1996, when it was dangerous for an actor to play a gay character, Eric starred in It's My Party, as a gay guy with AIDS who decides to host a party for family and friends, then end his life.  Well, in those days gay men in movies were either dying of AIDS or coming out into a world where everyone is homophobic and there is no LGBT subculture.  As far as I can tell, this was his only gay role.

Not a lot of beefcake lately, but with movies like In Cold Blood and Runaway Train, and tv shows like Grey's Anatomy and Will and Grace, who cares?

Besides, I'm pretty sure that Eric played Eli's friend Junior as bisexual in Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones.

See: Gemstones Episode 2.1 Review: Junior likes dicks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!