Ten Nude Dudes from Rejected Reviews, Part 2: From Ben Affleck to Bill Skalsgard

 

Every day I check the new releases and my recommendations, beginning with Netflix, and then going on to Hulu, MAX, and, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Amazon Prime, looking for movies or tv series to review.   They should be in a genre that I like, with gay characters, gay subtexts, or at least some beefcake. 

Most are easy to reject, icons with ladies only, a man and a woman gazing at each other, or guys shooting things. 

Sometimes I just jump in, but usually research is necessary to ensure that there are no nasty surprises, like queerbaiting or homophobic jokes. 

The result is a lot of n*de dudes with no review attached.  

1. Garrett Clayton, top photo, in Reach, 2018.  Socially awkward band geek Stephen, Garrett Clayton,  is planning to kill himself due to the constant bullying, until the new k*d at school, Jordan Doww, falls in love...um, befriends him.   According to a review, it's supposed to be a gay romance, but they "staunchly refuse to say the word," although there are a lot of homophobic slurs thrown around...at a performing arts school in 2016?

2. Stephen Luca in Blame the Game, 2024. Three male-female couples gather for their weekly game night. Two of the guys, Stephen Luca and Dennis Mojen, get naked, but nothing comes of it. In fact, the new guy gets tormented by his girlfriend's ex.

3. Ben Affleck in Going All the Way, which just appeared on Netflix, even though it's from 1996. After returning from the Korean War, two men, Jeremey Davies and Ben Affleck,  search for love and fulfillment in Middle America. Sounds fine, except in the icon, they're in the background of a shot of a woman's breasts, and according to the plot synopsis, they don't become a gay couple.

Left: Ben dick.  You already know what his face looks like.

4. Jaeden Martel in Mr Harrigan's Phone, 2022.   A teenager makes friends with an elderly hellraiser, who dies, but continues to call him, and arrange for the deaths of his enemies. No girls in the plot synopsis or trailer, but the wikipedia page reveals that he has a crush on a girl.  Why do they hide that? To lure queer viewers in?

5. Nicholas Alexander Chavez as a hunky priest in Grotesquerie, 2024. I actually started watching. The detective arrives at the house.  The cop tells her that they should let the FBI handle it, because it's a hate crime.  "Hate crime against what?" she asks.  "Everything."  

A nuclear family Mom and two preteen boys have been killed and placed at the dinner table.  Dad's body parts are scattered all over.  The timer goes off: whatever is cooking in the pot is read.  I'll bet it's Dad's head.

I fast forward...it's women talking to other women for 45 minutes, and then the detective in bed with her boyfriend. And it turns out to be a tv show, not a movie.  Next!

More Chavez after the break

Fifty million Frenchmen can't be straight: Eight Bayeux boyfriends, Aix amis, and Parisian cocombres

 

You've probably heard the song "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong":

They say the French are naughty

They say the French are bad

They all declare that over there

The French are going mad.

They have a reputation of being very gay

I just got back from Paris, and I just want to say:

It's true.

I spent a summer in Paris in grad school, and visited regularly until COVID squashed international travel, so I have quite a lot of memories of Parisian cocombres.

Images of people I know are posted with their permission

1. The Ballet School at the Opera National.

Go in the winter -- no crowds.  On Christmas Eve, the Louvre is deserted.

2. A Turkish musician

3.  On the train

Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, my favorite place in Paris.  Well, aside from that bar near the Centre Pompidou...

4. Garz dans le placard -- guy in the closet

More après la pause -- after the break.  Caution: explicit.

Lucien Laviscourt: Shirtless in soaps, romcoms, Shakespeare, Archie comics. With a j/o video

 

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, everybody watched the Netflix series Emily in Paris, because they couldn't get to the real Paris. Surprise -- it's still streaming, with Season 4 coming up. The hapless social media content creator and her friends are still falling in love at the drop of a script, with Lucas Bravo, Charles Martins, Kevin Diaz, Paul Forman, and most recently Lucien Laviscount.

The British actor -- I know, I thought he was French, too -- has 43 credits listed on the IMDB, beginning with Clocking Off, 2002.

The interconnected lives of Manchester mill workers.  I wonder if they do a Full Monty.

Soap stud roles followed: 13 episodes of Grange Hill, 34 episodes of  Coronation Street, 18 episodes of Waterloo Road.  Plus guest spots on Life Bites, Father & Son, New Tricks, Shameless, Mount Pleasant...well, the list goes on and on.

I might want to see Still Star-Crossed, set in Verona shortly after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, with new Montague-Capulet lovers investigating political machinations. Lucien plays Romeo in a flashback.

Plus a lot of modeling, here for Tommy Hilfinger.  I guess they're supposed to be very close teammates, not boyfriends.  But you never know.

The Bye-Bye Man, 2017, is Lucien's first starring role: "three friends stumble upon the horrific origins of a mysterious figure they discover is the root cause of the evil behind unspeakable acts."  

 Got all that? A bit overblown, with way too many adjectives, but I gather that we're working down from unspeakable acts caused by an evil caused by a mysterious figure who has horrific origins. 

Ulp. All you really need to know is it's all straight people, and Lucien shows his butt.

Another starring role in Snatch, 2017-2018, about...well, the IMDB description is suffering from adjective overload, but it's about con artists who get in over their heads.  The guys, Lucien and Rupert Grint, have a gay-subtext buddy-bond that gets ruined when they both fall in love with The Girl.

Katy Keene, 2020-21, was an ill-fated attempt to hit Riverdale gold by shoving minor Archie Comics characters like Alexander Cabot III into modern-day New York.   

More Lucien after the break