Snakes and Ladders: A teacher and her gay son squabble with a chocolate heir, the Spanish counsul, and a closeted hunk. With Roque and Nico dicks

 I've never played the game "Snakes and Ladders" but apparently you move your piece up by landing on ladders and down by landing on snakes.  It's the title of several tv series and movies, most recently the Mexican Serpientes y Escaleras on Netflix. The promo shows a femme guy with orange hair at a party, heading for the bathroom, encountering a conservative guy ("on the right"), and having a conversation with awesome sexual tension. Ok, so let's go, Episode 1.1.

Scene 1: Some kids playing in a school yard.  A boy with blue eyeglasses and a girl get into a tussle, while the playground monitor looks horrified and the narrator tells us that "ethics" means "moral character," following the norms of the society. 

Cut to the Playground Monitor, aka the Prefect  putting on her prim schoolmarm outfit and walking through her mansion to kiss her pink-haired son.  He promises to come to lunch later.  She writes "I Deserve to Be Headmistress" in her notebook (aha, a micro-authority position, like Vice Principal), drives past the Millenium Arches that identify her city as Guadalajara, and arrives at the Colegio Andes (a grade school), only to find her friend Roque (Alfredo Gatica) passing out fliers for her competitor.

The Prefect yells at him. He responds: "She asked.  What could I do?"

N*de photos of Alfredo after the break.

Scene 2: She is called to the Headmistress's office to meet the parents of the blue-eyeglassed boy: Dad is the super-handsome Vicente (Martino Rivas, top photo and left) aka His Excellency Don Vicente Garcia, the Spanish Counsul.  Uh-oh, super-powerful.

The girl's father is dorky-looking Mr. Muriel, aka the Chocolate King, the head of Mexico's biggest chocolate company. 

Mr. and Mrs. Counsul claim that the girl grabbed the boy's testicles, which constitutes sexual assault. 

Chocolate King: "No way!  She's six years old,  too young to know about such things!"

The Prefect was there, but couldn't see well enough to affirm or deny that it happened.

Headmistress adjourns the meeting until tomorrow, and then yells at the Prefect: "You will write a statement indicating that you saw exactly what happened, and it will be what the Counsul wants to hear!"

The kids are still friends, but the parents forbid them from seeing each other again. In other news: Mr. Muriel is the ex-lover of Vicente's wife, and thinks that she came back to rekindle their romance. "No, my husband got a job here.".  Maybe he was better looking in the old days.

Scene 3: The Prefect and her friend discuss whether to say that the daughter did it or not.  The Chocolate King is the most popular parent in the school, but the Spanish Counsul!

At home, her bigoted, abusive ex-husband is visiting. There's a problem with their pink-haired son, Antonio: he's been gambling, and owes a lot of people money -- the Mafia!  She doesn't believe him.  They argue about who is the worse parent.  Then Antonio comes in and asks to borrow a little money. They start yelling at him: "I've raised you under the framework of ethics and morality!"

Uh-oh, the Chocolate King arrives in his limo, so Prefect tells them both to go out smiling, as if they're the perfect family.

Scene 4: The Chocolate King wants the Prefect to say that his daughter didn't do it, so she's not stigmatized as a sex offender at age six. 

When the Prefect balks, he gives the back story: Once he was engaged to Mrs. Garcia.  Then he got another girl pregnant, so he had to marry her instead.  She went to Spain, married Counsul Garcia, and now she's back, trying to prove that her husband has a bigger cock.  

"Here's my card. Call me if you have any wish you want me to fulfill.  And believe me, I can fulfill them all."  Whew, this dude is creepy.

Scene 5: The Prefect consults a Tarot card reader, who says that she's not going to make Headmistress. "But a week ago, they said I would make it.  What happened?"  The cards say: "No matter who you decide on, the other parent will try to destroy you."

Pink-Haired Antonio comes in to ask if she's thought about lending him the money. The Prefect: "I'm tired of trying to make you a good person.  I'm done."

"But I'm in danger."

"Tough. I have my own problems."

Scene 6: The second meeting with the parents, where the Prefect has to tell "what really happened."  Her verdict: it was a minor scuffle.  If the girl did it, she had no malicious intent. So we won't do an expulsion, but we'll transfer the boy to another class.

The Counsul is irate: "This is going to reach the King's ears." He means King Felipe VI of Spain.  Are we going to start a war over a testicle-grab?

The parents storm out.  The Headmistress is irate. 

Outside, the Chocolate King wants to know why the Prefect decided the way she did. "It was the right thing to do."  He promises to help her win over the mothers in her quest to become Headmistress: "I'm popular with the mother. I'm handsome, rich, and widowed."  Handsome?  You're a gargoyle, dude.  He's having a party tonight with a lot of mothers.  Maybe she can come?

More after the break

Pain and Glory: An aging director recalls his first crush and his first boyfriend, with nostalgia and nudity

For forty years, Pedro Almodóvar has been giving us raucous, irreverent, sometimes funny glimpses into the sexual and social freedom of post-Franco Spain: Bad Education; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!; A Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; What Have I Done to Deserve This? He's not exactly a proponent of essentialist gay identity: his gay men are usually there to have affairs with the female focus character, when she's not busy seducing her stepson.  Or maybe she'll seduce her stepson and his boyfriend, or join her sister in having the affair with the gay man.  There will be male nudity, urination, pop culture references, and kitsch. And these aren't comedies. 

Pedro went through similar machinations in his private life, being closeted, then stating that he was bisexual, and finally coming out as gay.  He's been with his partner, Fernando Iglesias, since 2002.

Dolor y gloria, Pain and Glory, is the 74-year old director's swan song, a summary and perhaps a justification of his work, touching on all of his major themes:  "sentimientos, costumbrismo, reencuentros, homosexualidad, sensibilidad, pasión, familia, drogas… "

Almodóvar stand-in Salvador, played by regular star Antonio Banderas, is an aging director, in physical and mental decline.  His chronic pain has kept him from new projects for several years.

Left: A misty memory of Banderas, fully nude in his first film appearance in 1982.

Asked to speak at the restoration of one of his old films, Flavor, he decides to look up the star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia, left), whom he hasn't seen since the filming.  They had a falling out over Alberto's use of heroin on the set.

While reconciling, and trying heroin himself to ease his chronic pain, he tells the story of his first boyfriend.  

His First Boyfriend:  Director Salvador was in a relationship with Federico, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, in the 1980s, but ended it due to his heroin use.  

Federico turned out to be one of Almodovar's temporary gay men: he left the "lifestyle" behind, moved to Argentina, married a woman, and had children.

Flavor star Alberto turns this story into a play that draws the attention of the real life Federico.  He returns to Madrid and wants to start the relationship again, but Director Salvador wants to keep the past in the past. 

More after the break

Alberto Ferreira: Not the gay guy in "The Other Side" or "Bad Education," but at least he has a big one

 

Do you want a profile of Alberto Ferreiro, star of the gay classic Bad Education, 2003?

How about now?

The guy is very difficult to research: no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, a Wikipedia page in Spanish that only goes to 2006. 

Alberto Ferreiro, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, has just died and dominates Google searches with memorials.

Getty Images promises 31 pictures of Alberto, but delivers two.  The others are of a semi-naked woman gyrating.

So we'll have to make do with the IMDB.  

Alberto was born in Madrid in 1983, and began his acting career in 2000 with El Otro Barrio, "The Other Neighborhood" or "The Other Side," about the bond between a delinquent boy and a lawyer. Alberto stars in a boy-meets-girl subplot.

The frontal nudity comes from Nito, 2003, a 17-minute short about a bullied kid with learning disabilities.  He figures that the best way to fight back is to have sex with a lady.

Mala Educacion, Bad Education, 2004, has a filmmaker interviewing a trans woman, who tells the story of two boys, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fele Martinez, falling in love in a Catholic school in the 1960s.  Torment, torture, angst, despair, and tragedy follow, as was common in gay relationships in movies in those days.  You gotta punish those gays.

Alberto shows his butt while sexing a lady.  I swear, until this moment, I thought he played the boy who fell in love with Gabriel Garcia Bernal.

Segundo asalto, 2005, released in the U.S. as The Good Boy, features the relationship between a failed boxer and a bank robber.  Alberto has a minor role Dienteputo.

Recurring or starring TV roles followed: Un lugar en el mundo, "A place in the world"

Mis adorables vecinos, "My lovely neighbors"

More after the break