"Love is a Poison": High-power lawyer and cute con artist stalker in a post-gay Japan

 

Love is a Poison, a Japanese tv series on Netflix, has this description:  "An elite lawyer with social anxiety takes in a genius con artist."  Ok, if they're both men, there may be some gay subtexts.

The Episode 1 description: "After meeting a young man named Haruto, elite lawyer Shiba can't stop thinking about him. He goes camping to clear his mind, but runs into Haruto."

He goes camping.  Shiba is a man, and "can't stop thinking about" a man.  Either this is a gay romance, or world-class queerbaiting.

Scene 1: High-power lawyer Shiba's partner congratulates him on winning his case. "I've learned so much from working with you."  Shiba is upset: "You've learned?  If you're still learning, you're not fit to be my partner. You're fired." Jerk

Shiba tells us that he passed the bar with the highest score, and now, at age 27, works in in the most prestigious law firm in Japan.  He wants to make the name Shiba a worldwide legal brand.  "This is a serious legal drama."

Cut to a young man, sweating and crying, telling Shiba, "please don't leave me," and touching his face.  "Or not. This is a legal drama and romantic thriller."  This is a gay romance or a seriously excellent job of queerbaiting.  

Scene 2: Shiba in a bar with colleage Kotaro Kozama, a caring human rights lawyer, his exact opposite, but he wins cases.  Kotaro shows the bartender a photo of his new lover: "He's gay, but I don't care about other people's sexual preferences," har har. 

In other news: the big boss won't give Shiba any more partners, since he's chased away 99.  Not to worry, Shiba tells him: "I can handle the work load alone."

Scene 3: Shiba runs into the bar bathroom, and accidentally hits a young man,  Haruto.  He gives him his wallet so he won't sue.  Kneeling on the floor, Haruto smiles serenely and says "You're very kind."

Back home, Shiba tends to and talks to his plants, but he can't stop thinking about the guy.  "Ridiculous!  I'm not interested in him!"  The only way to clear his head is to go camping.

Scene 4: At the campsite, Shiba can't start a fire, so he eats an energy bar instead of the expensive beef he brought.

Suddenly Haruto appears.  He explains that he's staying with a friend nearby, so it's just a coincidence that they ran into each other again.  I'm not buying it.

After insulting Shiba's camping skill, he starts the fire and cooks the best beef that Shiba has ever eaten.  Then he gets a call, says that he has to return to his friend's house, and leaves. Curioser and curioser.

Even more curious after the break

Carlin James: The third thug, a gay three-way, a queer romance, and Pretty Dudes.

In Episode 4.5 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk as a sleazy lawyer, a flashback to 2003 shows the young Saul/Jimmy McGill working in a cell phone store.  He starts a side-business selling stolen burner phones (popular with drug dealers, gang members, cheating husbands, and so on). 

While scoping out customers at the Dog House, a sleazoid-favored hot dog stand, he approaches teen thugs Peewee, Skipper, and Scooter. They don't need any phones, but they'll wait until he's done for the evening and beat him up for his profits. Jimmy kicks himself for not being able to foresee that the interaction would go bad.

In the next episode, Jimmy approaches the guys at their laudromat-hangout and offers to give them a cut if they let him sell without harassment: a more reliable dividend stream than robbing him just once.  They decide that they prefer robbery, and chase him -- into a trap!

Jimmy's allies, Huell Babineaux and Man Mountain, tie them up, gag them, and hang them upside down in a piñata warehouse.  They begin smashing the piñatas with baseball bats.  Jimmy asks the teen thugs if they prefer to be smashed to death quickly or slowly.  

The thugs are so terrified that they promise not to bother Jimmy anymore, and to tell all the other thugs to leave him alone.  He calls off the smashing, but his goons pretend not to hear him until the bat comes withn inches of Peewee's face.  "You get one warning," Jimmy tells him as he whimpers.  "And that was it." 

Other than the gay-subtext potential of the three guys hanging out without chatting up girls, I was interested in this scene because I have profiles of two of the actors: Tommy Nelson, left, and Cory Chapman, center.  

Both would go on to roles in The Righteous Gemstones, but in different seasons, and both have a substantial amount of gay and gay-subtext work.  

So what about the third thug, Scooter?  

He's played by Carlin James, a Filipino-American actor from Long Beach.  His on-screen career begins in 2009-11, playing college students in dramatic shorts and guys who get killed in thrillers.

His first mainstream role was in a 2016 episode of  How to Get Away with Murder: he plays Martin, one of the guys that main character Connor, played by Jack Falahee, invites home for a three-way.

More Carlin after the break

"A Man in Full" or "The Fullness of Man" or "Filling a Man." Whatever, it has a wild penis scene

 

While I am scrolling through my new photo feed, I am shocked to find two that are extremely explicit (after the break).  In the first, an older man wearing a suit catches a young man having anal sex with his boyfriend.  So Dad didn't know that he was gay?  In the second, the young man confronts the older man -- while fully aroused, and huge!

The caption says Tom Pelphrey, whom I've never heard of, in the movie A Man in Full.  It must have a gay theme -- gay men being accused of being "not really men," and all that.

Tom Pelphrey has 10,000 photos on the internet, but he usually looks much older, so this must be a movie from early in his career.  Probably European -- what American movie would show full arousal?

More research reveals that he starred in Ozark, but I can't tell which character.  An article in People says Perry Abbott, but a Reddit feed says that he was AMAZING as Ben.  The Ozark wiki mentions Ben, "a major antagonist in the third season," but not Perry Abbott, so People must be wrong.

Here's a long shot of Ben's butt.

Next I try to look up A Man in Full, but it's such a nonsensical title that I keep searching on A Full Man and The Fullness of Men instead.   When I finally get the title right, it's not an artsy European movie from the early 2000s, it's a tv series that dropped on Netflix in 2024!  Atlanta real estate mogul Charlie Croker, played by famous actor Jeff Daniels, goes bankrupt, and has to defend his empire. Isn't that, like, "Succession"?  

Jeff Daniels is best known for the adulation of 1990s stupidity Dumb and Dumber. Here he shows a bulge in Something Wild (1986).

Tom Pelphrey plays "Raymond Peepgrass" Ridiculous name! This guy is a voyeur of lawns?

Wikipedia doesn't say who he is, so I'm assuming from the photo, the rich guy's lawyer?  Why would he care if his lawyer is gay?

Looking for a photo of Croker and Peepgrass -- Peepgrass? --  together, I get the name of the series wrong again!

Reviews mention "a wild scene" and "a shocking scene," but fail to say what episode, so I surmise the last, "Judgment Day."  I fast forward to the very last scene of the series.

A peep at Peepgrass after the break. Warning: Explicit.

"Partner Track": High-power lawyer is passed over in favor of people with penises. Yes, we see a few.

Partner Track , on Netflix, is about a high-powered Manhattan lawyer.  Are there lawyers in any other city?   But I couldn't find any gay characters or subtexts, so here goes. Maybe there will be some grey-suit hunks in steam rooms.

Scene 1: We're in NYC!  You can tell because of the shots of Central Park and the Empire State Building.  Close-up of pink high-heeled shoes, eventually are revealed to be Ingrid, a lawyer  in a pink business outfit, standing out amid the throngs of grey-suit men.  She gives some coin to a homeless guy, gets jostled by a grey-suit man, and tells us that this city is tough on a girl who wants to get ahead.

Inside the glass-and-steel building, she meets her friend, a woman in a blue business outfit.  They discuss Ingrid's obsessive drive to be made junior partner at her law firm (ok, partner track, I get it).   It's down to her, Dan , and Todd, but they have penises, so she has to do something spectacular to tip the balance, like land a major account.  

When they arrive upstairs, Dan and Todd, and a third guy, Hunter, can't wait to start their hetero-horny hostile-workplace sexism: "she's got a wide margin on the face-body quotient.  She looks like you from the back, and Dan from the front.  Ugh!"  So the epitome of ugliness is...a man.  Got it! 

The three grey suits don't have any distinguishing characteristics: they are all fratboy-style hunks, they mention sports every 10 seconds, and they think of women as sex toys..  But in case you are interested, they are played by Zane Philips (top photo), Nolan Gerald Funk (left), who often plays gay roles, and Will Stout ("actor, West Virginian, Dad", but no beefcake).

The butts of the guys follow:

Everyone drools over Ultra-Richster, who will decide on the next junior partner.  They have to really butter him up!  

Ingrid rushes to her office, ignores a phone call from her mother, and tells her assistant to gather all the intel needed to wow Ultra-Richster.  

She also meets her new paralegal Justin (Roby Attal), a white dudebro who has his feet on his desk and is busily texting and ignoring his duties.

Left: Nolan's butt. He's having sex with a lady.

Ingrid's friend asks why she was assigned such a terrible paralegal. The answer: since Ingrid is Korean-American, HR thought that assigning her only paralegals of color might be construed as racist, so they got her a white one. Problem: they couldn't find any competent white paralegals.

Friend shoves his feet off the desk and yells: "Ingrid graduated #2 in her class at Harvard Law.  You will show her some respect!"  Oh, please, every lawyer on tv graduated at the top of their class at Harvard Law.

Scene 2:  Out of nowhere, Friend asks "What happened to the Brit you hooked up with long time ago?  You said he was like Bogart from Casablanca?"  Ingrid shrugs.  "It was just a hookup."  "Well, he was just hired by this firm.  A chance for you to get laid, and take your mind off your obsession with becoming partner!"  Why do you care so much?  Are you a standard romcom friend who exists only to goad the big city girl into accepting the small-town hunk? Or, in this case, hunky Brit?

Scene 3:  Ingrid runs into Tyler (Bradley Gibson).  He is wearing a blue suit, so he's a nice guy.  This series is as color-coordinated as an old Western.  He is bragging to someone on his cellphone that he has landed a bunch of accounts, plus he started reading Vogue, Teen Vogue, and Women's Wear Daily when he was 11.  The guy on the phone is impressed, and gives him the account. 

Left: Zane's butt.  He's having sex with a guy.

I thought Tyler would be a standard romcom gay bff,  but he asks Ingrid to "come say hi to the kids at the reception tonight."   Was that thrown in to identify him as heterosexual?  About 20% of gay men have kids, you know.  There are several ways to get the job done that dont require sex with a lady.

Scene 4:  Not looking where she is going, Ingrid has a splat! meet-cute encounter with...you guessed it, the Brit, she used to date, Jeff Murphy (Dominic Sherwood).  He stares in cliched teencom Girl-of-my-dreams lust, but unfortunately he doesn't remember Ingrid from their long-ago hookup.  He was way drunk that night.  Ingrid is way pissed.

Whoops, Brit Jeff was hired at level five, whatever that means, so he's in the running for junior partner, too.  Romance between competitors, a cliched...um, I mean classic romcom trope.

Scene 5: All of the contenders -- Dan, Todd, Brit Jeff, and Ingrid -- watch in amusement as the Richster demolishes fawning acolyte Sanders: "Don't ask if you can ask a fucking question, just ask the fucking question! And don't laugh.  Laughter is a coward's expression of fear."  

They bet on which cliched business phrase Richster will use first.

Scene 6: A meeting.  Who wants to work on getting a corporate merger contract worth $2.9 billion? Wait -- is that the law firm's fee?   Ingrid brags about her qualifications, repeatedly, and is ignored.  He assigns Grey Suit Dan instead.  "And this deal is confidential.  Any leak, and I will fucking tear up your fucking license my fucking self."  

Out in the hallway, Grey Suits Dan assigns Ingrid some grunt work.  She fumes.  Is she going to start murdering these grey suits?

Scene 7: Another meeting. The big boss walks right by Ingrid to shake hands with Dudebro Paralegal Justin, because he has a penis.  Maybe he wants to see it?  Then he orders Ingrid to bring them some wine. She relegates the task to Justin. "Oh...you're the associate?  Sorry...you look so...young."  He means "lacking a penis."  Everybody else arrives, and Ingrid is ignored again as they delve into sports and car metaphors.

Guys demonstrate that they have penises after the break