"Saltburn": "Brideshead Revisited" for the post-gay genearation, with kink and penises

Whenever possible, I check out plot synopses, reviews, and trailers before watching a movie. Since Amazon Prime has been pushing Saltburn , I checked the reviews: "a spectacularly crafted masterpiece"; "brilliant"; "sick, savage, and satisfying"; "vibes forward" (I don't know what that means); "a febrile thriller."  Sounds like a mishmash of Brideshead Revisted and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a poor (well, middle class) boy longing for the unstated homoerotic tensions and sybaritic excesses of the Polo Club crowd.  Except set in 2016, not the Georgian Era.

Some of the reviews contained plot synopses, which allowed me to make my decision: don't watch, don't even look at a trailer.  Here's why. 

1.  The focus character, sort of, is decadent Oxford richster Felix, seen here eating a popsicle and reading a Harry Potter book like a modern day Sebastian Flyte.  He's played by Jacob Elordi, a bad boy in Euphoria.

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2, Felix feels sorry for the sob stories of  poor-but-honest classmate Oliver (Barry Keoghan, who has received awards and appeared on a list of the greatest living Irish actors),  So "Come out to Brideshead...um, Saltburn with me."

Oliver doesn't want to date Felix, he wants to be him.  So he does something too disgusting to mention here.  Really, really disgusting.   I'm not kink shaming: probably 3/4ths of the population will get physically sick just by reading about it, but if it's your thing, fine.   Why not just give him a blow job?

3, Felix conquered, it's time to coerce Cousin Farleigh(Archie Madkwe) into sex.  Then Felix's sister, with another really, really disgusting kink.  

4. Felix gets tired of the lies, deceptions, and disgusting kink, and orders Oliver to leave Saltburn.  But Cousin Farleigh ends up dead.  Then Felix!  Now, of course, Oliver has to stay to find more family members to do disgusting kink with. Then Venetia kills herself!

5. Oliver is running out of family members.  He tries to seduce Mom, but she refuses.  Wait, dude, you forgot Dad and the Butler  Then Dad, tired of the lies, deception, and dead family members, bribes Oliver to leave.  He does.

6, But when Dad dies, Oliver returns, forces Mom to sign Saltburn over to him, and kills her.  Now he is the master of Saltburn, so he dances around naked.  

Actually, this looks sort of interesting, an a post-gay, everybody-does-everybody way.  Maybe I'll watch, but skip over the disgusting kink scenes. Or I'll just fast forward to the last scene with Barry Keoghan dancing naked like a sybaritic sycophant.

Dicks after the break

Matthew William Bishop: Leatherman, muscleman, actor, LGBTQ advocate. With nude bodybuilder bonus.

 

If you saw this guy standing outside a brownstone in New York, would you a) Run away screaming; b) get on your knees.

How about now?

He's Matthew William Bishop, who gave up a career in corporate public relations in 2021, when the acting bug bit.  His Some Kind of Wonderful, about four gay guy looking for love in Palm Springs, won four awards for Best LGBTQ Film. 

Then he hit the big time playing the silent supernatural Big Daddy, a symbol of AIDs in American Horror Story, NYC:  (Set during the first years of the AIDS epidemic.)

Matthew is also a bodybuilder, obviously. He took first place at the 2023 Miami Muscle Beach Contest in the NPC Open Super Heavyweight Category.

And a philanthropist, devoted to recovery, AIDS awareness, and LGBTQ advocacy.  10% of the sales of this "Make the Deposits" shirt go to the New York LGBTQ Community Center, so it's probably not dirty.

This isn't supposed to be dirty, either, although a lot of the comments on his Instagram page were from people willing to "choke on it."

"It" after the break

"Solar Opposites": Do Korvo and Terry act like a married couple? Do they call each other 'husbands?' Do they have sex?

Solar Opposites (2020-) is a Hulu animated series about two aliens, their replicants, and their pupa,  who flee from their doomed planet and crash-land on Earth.  During Season 1, showrunner Justin Roiland addressed the question of whether male adults Korvo (Justin Roiland, Dan Stevens) and Terry (Thomas Middleditch, left) were a gay couple.  He said that since their species practices asexual reproduction, they don't have sex, and therefore they can't be gay.  Jerk, thinking that being gay is purely about sex.  What about romantic partnerships? 

Apparently he changed his mind.  The fan wiki states that Korvo and Terry became a romantic couple between Seasons 1 and 2.  But how romantic are they?  Do they say anything?  Do anything?  Or do you have to just infer from gay subtexts? To check, I reviewed some episodes, either because the premise sounded interesting or because there was a hot guest star.

Episode 2.1: The Solar Opposites discover another refugee group from their home planet, living in London!  But it turns out that they have a disturbing hidden agenda.  No indication that Korvo and Terry are romantic partners.  With the voice of Thomas Lennon, the grotesque gay-stereotype cop in Reno 911 (left: his butt)

Episode 2.2: Korvo hates dinner parties, so he declares them illegal and starts a police force to seek out forbidden dinner party paraphernalia.  Things turn deadly: people are turned into wine.  During the denouement, Korvo and Terry kiss.

Episode 2,3: Yumyulack, the "teenage boy" replicant, invents a ray that gives him a huge penis -- not for sex, for the power that goes with it.  He makes it bigger and bigger, until it threatens to destroy the world.  No indication that Korvo and Terry are a romantic couple.

Episode 3.2  Korvo wants to take up a hobby, but everything he tries, Terry is already doing, and doing better.  In frustration, he goes into a toy train shop.  The manager thinks that he's just pretending to be interested in trains to beat his "alien husband."

Episode 3.3 Terry shows Korvo the joy of standing in line, and introduces him to his "line husband," Linus (Adam Pally).  Line husband and regular husband jealously snipe at each other, until Korvo finally wins Terry's heart. (Left: Dan Stevens' butt)

Alien bulge and dick after the break