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

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 having kids, she argues that she's trying to keep her body "foine" to incite BJ's desire.  Nope, they need to make babies. Well, how are they going to make babies if BJ isn't into Judy? Desire and family can't be polar opposites.

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 girl 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 sex 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

"Asteroid City": Bleak play within a play within a play, with one teensy gay kiss and Matt Dillon's dick

Movie night was Asteroid City (2023), which I thought would be about atomic testing in Nevada in the 1950s.  Instead, I was watching the Theater of the Absurd.  Maybe Ionesco, where your mother turns into a giraffe and offers you brownies,  or a Monte Python episode where one sketch bleeds into another, so Vikings are suddenly talking to the Minister of Finance about the hippodrome tariff. 

As far as I can tell, there are two plays with plays.

1. In an old-fashioned black and white tv studio, a narrator tells us that what we are witnessing is a story, not real. The curtain opens to reveal:

2. The Playwright (Edward Norton) auditioning an actor for the lead in his play (Jason Schwartzman), who brings him ice cream, changes into a different costume, and delivers a nonsequiter monologue.  

They kiss..  But don't get excited: it's in the distance, and never referenced again, while there are three or four heterosexual romances coming up. We cut to the main story:

A lot of people arrive for the Junior Stargazers' Convention in Asteroid City, Nevada , where an asteroid crashed to Earth (they mean a meteor).  During the opening speeches, an alien descends from a spaceship and grabs the asteroid.  Everyone is put under quarantine, while the government tries to convince them that nothing happened.  After a week, the government is about to lift the quarantine, but the alien returns and gives the asteroid back.  The quarantine is on, but everyone riots, and the next day they are gone.  Maybe it was all a dream.

While all this is going on, there are several soap opera stories.  Steinbeck (Jason Schwartzman again, I think) arrives with his son and three young daughters.  He was going to leave the son and go on to his wealthy father-in-law's house to bury his wife's ashes, but his car broke down.  During the quarantine his three daughters, who are witches, bury the ashes in the desert and perform a spell to resurrect her.  She isn't actually resurrected, but she apparently appears in a flashback or flash-sideways scene.

Left: This is Jason Schwartzman's penis.  It is not Jason Schwartzman's penis, it is a salami.  It is not a salami, it is the diary of a 17th century French poet who wrote about salamis.

I figured that Steinbeck must be the famous novelist and nude model, who was active in Hollywood at the time, so I went scurrying to wikipedia for his biography.  It doesn't match.

More nonsequiters and dicks after the break

Why Him?: Adam Devine hooks up with Griffin Gluck over discussions of jizz. With bonus Gluck dick

 

When I saw that Adam Devine was in the 2016 father-of-the-bride comedy Why Him (2016), I forked over the $3.95 for a rental, even though he is far down the cast list on IMDB.  

You really can't go wrong with an Adam Devine movie.   His hotness makes watching him in anything worthwhile, and he appears to have made his career from talking about  penises and jizz, usually in a homoerotic context. (But what reference to penises and jizz is not homoerotic?).  

The premise: conservative button-down printer Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston) visits his daughter's fiance, the effervescent, unconventional tech millionaire Laird (James Franco, left), for Christmas.  The two start out hating each other, but learn to love and respect, yada yada yada.

Ned's entrepreneur son  Scotty (Griffin Gluck, right) tells him about Tyson Modell (Adam Devine), "the kid who founded Ghostchat.  He turned down billions of dollars, and he's only 24 years old."  They're going to meet up at Laird's Christmas party

Scene 1: What is bukkake? 

At the party, we see Tyson and Scotty -- neither with lady friends -- talking shop: "Totally tanked porting the thin-client apps for the JDK build.  It took me two weeks on the JDEE database..."  Scotty is more into the entrepreneurial side of things, but Tyson advises him to start coding.  The parents and a brother-sister  team join them (the brother is played by Boys in the Band star Andrew Rannells)

Ned is so confused by the tech talk that he exclaims:  "There's bukkake floating all around me."  He thinks bukkake means "overwhelmed," which technically it does: Tyson explains that it means "jizz all over your face."  This is particularly common after gang-bangs, or during,  when one of the guys finishes early.  Apparently Tyson only goes to male-only gang-bangs. .

Laird, who gave Ned the wrong definition, claims that 'I was trying to protect you, Dude.  It's a really sensitive conversation.  They're talking about guys jerking off on each other." None of Tyson's friends likes oral?

To illustrate what bukkake look like, Tyson shows everyone a video on his phone (we don't see it).  Scotty demonstrates considerable interest, but the others are disgusted.

"Is that you?" Laird asks.  

"No." But he nods  "yes" at Ned.

More sex after the break