The Mick, Episode 1.12: Strong gay subtext and ample beefcake in this gloomfest. Dick and butt shots do not help.

 

The Mick (2017-2019) was a Fox sitcom (and you know what that means: raunch) starring Kaitlyn Olson of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (and you know what that means: raunch).A low-life grifter, she becomes the guardian of her upscale sister's kids after the parents flee the country to avoid a federal prosecution.  It doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but Episode 1.2, "The Wolf," features both Scotty McArthur and Andy Favreau, who are definitely my cup of tea, so let's review. 

Scene 1: Mick: "You've never sucked anything before."  Her boyfriend Jimmy (Scotty McArthur): "I'm sucking as hard as I can, ok?" Mick: "It's not coming!  Suck harder!" Actually, guys, a successful blow job is more about the lip and tongue act...psych!   He's not giving a blow job, he's sucking gas out of a car in a show room, so they can steal a different car.   Meanwhile, hetero-horny teen Chip (Thomas Babusca) impresses a lollipop-sucking girl by bragging about all the cool cars he'll drive when he gets his license.

Horny Teen brags to Mick and Jimmy about the girl he met on an online dating site; he's sending her money fo air fare so she can fly over from Russia for a visit.  Scam!  The grown-ups laugh at him.  "You know nothing about the real world."

Scene 2: Mick, her young adult niece Sabrina, and another lady  drinking beer in the kitchen. Niece tells them that her boyfriend Kai, introduced in an earlier episode, is back from studying furniture design in Scandinavia, and taking her out to dinner.  And here he comes, in a muscle shirt!  But he ordered Chinese delivery instead of going out, which makes Niece angry. And he didn't actually go to furniture school, because the application wasn't in English. "Loser!" Mick exclaims.

Mick's boyfriend Jimmy comes in and starts eating the kung pao chicken with his hands.  Mick notes that he used to be hot, but he let himself go, "grew breasts," and became into a slob.  And now Kai is on the same path.  Niece doesn't believe it.

Scene 3: Horny Teen at the luggage carousel at the airport, holding a bouquet of flowers, while Mick films him for humiliation.  There's only one bag left: a long-haired blond picks it up.  Horny Teen rushes to hug...a guy!  Gender misidentification joke, yuck. Mick is jubilant: "Watching you being destroyed was so good!"  Hey, you're the guardian.  How about comforting the kid?

She explains.  The world is full of wolves and sheep. Mick and the Russian girlfriend are wolves, taking advantage of people.  Horny Teen is a sheep, getting taken advantage of.  But he could change, learn to be a wolf. "Sure, what the hell."

Scene 4:  In a grocery story for the first lesson: a wolf takes what it needs.  Mick orders Horny Teen to steal a bag of chips.  He hides a bag under his shirt, and immediately is caught by the security guard.  

Out in the parking lot, Mick is eating the fried chicken that she stole.  She was using Horny Teen as a distraction!  Lesson 2: Never trust another wolf.

Scene 5: Kai and Jimmy bonding in a sauna.  Jimmy: "Turns out he was Mormon all along."  You discussing an old boyfriend, dude?  Niece enters and wonders what they are up to.  "We got a friendship cooking."  Tell me more....

She asks Kai about his goals for the future. "Nothing, just hanging out with Jimmy...and you, of course."  "Well, get some goals, or people will think you're a loser."

Scene 6: Off-track betting joint. Next lesson: how to spot a sheep.  Horny Teen suggests the guy waving money around like a jackass. The scam: you get mussed up, slip your wallet into the guy's pocket, and claim that he mugged you for your winning ticket.  The haul is $38 -- but they also ruined a $1,000 suit and sent a guy to jail!

Left: Andy's dick

Scene 7: Back home, Horny Teen is done -- this is totally immoral! Besides -- his online girlfriend is here!  She was detained by ICE, and she didn't have a cell phone to call on.  Horny Teen gives her some money for a cell phone and asks the maid to make up the guest room for her. Don't you, like, want to have sex with her?  Mick isn't buying it: she's a wolf.  The scam is continuing.

Scene 8: Kai in a towel, getting ready for a meeting.  "Oh boy," Niece thinks, "He's looking for a job!"  Nope, his meeting is with Jimmy -- also in a towel -- about their new business.  Women like hot guys, and they can't fix anything around the house, so Stud Nailers, shirtless household repair.  Hey, that's sexist and heteronormative!  Lots of ladies can fix things, and lots of guys like hot guys.  

They hug: "Having a business partner who's also a friend takes off a lot of the pressure." Aww, why don't you kiss him?  Oh, right, your girlfriend is there. "Now let's go hit that sauna."  Butt grab.  Gay subtext just turned into text.

Scene 9: Dinner: pizza. Jimmy and Kai found a van for the Stud Nailers business. Good idea.  Photos of shirtless guys with big..um...hammers.  The Horny Teen's Girlfriend suggests a web show.  Also a good idea: Actually, that show already exists: "Flip the Strip."  

Niece tries to discourage them.  What's her problem? Does she think that the guys are actually having sex?

Next: Mick asks the Girlfriend about her intentions.  What does a wolf like her want with a sheep like Horny Teen?  Reveal: She likes him because he is a sheep, kind and gentle.  "He will neve hurt me."Aww. She's had to do a lot of things to survive.  

Jimmy: "We've all had to do things to survive."  Tell us about your hustler days, dude. 

There are two more nude photos after the break.  Plus the most disgusting concluding scene in television history.

Sylvester Stallone: Nude photos of Rocky, Rambo, Estelle Getty's son, Kurt Russel's boyfriend, and the Italian Stallion

 As Rocky and Rambo, Sylvester Stallone defined the gung-ho cowboy 1980s, singlehandedly defeating the Russian army and winning the Vietnam War.  

His grunting, snarling man-mountains didn't have a lot of sex scenes, but they did manage to get stripped out of their clothes by various cops, prison guards, and torturers.  Here Rambo is fumigated in prison in First Blood (1982).

Tortured in a loincloth in Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985)

During the 1990s and 2000s, Stallone often got naked while playing grunting man-mountains or parodies of them, as in the cop buddy gay-subtext Tango and Cash (1989).  The guy on the left is his gay-subtext buddy, Kurt Russell.

Or Stop, or My Mom will Shoot (1992), with Estelle Getty as the Mom.  Imagine, Rambo and Dorothy of The Golden Girls as siblings.

But to see the Full Monte, we have to go back to 1970.  

Stallone dick after the break. Warning: it gets 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