Grosse Pointe Gardening Society: Heterosexuals garden, have affairs, and murder someone. With a hung Hodge and Wolfe wang

 

Don't you hate it when you subscribe to a streaming service for one movie or tv show, and then find nothing else of interest?  We just finished Paramount Plus for Twin Peaks, and now we've in Peacock for Wicked, Nosferatu, and since I'm trying to watch everything from Adam Devine, the hottest guy on the planet,  Break Point.  Done. But I'm not going to spend $18 a month to watch three movies, so here's a review of Grosse Pointe Garden Society: one of the garden-society members is male, gardening is gay-coded, so surely he'll be gay.

Note: Grosse Pointe is an affluent suburb of Detroit.  It just means "big tip," as in tip of land, in French, but it sounds funny. 

Prelude: The gardeners dump a body into a hole they dug. The four stories are interspliced, but I'll separate them to make the plots easier to follow, and give them nicknames: From left to right, Entitled, Pink Hat, Male Gardener, and White Hat.

Pink Hat's Story: Six months earlier, a park area with a lot of flowers. Pink Hat puts up a "lost dog" flier on the community bulletin board and narrates: "They say people look like their dogs, but when you're in a garden club, you're more like the flowers you plant." She begins unloading geraniums, but the Snippy Leader tells her that they're not good enough to win the award this year. 

"I think I'd be a geranium," Pink Hat continues, flashing back to smooching with her underwear-clad boyfriend (they don't unclench long enough for a screen shot).  Then to her high school class, where they're discussing the Romantic Poets (that's the Romantic Era, 1790-1830, not "romance').  She hates it, although she does gaze lustfully at one of the Hunkoids (Christian Finlayson).

Cut to Hunkoid's Mom coming in to complain about her son's grade -- "D on a poem?"  He copied the lyrics to a Kenny Lamar song.  So why not an F?    Mom threatens.  

In other news, Pink Hat's application for a job at the New Yorker has been rejected. 

Later, Pink Hat and boyfriend (Alexander Hodge) have dinner with his parents, who criticize her writing ambitions and his job painting restaurant signs.  They want them to move into their rental property, four bedrooms and two baths, for when you have children.  "You know the heterosexist trajectory: job, house, wife, kids?  Have some kids, already."

Pink Hat doesn't thnk she wants kids, which horrifies them."  But...you have a uterus...

After the horrible dinner, Pink Hat meets Male Gardener outside a garage to drink.  He reveals that they found her missing dog -- she's dead.  At least it doesn't die on camera.  Someone shot her!  Pink Hat seethes for revenge.

At school, the Hunkoid who plagiarized his poem drops by to explain: "That song moved me."  White Hat isn't impressed.  So does this mean that you'll stop lusting after him?  "So why did you give me a D?  D means dick. You think I'm a dick."

He approaches threateningly, and hints that because she "got personal," he killed her dog.

Seething, Pink Hat complains to the Principal: "He's rude, disrespectful..." Arrogant?   But the Principal won't expell him, because his parents are rich: they built the lacrosse stadium, the library...well everything.  "We work for them; they can do what they want."

Left: Hung Hodge

So she accosts Hunkoid's mom at the beauty parlor and says that she's reconsidered his grade: now it's an F, "because you've failed him as a parent."  That's not a good reason.  "Your son killed my dog."  Not a good reason either. 

Cut to Pink Hat being fired for standing up to the rich people.  Hunkoid drives up in his new car to gloat. 

Potential Victim: Hunkoid or his Mom

Male Gardener's Story: He's Ben Rappaport, top photo, introduced talking to Pink Hat about cars: "Coyote-V8 with dual Blistein shocks. It's the exact '66 Bronco I restored with my Dad"  What's with the car talk at a garden club?  Are the writers trying to prove that this guy is "a real man," that is, heterosexual?

Pink Hat tells us that Male Gardener is a dandelion.  They can grow anywhere.  Cut to him bringing his two toddler kids to "see Mommy."  Heterosexual identity established at Minute 2.14, unless you count the car talk.  He bursts into the office to find Mom "pollinating with another flower," har har.   So they broke up, and now he's gazing longlingly at Pink Hat.

In the present,  Male Gardener drops off the kids at his ex-wife's elegant Tudor.  But he has them for two more minutes, so he forces them to stay in the car, while they complain and ex-wife and Current Husband (Josh Ventura) glare at him.  

Left: on his Instagram, Josh Ventura claims that he's one of these guys, the stars of the tv series Satisfaction.   His followers commiserate over having a guy lying next to him; that must have been awful! 

But he not actually in the photo. They are Family Man Matt Passmore and Blair Redford as the hustler his wife hired.  Josh appears in just one episode.

Back to Gardening Society: Male Gardener waits in the back yard, glaring, for the kids' clothes to be washed and dried (by the ex-wife, naturally). In other news, Husband is speaking at his kid's career day.  Male Gardener offers to do it, but they say "Don't be silly, you have an awful job."  But it's Ex-Wife's fault: she promised to stay home with the kids while he started his car restoration business, but then she had an affair and cancelled the deal.  

Male Gardener and Current Husband compete to see who can throw a football at the son (into sports, like all "real boys."  Annoyingly gender polarized).  

Later, Male Gardener is driving with his kids, when he callously drives by a stalled motorist, even though he's a skilled auto mechanic.  Then he thinks, this might be a way to prove that he has a bigger d*ck that Current Husband, so he turns around and helps, blabbing car trivia and grunting.   The Motorist wants to thank him somehow.  Male Gardener grins.  No, of course he doesn't have that in mind.  No gay people in this universe.

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 4.3: Keefe has sex with the Devil. So does Eli. With a pole dancer's dick and the Groundskeeper's butt

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Pilot Bunch: Unbreakable boyfriend, zombie boyfriend, teen Jesus manager. With n*de dudes from New Orleans and Hawaii

 

I may have met Pilot Bunch, who will play Johnny B., the "hype manager" of the teenage Jesus in the Gemstone tv series Teenjus, at a Halloween party a few years ago. No, we didn't hook up.

Today he looks a lot like my niece before she began transitioning.  And coincidentally, their boyfriends look very similar, too.

Pilot was born in Kazakhstan, but grew up in Atlanta, where he will graduate from the Woodward Academy in 2025.   His first acting role was in The Lion King, performed at his elementary school.  He got an agent at age 11, and began appearing on tv at age 14.  To date he has twelve on-screen credits  listed on the IMDB, including:

Four episodes of Drama Club (2021), a Nickelodeon mockumentary about a middle school drama club recruitng a football player (Chase Vacnin).  Sounds like "High School Musical."

Pilot plays Colin, the chem-class lab partner of focus character Mack (a girl).  In an interview in TresA, he says that he loved the character: "witty, sarcastic, and always messing with Curtis (Reyn Doi).  Reyn Doi usually plays gay characters, so we can assume that Colin is gay-subtext or gay-vague.

In 2021, Pilot played Vincent, a resident of the Alexandria Safe Zone, in  the post-apocalyptic The Walking Dead.  "A reckless, immature bully," he and his friends play "chicken" with a child zombie (Augustus Morgan, son of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays antagonist Negan).  He says that the role was fun because he got to hang out with Augustus in his zombie makeup. 

He also has roles on The Wonder Years, 115 Grains, The Hill, and Red One, and some theater, including Shenandoah.  He plays Robert, who is kidnapped by Union soldiers during the Civil War (right, with Caleb Baumann as Gabriel)  Robert isn't dead; Gabriel is his best friend, not an angel.

Pilot's biggest role to date is in The Unbreakable Boy (2025), a biographical heartwarmer featuring Austin (Jacob Laval), who has a brittle-bone disorder and is on the autism spectrum.  Pilot starts out a bully, but becomes Austin closest friend and supporter. In a feature article in Pop Size, he notes that the role has special significance for him, because his brother is on the autism spectrum

Pilot's Instagram contains no pictures of him with girls, except for this one, but he could hardly help it: it was at a friend's birthday party.  Otherwise it's boys all the way down.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

"The Residence": Murder at the White House, with a gay President, suit guy dicks, and Randall Park's butt

 

I wanted to see The Residence, a new Netflix comedy about a murder at the White House, because it has a gay character: the President. The Observer review specifies: "it's rarely discussed and simply accepted as part of the narrative landscape."  Buttigieg in 2028!  

Besides, I love a guy in a suit, and the White House will be full of them.

Episode 1 is "The Fall of the House of Usher," a reference to the Poe story.  

Scene 1: Thunder rumbles.  We pass the busts and portraits of former presidents.  An older man in a tuxedo (Giancarlo Esposito) walks down a busy hall, being greeted by passersby.  He peers down at a reception, and then a formal dinner with hundreds of people attending, including the Prime Minister of Australia.  There's a knock on the door, a woman screams, and we cut to the evening's entertainment, Kylie Minogue. The camera zooming through the hallways is making me dizzy.  Back to the screaming woman, who looks like Jane Curtin.  The older man is dead!

Left: this is supposed to be Giancarlo's penis, but all I see is a suitcase with a foot on it. 

Scene 2: The Capitol, a few months later.  A Congressional Hearing about the murder and the investigation that followed.  First to witness: Jasmine, the Chief Usher, in charge of overseeing the Executive Residence (the 3rd floor residence of the President and his family). 

Flashback to Jasmine sitting in the very authentic-looking Blue Room, drinking while she's supposed to be working. A waiter asked if she talked to him, and advises that she not do something she'll regret. Like murder?  "Too late, I already did."  

Suddenly Agent Rausch (a woman) appears, and brings her upstairs, where the President's best friend Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino, left) says that there's been an incident, and she has to keep everyone away from the second and third floors.  

Jasmine refuses to do it because she's only the assistant usher.  She thought she was going to be the chief usher, but it was made very clear that she wouldn't, so ask the actual Chief Usher, A. B. 

Ulp -- A.B. is the murder victim!

Scene 3: Jasmine takes the elevator down, and flashes back to meeting A.B. on the same elevator earlier that evening. She congratulates him on his upcoming retirement, but he announces that he's not retiring after all, so no Chief Usher job for her.  She bangs the doors and screams.  

Later Jasmine returns to a roomful of people, including the President's friend Hollinger, Secret Service Agent Trask, the FBI director, the head of the National Park Police, and Lawrence Dokes, chief of the Washington, DC metropolitan police. 

Scene 4: Testimony switches to Chief Dokes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.).  He explains that the White House is his jurisdiction.  No, it's not.    

Back at the crime scene, he brings in Cordelia Cupp, the greatest detective in the world, to help out.  She's on the South Lawn, bird watching. Best Friend Hollinger insists that it was a suicide, so they don't need an investigation.

Cordelia enters, discussing Teddy Roosevelt's list of birds (a real thing), and examines the body and the room -- it was locked from the inside -- a locked room mystery!   

Next she interviews the person who found the body: the President's mother-in-law, Jane Curtin in a bathrobe, who was watching a movie on tv.  She didn't go to the dinner because she doesn't like talking to people, especially her son's husband, the President.  First indication that the President is gay at Minute 14.  She heard a thump and a door close, and investigated to find the body in the Game Room.  

Cordelia gets a tour of the various other bedrooms, gym, music room, and solarium.  The President's brother Tripp was asleep, heard the scream, and went back to bed.  Best Friend Hollinger has a room there, too, which makes Cordelia suspicious.

Hollinger explains the severity of the situation: the last administration pissed off the Australians (and the Canadians, and the Danes, and...well, everybody), and this is a state dinner designed to smooth over relations.  They need to figure out what happened and put the least disastrous spin on it in 45 minutes.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit