Case Walker: ChaseDreams from "The Other Two" grows up, plays a monster, displays his delts and...stuff. With n*de Chase, Tarver, and Fin

 Case Walker was as a kid growing up in Denver who hosted weekly podcasts on social media platforms, and within a year had 1.7 million followers and a new television program. The Other Two  were Brook and Cary Dubek (Heléne Yorke, Drew Tarver, left), a failed dancer and aspiring actor dealing with the sudden fame of their 13-year old brother, Chase (Case Walker), aka teen pop sensation ChaseDreams. 

At least in the first season (2019).  In the second and third seasons (2021, 2023), Brooke and Drew get the lion's share of plotlines, negotiating increasing success, friendships, and romances.

  For instance, Dreew dates Lucas (Fin Argus), a method actor who stays in character off camera and therefore refuses sex. 

ChaseDreams still appeared in nearly every episode, but he has very few centrics.  The writers just didn't know what to do with him. Turn him into a bad boy, with pink hair and a lot of tattoos? Make him a fake mental health advocate?  Have him date a girl who isn't a fan?

Viewers mostly ignored him. It was much more interesting to see a non-swishy gay guy who actually had a romantic life.

While we weren't paying attention, Case grew up.  As of this writing, he's 22 years old, and buffed.  No, ripped.  No -- have you ever seen delts like that?

More after the break

"Final Destination: Blood Legacy": Death has a wacky sense of humor. With Travis Turner, the gay guy from "Chucky," and a n*de security guard

Final Destination is a movie franchise about people who escape death, so Death tracks them down and offs them in complex, gruesome ways that would make Rube Goldberg proud.  Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025), on HBO MAX, gets a score of 93% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and reviews of "a scary streaming hit with a surprising amount of heart."  I'm looking for beefcake and gay characters, of course.

Scene 1: A blindfolded girl is apparently going to her Sweet Sixteen party with her father.  She asks for a hint, but he will only say "You'll love it!"  They end up at a fancy building, the Sky Tower, with a weird fountain outside.  She is thrilled: "I didn't even know it was open yet!"

"I pulled some favors, and got us on the list for opening night."  How are people in movies always pulling in favors.  Who are they granting this big favors for?

Transistor radio playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (1963).  This is the mid-1960s.

First misdirection: "Dad" is made up to look much older than "Daughter," but actually they are only eight years apart: Paul (Max Lloyd Jones, age 34) and his girlfriend Iris (Brec Bassinger, age 26) 

The Evil Penny-Dropping Kid (Noah Bromley, who deserves an Oscar for his smouldering malice) is nabbed for fishing coins out of the fountain, then pushes ahead of them to get on the elevator.  It is overcrowded, but the Elevator Operator (Travis Turner) says that there's plenty of room.   Don't believe it.  I saw that Twilight Zone episode.

Uneasy, Iris agrees to squeeze in with Paul. 

The dang floor is glass!  Penny Dropping Kid starts jumping up and down to scare her more.

And they make it to the Skyview Restaurant. Unfortunately, their reservation has been cancelled, so they sit at the bar, while we see the various set-ups for the deaths and destruction: people dancing on the glass floor, a pricked finger, a chef doing a flambé, a woman singing "I came tumbling down," and so on.  Back story: Iris is pregnant, but hasn't told her boyfriend yet.

They walk up the stairs to the observation deck, where Paul decides to pop the question.  But then the Penny-Dropping Kid drops the penny, starting a chain reaction that reveals the structural faults and will send the whole tower tumbling down.

Down on the main floor, as the singer sings "Shout!", they all jump up and down on the glass floor.  It caves in, and people fall to the ground.  Lol, the parking valets are playing "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head"!.  Then the whole place catches on fire and explodes. The Elevator Operator tries to guide everyone down the stairs, but they crumble.  He guides them onto the elevator, but it splats.  The tower topples.  Iris and a little boy are hanging on..,they fall and die!

Scene 2: Psych!  It was just a dream.  In the modern era, Stef awakes screaming during her university math lecture (in a giant lecture hall, like even the most advanced classes in movies).  The Professor yells at her.

Later, in the dorm room, Stef has the same dream, and wakes up screaming. Her roommate yells at her for having the same dream every night and waking her up. The woman in her dream is named Iris -- her grandmother's name!  She's dreaming about her grandma, who she never met.  No wonder, she died before she could give birth to Stef's mother.

Scene 3: Stef is determined to track down her Grandma Iris and find out what the dream means. Back home, she greets her dad (Tipo Lee),  who is happy to see her, and sibling Charlie, who is not.  Dead end: Dad threw out all of Grandma's stuff after Mom abandoned them. 

More after the break

"Caravaggio's Shadow": As time goes by, the gay Baroque painter becomes more and more straight. With nude Italian men

When my generation was growing up, teachers, reference books, and movies always presented historical figures as absolutely, undeniably straight.  My paperback copy of The Importance of Being Earnest said that Oscar Wilde was imprisoned "on scandalous charges."  I asked the teacher what those charges were. She said she didn't know.

In the 1980s, we started to uncover the "lies, secrets, and silence," reveal the gay men and lesbians of the past who had been denied us.  We collected them like beacons of hope in a homophobic world: Plato, Aristotle, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Michelangelo...and Caravaggio (1571-1610), who introduced the Baroque style of bright, naturalistic color to Italy, who scandalized the art world by using thieves, beggars, and prostitutes as models for religious-themed paintings.  And who was gay.

Everybody in West Hollywood went to Caravaggio (1986), by filmmaker Derek Jarman (who announced that he was gay later that year). We were expecting a lot of cute Italian guys (there are some), and hoping that they would be nude (no). 

We were also hoping that Caravaggio would be presented as gay, but resigned to the likelihood that he would be straightwashed: turned heterosexual, or mostly heterosexual (a few men as trivial dalliances as he pursued the Woman of His Dreams).  

He was straightwashed.

As a child and teenager, the artist (Dexter Fletcher, left), is the victim of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  This "turns him" gay, or rather pansexual. 

As an adult (Nigel Terry), he is a decadent figure like something out of a Pasolini film, consorting with men and women, although he prefers women.   He seduces both Raduccio (Sean Bean) and his girlfriend Lena.  But Raduccio is just a dalliance; the heterosexual romance is True Love.  Then Raduccio kills Lena, and a distraught Caravaggio kills him.  Gay lives must always end in tragedy.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

"Goosebumps: The Vanishing": Ross from "Friends" as a crazy botanist, some gay teens, a monster, and Sam McCarthy's....

 

Goosebumps: The Vanishing has dropped on Hulu, the second season of the Goosebumps series, based on the popular children's books.  I can't tell if it is episodic or not at this point, so I just clicked on Episode 1, which stars David Schwimmer, Ross from Friends; and teen idol Sam McCarthy.

Scene 1: Brooklyn, 1994. Bill Clinton is in the White House, I'm in West Hollywood, Mariah Carey is topping the charts, and Friends premieres on CBS: 

So no one told you life was gonna be this way

Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A

 Four teens (Sameer, Matty, and two girls) descend into eerie catacombs, until they come to the room where "they conducted medical experiments."  They're doing a "truth or dare" thing where they have to spend the night.

Sameer: "I'm not scared.  I just like to sleep naked, and it could get a little awkward."  

Uh-oh, Matty's younger brother Anthony followed them!  Mom's going to be furious.  Matty forces him to leave.

Suddenly a machine switches on, gas squirts out, and Matty's face dissolves.   A gruesome image.

Scene 2: Brooklyn, 2024.  Teen twins Devin and Cece (Sam McCarthy, Jaden Bartels) exit the subway and complain about having to leave their friends in Manhattan to live with Dad, the grown-up Anthony (a craggy, dissolute-looking David Schwimmer). He picks them up in a car.  Are you sure this is Brooklyn?

At home, Dad Anthony yells at neighbor Trey, also called James Junior, for blocking his driveway. "But your mom always let me park there."

"She didn't have a car."

Inside, the living room is crowded with boxes.  Back story: Dad has moved into this house after his mother went into assisted living with dementia, and he's going through her stuff.

In other news, "I've really been looking forward to your aunt's brain surgery."  WTF?  Who looks forward to that?  He means because then they can come live with him.  

Wait -- the twins are living with their aunt, not their father?  What's wrong with him?

The micromanager passes out his extensive list of rules, but emphasizes that the main rule is: "Stay out of the basement." He gives them a tour: he's a botanist, working on a lot of plant types that will revolutionalize the botany world.  Shouldn't you be working in a lab somewhere?   But stay out!

Scene 3: Dinner at Gwendolyn's restaurant.  Gay couples at the tables behind and in front of them. Back story: Cece is starting debate camp tomorrow. She hates it, but you need "a thing" to get into college. 

Next up, Devin: He claims to be ok, given "everything that happened," but he was suspended for getting into a fight.  Nope, not gay.  

CJ drives up on his motorcycle.  Dad introduces him to the twins. Back story: he's working here, at his parents' restaurant, for the summer.  Dad suggests that maybe Devin would like to work there, too.  Playing matchmaker, buddy?  I don't have any hope that he'll be gay, but there may be a gay-subtext buddy-bond between him and Devin.

He has to make a delivery, but the guys are all meeting at the park later. "Y'all should come."  Maybe specify which park, and what time?

Scene 4:  On the way home, Dad sends the twins inside so he can chat with a crying woman in a car. She notes that the father of Trey/JJ, the neighbor who Dad argued with, stopped by the police station to file a harassment complaint. According to the Google AI, harassment consists of repeaed acts that cause the victim to "fear for their safety,"  Telling someone to not block your driveway certainly doesn't count.

The woman promised to talk to Trey/JJ's Dad, but "be careful.  He's big on conspiracy theories." 

In other news, she managed to pull some strings and retrieve his brother's things from the night he and his friends dissolved.  . Moldy clothes with dissolved Matty all over them, from 30 years ago? 

The woman has been thinking a lot about that night, but Dad doesn't want to hear it.  He cuts her off and heads inside.

Scene 5: The twins come downstairs while Dad is arguing with his ex wife on the telephone. Wait -- they were living with their aunt, but she's having brain surgery, so they moved in with Dad.  Why weren't they living with their mother?

Dad assures them that although they hate each other, they both love the twins.  He made burnt waffles, which they reject.  It's the next morning. What happened to meeting the guys in the park later?

Left: This show is a little beefcake-light, so here's a photo of Sameer, one of the melted teens (played by the 28 year old Arjun Athalye).

More Sameer after the break