"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

Andy Bian: Taiwanese actor, singer, and Good Boy stars in a gay tv series and a j/o video

 

I've been having trouble recently finding n*de photos of people who are celebrities but not actors.  They're sports figures, musicians, models, or internet influences.  So this time I checked the IMDB, and Andy Bian has eight acting credits, so he's good to go.

He first appears on screen in 2013, at the age of 22, in the Taiwanese thriller Killing 7

Then came two episodes of the 2016 tv series Jin wan, ni xiang dian shen me?, which translates as Jin Wan, What Would You Like to Order?.  A bar owner listens to the stories of different customers every week. 

Four Heavenly Kings in Ta tiao ko, translated Hanky Panky (2017): a comedy in which the son of the owner of a martial arts dojo "has a hidden plan to draw ou this father's enemy." 

Falling in Love (2017).  Andy doesn't play one of the people in love.

The TV series Songs and the City.  

A starring role in the thriller Karma (2019).

Five episodes of Wan quan sheng qian lian ai shou ce (2024), translated as Safety Pre-Life Love Manual, apparently about students in love.

Wait -- are all of his acting roles going to be in Taiwanese projects that aren't available to stream in the U.S., or only with expensive memberships and paywalls?

I'm particularly interested in Andy's role in HIS-tory (2017-) a Taiwanese anthology series, with every season depicting two men in love.  Five seasons, 90-plus episodes.  In his season, "Trapped," a gay couple is trapped in a "deadlyy game of wits." Researching it is nearly impossible, since no matter what I do, "HIS-tory" is interpreted as just plain "History."  And why is the title in English, not Mandarin?

An article calls Andy and his costar Kenny Shin boyfriends, and says that they are discussing marriage, but I'm not sure if it is real or fanservice.

A photo book of his character's adventures, called Good Boy, was published in Taiwan.

The drama wiki gives more details. Andy, Chinese name Bian Ching Hua,卞慶華; was born in 1991 in Keelung, Taiwan, on the northern coast about a 40 minute drive from Taipei.

Keelung is the home of Taiwan's first LGBT Cultural Center, founded in 2014.

He graduated from the National Taiwan Ocean University in Keelung.

The wiki lists several projects that the IMDB doesn't, such as the movie Mermaid Prince (2020) and  a lot of variety and game shows.  He appeared in Penghu on New Year's Eve 2019.

He also recorded the theme song to the tv series Mulan on the Run (2012) -- about a hostage crisis on a bus, no connection to the Disney movie.

And some commercials, like this one for Pizza Hut.

More after the break

The cringe cock of "Angels and Insects"

 I don't usually use the contemporary term "cringe" as an adjective.  It's from a later generation, so it feels weird, but it is completely appropriate to describe the famous penis scene in Angels and Insects (1995).

Everyone in West Hollywood saw Angels and Insects when it premiered, due to the rumor of the penis.  Male frontal nudity was vanishingly rare in mainstream movies in the 1990s, and rumor had it that this guy was actually aroused!

After 30 years, I've forgotten everything about the movie except for the cringe penis and people actually being insects, so I looked up a plot synopsis.

In Victorian England, entomologist William Addison (Mark Rylance, top photo) gets a job cataloging the insect collection of baronet Sir Harold Alabaster (Jeremy Kemp).  

The name Alabaster makes me cringe.

When you search for n*de photosof Jeremy Kemp, this pops up.  I doubt that it's the same one.

Yes, I'm stalling.

William, of course, falls in love with Sir Harold's daughter Eugenia, an insect-obsessed young lady who dresses like a bug.  Actually, all of the women do, for a symbolic reason that I don't quite understand, but the movie won an Oscar for best costumes.

Eugenia and William get married and have some kids, but he is bewildered by her bedroom behavior, coldly rejecting him one moment and being voracious the next, so he starts an affair with a servant girl named Matty.

Left: Mark Rylance has shown his d*k on screen several times, but in this movie he just gets aroused under the sheets.

More after the break, including the cringe p*enis

Gavin Munn's polar plunge. Plus Tony's cold dip, a bondage hookup, and some nude dudes in the snow

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