America's Next Top Model - Season 7 Casting Special
After two cycles of not being able to fully recap ANTM (either because of time commitments or because the show's quality slid down into a cesspool of suck), I've decided to not even attempt it this time. Still, the siren song of Tyra's bitches calls out to me, so I thought I'd least take a stab at putting mini-recaps up. I know the future me, looking back sixty years from now, will appreciate being able to say "Oh, yeah. I remember what a dumb skank Cyndel was. Heh heh heh. Pass the prunes."
So, we're back for Cycle 7! Whee! These girls just keep getting homelier and homelier. In a couple of cycles, they'll be those toothless women who argue endlessly with the cashier at the ghetto supermarket near my apartment. We start off with thirty-three girls, and while it would be deliciously wonderful to make them all share the model pad, we're going to have to whittle them down to the usual thirteen. We meet some of the hopefuls at the airport. Melrose is fairly pretty and fairly bitchy, so we know she'll be making it. Amanda and Michelle are twins. But I'm sure they'll be the only hopefuls who try to use some sort of hook to get into the competition. There's a surprise waiting for the girls when they land at the Los Angeles airport; Miss J in full...regalia, waiting to lead them outside and have them pose for a photographer. Ooh, cruel idea. I love it. I look like hell after I've been traveling. We only see a few of them get their picture taken, but they seem to do pretty well.
All of the girls wind up at some hotel or other, and are greeted by those tiresome twins from the last cycle, who seem to make their entire living out of spinning in circles. No, really. Their job is to show people what bored seven-year-olds have been doing to amuse themselves since cavemen days. Sigh. Tyra appears from behind them, and the girls squeal as always. The twins vanish for the rest of the episode. So they twirled for fourteen seconds on a television show. I bet they make more in a year than I'll make in my life. Sigh. We go into the panel interviews with Tyra and the Jays, and meet more of the girls. Caridee "doesn't care what anyone thinks of [her]". That may surprise you, given that Caridee will spend the rest of the hour trying to scrounge attention and approval from anyone unlucky enough to cross her path, but whatever. Anchal is an Indian-American who "strongly" identifies with her culture -- except she wears light blue contact lenses to cover her dirty, shameful dark eyes. Sigh. Mortifying as that is for legitimately cultural Indian-American women, at least Anchal doesn't seem as stupefyingly idiotic as Gina was. She's cuter, too. Michelle (one of the twins -- the model twins, not the stupid twirling ones) tells Tyra she used to play basketball in college. She says it as if she were recounting a tale of yore from days long past. Michelle, you're eighteen. You were in college for two months, six weeks ago. Shut up.
More girls come in and humiliate themselves for Tyra and the Jays. Becky is semi-cute. Monique comes in and tells Tyra that she deserves to be in the competition more than the other girls. When asked why, she breaks down into tears as she recounts the horrific story of...being made fun of by her siblings, because her skin's a little darker than theirs. OH, MY GOD!!!! POOR MONIQUE!!!! Come here, you poor dear. Let me get you a cup a tea. Man, I can't believe people gave all that money and attention to those stupid Katrina victims, when here we have Monique; a genuine survivor. Eugena comes in and tells the judges that she's mean, but "in moderation". Hmm. She does say that she thought Cycle 6 was boring, which makes her my new best friend. Brooke is a white girl who lamely tries to rap and thinks we should be proud of her for dropping out of high school to be on reality television. Yeah, you're a role model, Brooke.
Interstitial scenes wherein the girls stage their own boring walk-off, but at least nobody's fighting about chapstick.
More panel interviews. Megan is asked about a tragedy in her past, and tells the judges about surviving a plane crash, partly because her dying mother covered Megan with her own body. Pfft. You call that a tragedy? Get back to me when your skin's a slightly different shade than your sister's. Evita has two children and a husband in Iraq. All respect to that, of course, but she says it about a zillion times, clearly trying to cash in on sympathy to coast into the model pad. AJ battled cervical cancer. She's a rocker type of girl, and I like her instantly. Cyndel is an entertainer. That is, she entertains people by taking off all of her clothes and jiggling her vagina in their faces. But she's not a stripper, damn it! She's an entertainer. She tells Tyra that stripping is just another form of modeling, and Tyra recoils with disgust. It's fairly awesome.
No matter what you see next, know that I'm not making up any of these names. Jaeda is ugly. Jaslene is fugly. Leangela was abandoned at a young age, and had to live in foster homes, but wound up becoming the first African-American homecoming queen in her town. That's cool. Ginger is our token conservative that the judges like to beat up on for being narrow-minded. She seems pretty harmless. Megg yells a lot, but still manages to be really boring. Some other girls are even more boring, to the point that I couldn't find a single thing about them worth noting.
Time for the first elimination. The girls are cut from thirty-three to twenty-one in the usual stampede fashion. OJ is wearing a sleeveless shirt in the mistaken believe that he is attractive. I always love when Tyra's gargantuan ego peeks through, so the fact that the girls have to find their photo by opening a folder with a giant picture of her face plastered across it amuses me no end. A bunch of girls squeal with joy upon finding their pictures. Wow, Cyndel didn't make the cut. Shocking.
OJ gives the remaining girls access to makeup and a wall of wigs and hair extensions, and tells them they have fifteen minutes to do whatever they like. They do, and some of them are hilariously incompetent at making themselves presentable. After they're finished, OJ tells them that those who chose to use the wigs will have an advantage, because they can use them to artfully cover themselves for their next challenge -- a nude photo shoot. The girls freak out; particularly Ginger.
They go up one by one, with various bits being blurred. Not that I get any sexual charge out this, but I still think it's a bit icky to have girls that turned eighteen about four hours ago running around naked. My straight male friends are going to hunt me down for saying that. If they watched this show. Which they inexplicably don't. Becky yells at another girl for giving her a hard time for not being wild about the shoot. She says, somewhat snottily, that she's going to do it, despite not wanting to. And do it she does. I mean... Yay for Becky, but calm the hell down. Ginger really, really doesn't want to pose nude, but winds up tossing off her towel, allowing the photographer to take two quick shots, then covering up again. One of the other girls says that if Ginger is going to be so inflexible, she should automatically be eliminated. Those two shots notwithstanding? I agree.
That evening, the girls gather so that Tyra can whittle them down to the final thirteen. She does that incredibly annoying thing where she announces that "the next name I am going to call is..." Just give us the names! It's not like they haven't been publicly available on the web for about three weeks! And here we go. Melrose. Duh. Jaeda. Ew, gross. Michelle. Eugena. Brooke. She does another lame rap. She's cute and seems nice, but needs to knock that shit off. Anchal. AJ. Yay! Christian. Who? Oh, she must be one of those girls that's so boring, I didn't even make a note about her panel interview. Megg. I sense a lot of "shut up" will be flying in her direction. Megan. Caridee. Amanda. She's relieved, as is Michelle. Twin competitors. I wonder how they'll handle those eliminations. And the "last name that I'm going to call" is...Monique. Well, sure. After all the hell she's gone through, she surely deserves a spot. Poor, slightly blacker Monique.
Evita is mad, because she made such a sacrifice leaving her two children behind (fatherless, since he's in Iraq, remember? Remember when she said her husband is in Iraq? Because he's there. In Iraq.) to come and compete. Well, you get to go back and take care of them now, so leave, fruitcake. Ginger doesn't think making it into the competition is worth compromising her morals. Hooray for your morals, Ginger, but maybe you should have considered them before applying to be in a competition where it's not exactly unheard of to be nude. Twit. So there are our thirteen! I'm calling Melrose to get third place. The bitch always does. Stick around for the second part of the premiere, so we can see who won't last long enough to cry about her makeover!
Overall Grade: B
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