America's Next Top Model (Cycle 12) - 12x13 "America's Next Top Model Is…"

I kind of didn't believe people who thought this cycle was dull, not at first, but by the time we got to the usual anticlimax perhaps known better as the cycle's final episode, the tedium was downright oppressive, so I don't have a lot to say that's the least bit interesting. In fact, I've got more to say about McKey than I do about Allison or Teyona.



That's really an amazing look for her, and if Blade Runner is going to be remade in the near future (har), they'd have a great replicant in McKey.

Tyra didn't seem to think so, though, when she met Allison and Teyona backstage for a pre-runway pep talk, and seemingly ignored McKey who was politely waiting there and for all the world longed for some encouraging words from Mama Fierce. Instead, she got about as much love from Tyra as Adrienne Curry gets nowadays.





If that isn't the saddest third wheel body language ever, then I've never been a third wheel.

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Indie rating: PJ Harvey and John Parish - "Pig Will Not"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 12) - 12x12 "Take Me To The Jungle"

Japanese animation -- known to nerds and teenage girls who live on the Internet (like me) as anime -- has this ephemeral style called facefaults that represent the Japanese equivalent to what American audiences would know as a wild take: a facefault occurs in anime when one character reacts in an extremely exaggerated and stylized way, and the way the character is rendered abides by conventions originally founded by Osamu Tezuka, but I'm getting away from Tyra's psychoscape.

This prelude is all to say that Allison is the live, flesh and blood manifestation of facefaults. She's already obviously a manga character come to life with those eyes, but now she's been reacting to ANTM's inherent ridiculousness like in way that defies facial physics.

Allison's Gallery of Facefaults, AFTER THE JUMP.






















And it's like she knows she's an anime character, too! Here she is, reacting to that stupid samba teach in an entirely appropriate way:









This is some straight Dancing With Ringu ½ insanity -- here it is in motion:

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Teyona was downright meta in this episode; she started off with a certain manner of confidence -- e.g. she felt safe because her body of work on the show was too strong for her to be eliminated, even after a subpar photoshoot -- that so often precedes a hubris-checking elimination. To her credit, though, Teyona realized the folly of expressing such confidence and convinced herself that she was courting reality death with such vainglorious behavior -- and saved herself! Self-correcting karma.

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I need to make my loathing for Ann Shoket clear. This woman is such a shameless wanton for televisual attention that she gloms so earnestly and unironically to this absurd self- or better yet Tyra-celebrating show, for lack of her own ability to leverage her hoary stewardship of that gray lady of teenybopper periodicals Seventeen into a show for herself she wants so badly, oh well hey she gets to hang with the cool, young, wacky kids! She's not old at all! and proffers nothing but insightless blandishments, blunt, inelegant stupidities, and obliviously inane remarks and keeps coming back for more.

Like, she says this about Aminat: "You use every single one of your strengths. Your legs are doing the right thing, your arms are doing the right thing, your face is catching the light." Not 3:30 minutes later (in tv time), after Paulina expressed her withering apathy for Aminat, Shoket brazenly backtracks! "I think you're [Paulina] right, though, what you said earlier about the face. It doesn't say much." AARGH YOU ARE SO UNREDEEMINGLY INSIPID WHY ARE YOU SUBTRACTING VALUE FROM MY SHOW.

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Indie rating: Stereolab – "Nothing to do With Me"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 12) - 12x11 "Let's Go See The City"

I think I can safely say that Allison, as a reality tv contestant, hasn't lived up to the potential she showed in the casting episode, mostly because she's too shy and lacks the exhibitionist's shamelessness that translates into reality tv gold, you dig?



More after the jump.


That said (TWIST!), Allison's reality tv deficiencies actually become a source of amusement -- albeit mostly out of her obliviousness -- because in the course of this increasingly underwhelming cycle, it's refreshing to see someone on a reality tv show that's ostensibly about modeling to be so unconcerned with looking pretty that she'll pull faces like these:







Because she's finally giving more than one face, do you see?



(I will never get tired of the way the show uses the camera zoom. Never.)

Also, she is kind of adorable and dorky.

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Also, she's got booty.

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Even Teyona got into the act, with this, her "Oh no you're not putting me in this" face:

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Last face note...



It's spreading!

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In non-face musings, what the Fo was she thinking with her photo, which was so dire and disturbing that I'm not going to post or even link to it? Like, I know that Tyra already used up the "worst in Top Model history" label on Lluvy's fishpic from back in the day, but Fo's picture is its own superlative.

Indie rating: Heidi Berry - "Northshore Train"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 12) - 12x10 "The Amazing Model Race"

To start with the last thing that happened in this episode: I'm a little sad Natalie is gone because now it seems that in terms of the villain, the show will turn its full attention to Fo and her burgeoning brattiness, which breaks my heart more than a little (which was already weakened in the recap episode where we found out that Fo is a remorseless crying machine).



But to return to Natalie -- the show seems to be following a pattern where it downgrade its villains to something more benign, first dumping Sandra (who for a maniac was actually pretty unthreatening) for Natalie, whose spoiled, entitled rich girl shtick (every other time she got face time this episode, we saw her complaining about how Brazil was failing to live up to her upper-middle-class expectations, or the temerity of poor people being close to her zomg (though in her defense, her remarks seem to be montaged together from spare parts to make them sound more imperious than they really were)) was just sent packing so that we can hear Fo whine about how she felt betrayed by Teyona.

So Fo's newly revealed small-minded spitefulness, along with her shortish stature, seem to have taken her out of the running towards becoming America's next top model. But hey, she seems to be getting ready for a different kind of modeling, after the jump.




Or "modeling," if you were.

Going back to this tiff between Fo and Windface, it's the second example that comes to mind where a notable a series of related events takes place over the course of more than one episode, which makes this cycle the most narratively complex and serialistic cycle in Top Model history. (The first example, of course, occurring when Celia told on Tahlia at the end of one episode, and the ensuing aftermath taking place in the next episode.) Narrative sophistication, specifically the lack thereof in reality programming, has been a bugaboo of mine for a brief time, and ANTM has always reduced its contestants into types of stereo or arche varieties. Instead, Cycle 12 is bringing the inter-episode intertextuality, which is turning me on like Jay Manuel turns himself on.

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Historically, ANTM begins rather unremarkably without being terribly memorable, but as the cannon fodder are cannon-fodded, our attentions are gradually focused on the main players who have become more and more outrageous. These last several cycles, however, have trended in the opposite direction: we get the same number of weirdos and freaks out of the gate, but they're long gone by the time the girls fly overseas. Think Monique being the third bootee from Cycle 7, or ShaRaun being the first last season.

What's more, the girls who are positioned early on to be the season's fiercest or at least cutest are shown to be weirdos and freaks without the entertainment value and a whole load of compromised, disappointed feelings, all of which results in a slowly enervating slog as we get down to the final girls. In line with the three faces of Cycle 12 villainy in which Fo was cutely sequestered until Sandra and Natalie fell away, I almost think that Tyra should string along some villain with an over-the-top and vicious personality and no hope of winning the competition or becoming a model, just so viewers are distracted, outraged, and entertained by the villain's hijinks and are baffled by how she has implausibly remained in the competition, flouting notions of desert and worth, all so the show doesn't have to settle for the reality tv scraps of the girls' mundane deficiencies.

The best we've this cycle is Celia, who is a more shameless version of Melrose (old face, no shot at winning) -- but even Celia's freakiness can't really fan away the others' stink of mediocrity.

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OK, the real reason I like Celia now is because I have almost this exact same top.

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Nice slouch Natalie has there, by the way.

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Dear Brazil,
Hide your goats. Celia hungers.



(Yes yes, el Chupacabra is not native to Brazil, but it is a Latin country, they all speak Latin, so there.)

Indie rating: Cat Power - "A Woman Left Lonely"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 12) - 12x05 "Put Your Best Face Forward"

At the beginning of the season, I said that ANTM was a simulacrum of itself now, which was most evident in how members of the current cast are molded after past contestants, and because nobody has mentioned these similarities. Like, no one on the show has remarked that now that Aminat has a long, straight weave, she's just a bigger gap away from being the spitting image of Danielle, winner of Cycle 6.

Like, here's Aminat:


And Dani, after the jump.






Anyway, because neither the girls nor the show have remarked on these echoes, they all come off a lot less self-aware than usual, which may explain why this cycle, fun and engrossing as it is, also seems incredibly predictable. In fact, this predictability is kind of why I haven't really been blogging the show thus far. But then, ANTM every so often uncovers these gems of pure inanity that ought to be put in amber for eternity, like Dominique and Whitney tilting at racist green-eyed Jewish windmills from Cycle 10, that you can never ever forget.

This time, Celia delivered. While I was actually watching the episode, I wasn't sure it would actually happen, though rewatching the events again I'm picking up on all these subtle hints...



She may know more about fashion than all the other girls combined thanks to her many wizened years of life on this earth, but her presumption to be able to judge what is and isn't fair is a breathtaking example of arrogance on this show, and more power to her because I can't get enough of its entertainment value.

To recap:



"Hey girls, looking like the Wicked Witch of the West didn't keep Melrose from reaching the top 2, what can I do to totally undermine my chances of getting any further in the competition?"




"Celia, don't ask me, Courtney Kortni Coortknee Kourtney I STILL CAN'T SPELL IT , I'm not interesting enough to get even a cursory 'I'm getting eliminated this episode here are a few facts about me and my personality' edit so I've got nothing."




"Can you believe Tyra didn't give me a makeover? I'm so totally going to win this competition zomg!"
"H-h-hey, Tahlia told me, EYEBALLS GIRL, that she wants to go home! Mention that when we're at panel!"




"Fabulous, dahlings!"




"Wait, I thought I was supposed to be the villain here."




"BIG TYRA IS WATCHING YOU."

LATER...






"Oh no you di'n't."




~ FIN ~

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I still can't believe that Celia thought it was ok to go ahead and call someone out like that on such a frivolous show, and generally, that contestants still spout the "I'm not here to make friends" meme and claim that they're willing to walk over all the other contestants. Strategizing against your opponents is a viable if not altogether effective philosophy to employ in a reality TV competition like Survivor, but on ANTM, where you're judged almost entirely on how you look as you stand in front of Tyra et al and how you look in a photo, there simply isn't much room to maneuver strategically. Like, are you going to not tell another contestant where her hairdryer is? Really, "strategy" as practiced by girls on this show is an excuse to be anti-social.

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Tyra's reaction to Celia was golden.

She may have adopted an outwardly ironic pose with the Goddess of Fierce thing this cycle, yet we all know that her ego's way too big to not buy into it on a not that deep level. But sometimes, like when she cut Celia down -- cold! -- Tyra totally earned the right to act like the Alpha and Omega Diva.

Indie rating: Stereolab – "International Colouring Contest"