America’s Next Top Model Finale Recap: An “Illuminata” Princess is Crowned

She flirted with it all season, but I really have to give props to Tyra for taking until the finale to directly compare the season’s Brits vs. Yanks theme to the Revolutionary War. As Sophie and Lauren stood before the Great and Powerful T with their hands politely folded and legs firmly planted in front of flag paintings done by the Mexican non-union equivalent of Jasper Johns, published author Tyra Banks told the two young women that just like their forefathers, they started out enemies and quickly became allies. Only this time, George Washington (today being played by a white-blonde nymphet with a penchant for snarling) ended up losing to a Lord North with cotton candy hair. We’re learning!

Sophie was the obvious choice for the win (arguably from the beginning and certainly ever since Azmarie got unceremoniously dumped) but I was kind of obsessed with how Laura looked during both her photo shoot and runway show. As a TV character, I found her pretty annoying and occasionally attention-starved when the season began, but enough genuine cracks in the façade and displays of earnest emotion started to develop in time for me to feel a little conflicted (just a little) about who I wanted to win. The complete lack of drama between the two reminded me of when Joanie and Danielle went head to head in cycle 6, only this time there was no snapping Jade in the background to offset the cuddly-wuddlies.

That’s not to say the episode was a complete snooze, and while paramedics probably end up arriving for a contestant at least two times a year these days, the panic attack Laura suffered during her Cover Girl shoot really did seem sort of scary, especially when they showed her shaking in the fetal position while laying on a truck’s loading dock. Sophie, having gone through all this before as a runner up on the British version of the show, was completely in her element here, and while Laura ended up pulling through better than most “quirky” girls do in these types of challenges, the look of pure terror on her face was never totally gone from any of her commercial shots.

The next day, Sophie and a presumably tranquilized Laura are whisked off to shoot their Italian Vogue spread, which is described as a “hyper-stylized spa inspired shoot” which basically means it looks like those scenes in the “Womanizer” video that you weren’t really sure Britney was actually there for. The scene is over in a flash, although it’s significant since editor Valentina Serra ends up preferring Laura to Sophie, stating that “she shoots like a dancer.” It’s here where I realize how confusing this show must be to aspiring models considering how much Tyra historically hates dancers who model. Winners are expected to have a song these days, so it’s likely Tyra just forgot that at this point.

Before the runway show, Tyra visits each of the girls for her requisite pep talks. Laura’s is blandly inspiring, but it’s during her chat with Sophie that Tyra manages to toss in some masterful backhanded shade. Not only does she describe Sophie as “someone I’d want to be friends with if I were 21” (extra emphasis on the“if”), she also tells her that her “eyes are a little far apart” and that her “chin is a little short.” It’s all part of your offbeat beauty, girl!

The Forever 21 (oh) runway show is pretty dumb, but not as awful as hurling ponytail extensions while covered in oil or running from imaginary Spanish ghosts. Coming off as a cross between hologram Tupac’s recent Coachella stop and Beyoncé’s multimedia performance at last year’s Billboard awards, the catwalk is horizontal and placed against a giant screen displaying graphics Tyra found while putzing around iMovie. The show is desperately lacking a 3-dimensional component, but was thankfully saved by a ridiculous Tyra opening that found her speaking violently and seemingly incoherently in Chinese. The look on Kelly Cutrone’s face as she pretended to find it enjoyable is maybe the highlight of the series.

At panel, most of the judges seem to have already made up their minds in favor of Sophie, although Kelly does manage to tell her that she looks like “Edie Sedgwick after a party” which is basically telling her she looks like she’s on drugs. Laura looks stunning in her candid shots included in the Cover Girl commercial and nothing about her walk ended up being as disastrous as anticipated, but it’s still not enough to topple the British monarchy. We’ll get them back at the Olympics.

Congrats to Sophie! Now can she please tell us how the pink in her hair changes hue every 5 minutes?

- Marcus Michalik

America’s Next Top Model Recap: The Sweet Smell of Third Place

First off, let me apologize for missing last week’s recap. I didn’t see the episode until the weekend, and by that point it seemed a little pointless. Pity too, because last week, with its action movie stunts, hysterical heights-induced crying and shocking double elimination, might have been the most fun episode of the year, barring the obvious music video episode. It was certainly a lot more entertaining than this episode, which found the models going on their umpteenth go-see and awkwardly trying to convince the cameramen why the other girls don’t pose much of a threat to them. Annaliese (bless her) probably went the most overboard by telling us that Laura couldn’t possibly win because she’s driven purely by sex. In season 2 (I keep going back to season 2 – Nigel even brought up Mercedes last week, even though the last time I saw her was in a Chili’s commercial) we had a contestant cheating on her boyfriend with a male model in a hot tub, so Laura’s occasional declarations of enjoying sex hardly seem like a deal breaker. Then again, during this week’s perfume shoot, we kept hearing the judges talk exclusively about marketing to 18-year-olds, so maybe Tyra should just stop using “commercial” as a dirty word already.

I appreciate the fact that there have been so many go-sees this season because it seems like something an actual modeling show should be concerned with, but after three of these, any sense of tension has long been zapped. Sophie’s guaranteed to win, Annaliese will get by on her charm alone, and Laura will struggle with the same runway walk that absolutely no one is trying to help her with. Sophie books all four and wins 2,000 Hong Kongian (Tyra’s word, not mine) dollars, which ends up amounting to around $500, all of which – according to Annaliese’s blog at least – the producers make her spend in an hour on drinks. Producers clearly want Laura to sleep with the male model that accompanied her on the go-sees, but no one so much as has a hangover the next morning. I didn’t even mention that Kelly Cutrone meets the girls on a junkyard boat. I’m not questioning anything at this point. I wasn’t even entirely sure those harnesses last week would have passed union inspection.

It would actually be impossible to make a print ad more hideous for the official Top Model perfume (Dream Come True, named after Adrienne Curry) than the one with Lisa D’Amato from last cycle, but the show’s art directors certainly try by dressing the girls in frilly tutus and placing them in a giant perfume bottle that seems to be made out of repurposed plexiglass from a pee-wee hockey arena. None of the girls look very good with their leotarded (look Tyra! I can make up vaguely offensive words too!) breasts strapped down, but it’s Laura that really struggles with the shoot. I forget that Laura is pretty young still, so I guess it makes sense that she has so many issues about maintaining her (carefully constructed) identity because she melted Barbie heads, you guys. She is nobody’s princess, unless maybe Xena asked her out on a date.

All three girls look terrible at panel (Laura’s a pirate now? What?) and all three get criticized for not looking young enough in their photos. It’s kind of boring so I amused myself by imagining how much Eboni would have bombed this, despite being “30-Never.” Den-mother Tyra winces through the entire judging session for some reason and knocks me to the ground when she tells Annaliese that her photo is “Michelle Obama meets Venus Williams meets an ad for a catalogue captured in a bottle with a little Aladdin twist.” If it were up to me, Top Model would be one giant 42-minute long stream of adjectives. Kelly gets in a sorta-good one about Laura’s picture looking like an ad for a plastic surgeon’s office. This is basically all I’m here for now.

We’re all kidding ourselves if we though this season would end with anything other than a Brit vs. American final two, so there’s absolutely no suspense when it comes down to Annaliese and Laura at the end. Annaliese goes home but she seems okay with it because making Kelly Cutrone kind of like her is apparently worth more to her than winning. You almost had me there, Annaliese.

It’s a battle of the blondes next week and the last hour we’ll get to spend with Nigel Barker. Are you crying yet?

- Marcus Michalik

America’s Next Top Model Recap: Don’t Have Macau, Man!

The last two episodes of Top Model have been so low-key and normal that I’m starting to get flashbacks to seasons 2 & 3. While we’ll never be so lucky to have the show bring back the long-forgotten in-panel challenges (remember when Yaya correctly called out Tyra’s ethnocentrism during one of these by refusing to wear a kente cloth hat and Tyra instead chose to dig her heels in by having a skin color-altering photo shoot the next cycle? Memories), there’s been so few histrionic Tyra outbursts and so many refreshingly simple challenges that I’m starting to think this massive rebranding we’ve all been promised for next year will have more to do with reestablishing legitimacy than it will with having Tyra trying to create her own governing body called “Fiercelandia.”

Take for instance the way this year’s international travel destination was revealed to the girls. Nigel came over to eat Chinese food with the ladies, and after some clearly producer-orchestrated fortune cookies (Eboni’s has something to do with maturity!), Nigel whips out an asteroid-sized cookie to quietly reveal to the girls that they’ll be immediately flying to Macau. If this had been last season, you damn well know Tyra would have come out dressed as a cow to break this news and then maybe said something about how the Chinese already have a naturally permanent smize.

Top Model was never a normal show by any means, so maybe I misspoke when I suggested that having a challenge centered around Chinese astrology and reading the girls’ auras off a giant iPad was completely without an eyebrow raise or two. Miss J gasped and widened his eyes until they were completely depleted of moisture as a man who was far too attractive and well spoken to not be an actor placated the girls with toothless statements about being stubborn and having bad childhoods. At one point Alisha is correctly told that she really loves her mom and Miss J responds by saying “Wow, this is really scary.”

In vintage Top Model style, the models are then told they have a few minutes to assemble looks based off the elements they were assigned during their consultations. Most of them end up looking like they’ve wrapped bed sheets around themselves, but I’m surprised at how correct the judges are when they say Laura emerged looking like a completely new person in her simple black sheath and makeup. Laura and her sudden natural glow are awarded to a massage, and since Eboni is the only other American girl left, she gets to come along for an awkward afternoon of reading the ingredients off of moisturizer bottles.

For this week’s photo shoot, the girls are asked to model beautiful silk gowns by Barney Cheng with the added twist that they’ll be covered in silkworms. There’s an admirable job by the editors to drum up some horror and suspense from this, but the truth of the matter is that they’re just silkworms and not tarantulas, so everyone manages to pull it together, although Alisha does have to anthropomorphize one of hers by naming it Edwin to get through without getting too squeamish. What the girls really should be worried about are the accompanying black bob wigs each is given for the shoot, which have the unfortunate distinction of making Catherine’s jawline look massive and sort of resembling that of a drag queen’s. The only queen she looks like after this is Dame Edna.

The bugs actually look really stupid on the dresses (I was actually hoping for a Silkwood tribute) and for some reason the girls are told that they should be channeling dramatic emotions for their pictures. Laura naturally creates intensity by pretending to orgasm (leading Alisha to say that “a fucking silk worm turns this girl on”) but Catherine takes a much different approach by pretending that she just found out a love one died, which ends up making her cry for her entire shoot. If there had been a painful back story here, Top Model would have been all over that, so all I can do with this situation is assume that Catherine is kind of bonkers this week. She tried to wear green lipstick earlier so I’m going to blame this on something like altitude sickness from the plane ride. Later Nigel cuts it bluntly by saying that a “tragedy like death is not an easy sell in the advertising world.” He’s right; it’s much easier to sell pedophilia.

At panel, Laura all but guarantees the Brit vs. American finale we all saw coming by delivering one of the best photos of the competition thus far. Tyra – who looks stunning in a floor length yellow silk gown, by the way – is hard on almost everyone else and actually manages to give Eboni a good piece of advice about avoiding making her waist appear the same width as her shoulders.  Alisha gives good face in her photo (although Kelly Cutrone’s zinger of the week is that she looks like “the girl who didn’t get into the Supremes”) but she forgets to sell the dress, which leads her to her second consecutive bottom two appearance after getting first photo the week before. Luckily for Alisha, if the pattern holds, the finale week will be a good one for her. Catherine goes home though, since in the grand scheme of Top Model, regality tends to equal snoozies! Off to Hong Kong next week!

- Marcus Michalik is still quietly rooting for Annalise

America’s Next Top Model Recap: More Toochin’, Less Bullyin’

I’m guessing Tyra can’t even remember whether or not Top Model has centered a challenge around anti-bullying ever since Glee and Lady Gaga made it into last year’s important zeitgeist-y social issue, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances and let the opportunity to deeply inspire pass her by completely. You can always see the gears turning in Tyra’s head beneath the smize, and while this season that look has fixated almost completely on making “booty tooch” into a marketable brand (aided by some skills she learned dorming it up at Harvard Business School, no doubt), I couldn’t help shake the mental image of Ty-Ty, obviously proud of herself, sitting in her office and brainstorming the idea of throwing a bunch of finger paint and crew member’s kids at the models and calling it an exercise in female empowerment. “This is how I won my Emmy. This is why they love me.”

It’s unclear then why the episode chose to open so coldly, with Laura (someone a reader helpfully noted I called “Lauren” at least two times in last week’s recap. Forgive me, there have probably been a whole two seasons worth of girls named Laura/Lauren, Sarah/Sara, and Ebony/Eboni by now) ragging on Kyle, mainly because she still doesn’t trust her after Kyle threatened to leave the show earlier this season. Trust me, if I were in this house (god-willing), I’d probably find myself in at least a dozen “so-and-so doesn’t deserve to be here anymore” bitch sessions, but after well over 100 episodes, they’ve become even more boring to watch than Tyra reciting the winner’s prize package.

Things quickly get to business when the girls meet at an undisclosed studio somewhere to shoot a self-empowerment PSA (the British girls don’t seem to know what a PSA is, but that’s probably because this one doesn’t have any of the horrific violence they’re used to.) The winning team will get their ad show on The CW’s website (for an audience of 10 Ringer watchers), but more importantly, will also get a taped message from home.

The setup allows for the backstory info dump the editors have been praying for, with audiences having the chance to learn about Laura’s alcoholic parents and the relentless racist bullying Eboni endured as a child. There are genuine moments of emotion that I’m not sure how to process in the context of this show when the models get paired with wise children to talk about beauty, with the sweetest moment coming from Alisha when she breaks down in tears after her teammate tells her she feels ugly because of the color of her skin. It’s nice to see the contestants pull it together and work in unison (as they mostly have all season) for the challenge, but I have to admit to being an asshole and laughing when Laura’s youngster misspeaks and says “freedom is mold” instead of “freedom is breaking any mold.”

Despite there being a moment where Annaleise’s cross-legged short shorts position required some inconspicuous vaginal censoring, the U.K. girls handily walk away with the win thanks to their breezy and heartfelt commercial, and are treated to videos from home broadcasted proudly off a Virgin Mobile phone. Annaleise’s message is weirdly from her roommate, but the one from Sophie’s boyfriend is even worse as it mainly contains him rambling on about the weather and generally looking like he wandered off the set of a Klaxons music video.

This week’s photoshoot is pretty strange, mainly because it’s initially presented as if it’s supposed to be a live performance art installation.  Instead, it’s week two of booty tooch lessons, only this time in the context of a fancy Bel Air dinner party instead of a mall kiosk music video. Alisha instantly endears me to her by promising that she’s going to offer “some bootie hoochie, toochie fruity.” “American Boy” singer Estelle and her mushroom cap hairstyle are there for some reason and is quickly hailed as one of the only U.K. singers to achieve crossover success by girls that have apparently never heard of Adele.

Almost all the girls approach the challenge by climbing on top of the table on all fours and presenting themselves like they’re in a nature documentary, and while some are able to make holding prop pieces of fish work for them, every single one of the girls seems to forget that Estelle is standing behind them in their photos. Estelle hilariously ends up a floating head and craning neck in each photo, hers sole piece of advice “watch out for what’s in front of you” falling upon deaf ears and mouths full of grapes. At one point the photographer yells out “Watch out for that meringue pie, it’s real!” and that’s really all you need to know in the end.

Kelly Cutrone isn’t as funny as she usually is at panel, although she does manage to compare Sophie’s photo to “Ivana Trump’s divorce party” and mean it as a compliment. Tyra again displays alarming self-awareness by laughing at her own “booty scooping” wordage, but things go back to normal when Nigel jokingly mentions “Booty Tooch: The Movie” and an obvious light bulb goes off in Tyra’s head.

Eboni and Seymone go the contortionist route in their pics and mainly get praised for it, but it’s Alisha and Kyle that end up in the bottom two, as editing clearly warned us of earlier. Laura is still salty over the fake butt pad Kyle is given during the challenge to help aid what nature has cruelly made flat, but it ends up being of no assistance as Kyle gives the British girls their first ever numbers advantage after she ends up getting the booty tooch boot. I’m half expecting next week’s episode to ask the girls to write college dissertations on booty tooching. It’s also in this moment that I’m finally telling my Microsoft Word to add the word to its dictionary.

- Marcus Michalik

America’s Next Top Model Recap: The Art of the Booty Tooch

Top Model may already be a handful of eliminations into its current Americans versus Brits season, and while editor Becky Lang and I have been secretly keeping an eye out on the show to make sure Bankable Studios isn’t in the process of covertly trying to reignite the Revolutionary War (now sponsored by Cover Girl!), we can’t in good faith keep mum on the subject any longer when Miss Tyra is out there teaching master classes on the art of the “booty tooch.” And just like that I’m powerless to the charms of an insane woman and the transparent reality television conventions of a show that now has as much to do with the real world of fashion as one of those Barbie Makeover Closet computer games did back in the days of Windows ’98.

Obviously aware of the entertainment goldmine that was last season’s All-Star music video challenge, Tyra has once again asked her aspiring models (that she hasn’t created a word for this concept by this point – probably something like “aspidels” – is absolutely astounding) to make like the best Bravolebrities and record truly terrible dance singles, which unfortunately wasn’t par for course for models in the glory days of Naomi Campbell. Last season’s challenge ended up touching upon an unexpected emotional nerve when Creepychan Allison Harvard looked past being required to shoehorn the phrase “pot ledom” (to quote Lisa D’Amato from last season, “in case you’re not wizards, that’s ‘Top Model’ spelled backwards”) into her composition to write what ended up being a weirdly mesmerizing song about her recently deceased father. Considering this year’s songs were actually co-written by D’Amato, who no doubt won the All-Stars season just to make Tyra look medicated in comparison, and given names like “Stop Drop ’N’ Tooch,” and “We’ll Mash You Up,” any chance of musical subtlety was gone quickly even before Lisa welcomed the girls by calling them all hussies. Lisa’s songwriting partner is also the former drummer for Letters To Cleo, which is something I don’t want to talk about.

Tyra splits the girls into country appropriate girl groups and introduces them to their special mentors, Nadine Coyle of the U.K’s Girls Aloud (only history’s greatest white girl group) and Jessica Sutta of the Pussycat Dolls, the latter of whom Lauren calls “the best mentor you could ever possibly hope for.” No one from Danity Kane makes an appearance, which is sort of sad.

The girls take a trip to the recording studio to record their vocals (which end up resembling Autotuned raps more than actual singing) and while the U.K. girls mostly impress by utilizing their cocksure accents Lily Allen-style for maximum attitude, the Yank girls end up with largely flat performances, save for Lauren who jumps at the chance to turn her rap into a phone sex hotline audition in case the whole modeling thing doesn’t work out. Androgynous Azmarie draws ire from the U.K. girls for her quirky delivery style, which surprisingly never gets called out as the lame Nicki Minaj impression that it is, instead sounding more like Amber Rose recovering from a nasty scalp burn. Scared doe Kyle is even worse, but I’d be lying if I said her utterly soulless “Hi! I’m Kyle! I smile for miles” line didn’t make me laugh out loud all 100 times it was played.

What follows is maybe one of the most gloriously outrageous segments in Top Model history, and that’s including the mini movie inspired by Tyra’s ModelLand book series that the contestants were forced into making last season right after they posed in kiddie pools full of Greek salad ingredients. Marching in proudly in a sleeved yellow shrug and workout pants emblazoned with the words “booty tooch” on the ass, Tyra greets the girls in a dance studio to teach a class on “the art of the booty tooch” which includes lessons on how not to break any of the cardinal sins of toochin’ (including the dreaded “hoochie tooch,” “pookie tooch,” and the “dookie tooch) and tips on how to live your best tooch or something. Azmarie, apparently feeling secure following her repeat best photos of the week, balks at Tyra’s requirement for the ladies to wear synthetic butts for their lessons fearing that it will spoil her androgynous image, stating “I’m a grown ass woman. I don’t have time for this shit.” Normally she’d be right, but considering the show has been on for 18 batshit seasons already, participants should probably just prepare to convince themselves that posing in NBA mascot costumes is fashion by this point. Azmarie’s pride gets her removed from Tyra’s seminar (I’m calling it a seminar), which is a real shame because she doesn’t get to join in with the others when Tyra leads the girls in a spirited Stomp The Yard style chant of “We don’t want no dookie tooch!” while pretending to sit on a toilet.

On the actual video set, which looks like some nightmarish version of a Wong Kar Wai film via Epcot Center, things are relatively calm minus Kyle’s sexless ineptitude and Laura’s growing animosity towards her following an incident involving a stuffed animal, a pool, and the memory of a dead friend. It doesn’t make much sense and Laura jumps at the chance to make it explicitly clear that the teddy bear is a metaphor for the connection between her and her deceased friend, which at least means she paid attention in 10th grade English class.

At panel, Tyra scares the shit out of me by revealing she’s actually self-aware of her psychosis (I mean, I always knew this, but it’s entirely jarring to hear her say it aloud) by suggesting that the music videos are supposed to be like something out of a cartoon. Fashion P.R. maven Kelly Cutrone is on absolute fire for the entire night, praising Lauren’s baby Ke$ha theatrics by calling her a “Silver Lake Lower East Side Ratta Tat Tat Rapper Dance Girl” and blasting Eboni for not pulling on her pigtails hard enough and for not doing a “robot girly baby dance,” which is direction that is abundantly clear.

The U.K. girls handily walk away with the win (and the first four photos) by producing a video that Tyra gleefully compliments by saying “I felt like I was watching a real music video!” Ahhh, more self-awareness! At one point Kelly says Sophie’s performance is what Edie Sedgwick would want to resemble today, which is essentially a suggestion for Sophie to die young. It’s Alisha and her magical gams that get first photo, while Azmarie and Kyle predictably end up in the bottom two. What’s not so predictable is that Azmarie actually gets the boot, a decision that’s a tad surprising considering the majority of her edit this week made it seem like it was merely serving as the narrative hiccup that all eventual winners must face to create even the tiniest modicum of suspense when they’re in the final 3 at the  cycle’s end.

Tyra’s lame decision leaves Team USA (or shall I say the “United Sirens of America,” as their band name previously heralded. Brits, don’t laugh. The best you could come up with was “Fiercely British”) with some pretty lame competitors. No lesbian winner this year, unless you’re counting Lauren’s supposed Katy Perry-style drunk girl bisexuality, which I refuse to. So much for progress, Banks!

-Marcus Michalik still can’t believe Tyra didn’t bring up “Shake Ya Body” once the whole hour.