MizShoes Reviews: ANTM Cycle 12, Episode 4

Previously on America’s Next Top Model, there was much squealing. There were make-overs and freak-outs and Jessica went back to Puerto Rico to think about the difference between being pretty and being a model. Now, though, we are with the hamsters in their pink plaid limo and Wind In Her Face is happily remembering her fabulous photo. Nijah worries about having dead eyes and no discernible personality. In confessionals, Tahlia is off her game, and losing her confidence and Aminat is wearing yet another Mammy-rag. Have these girls no sense of history? Or, in the words of Clerk’s Randal, are they just taking it back?

Tyra Mail gives them the clue of Ps &Qs and the girls deduct that they will be going to runway lessons. This lets Natalie confide to the camera that she’s all that and a side of fries, seeing as how she is already a great model and she’s already been signed with an agency. We cut to the house catwalk, and Natalie is showing the others how to walk. Aminat suggests that perhaps Natalie should “take a slice of humble pie and relax.” Not bad advice. Natalie does not take it.

The next morning the girls are hauled off to Miss Jay’s Drag & Slag Charm School for Dummies. They are told to change, and find cropped chinos, faux pearls and twin sets. And heels. The key words are Grace. Poise. Elegance. And Smooth. Miss Jay sashays down the make shift runway and gives the hamsters a textbook example of a perfect catwalk. OK. I’ll say it. She may be a freak, she may be a queen with no sense of how to dress, but Miss Jay can fucking walk. Celia humps out first and gives a “signature walk” which she claims is essential to a star model. Fo is called a wind up toy. Nijah looks angry (better than dead?) Kortnie has a “certain wiggle jiggle” and needs help. This, translated, means that Kortnie leads with her tits. Tahlia needs help. LondonComeToJesus needs poise and grace. Wind In Her Face elicits an “Oh,dear” but the clear loser of the evening is AllisonKeaneLemur, who needs all the help she can get. She is pigeon-toed. She is schlumpy. She gets a book on her head. Natalie has confidence and Miss Jay loves her. And then, previous

hamsters come out to give the girls some tips. They are…. Binaca of the Stank Attitude and Chantallobotomy. Chantallobotomy tells the girls not to over think things. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! yeah. Cause that was one thing she never had to worry about. At all. Hell, she never even had to worry about thinking at all. Binaca of the Stank Attitude doesn’t say much at all. She’s too busy feeling superior to this lot. And one must admit, she’s looking better than ever.

Back at the house, the girls are playing a game of Truth or Dare. Someone licks someone else’s nose. For her “truth” question,Natalie gets asked who had the worst photo last week. She thinks that would have been Tahlia. Tahlia takes this personally, and stomps out of the room, and says that Natalie is selfish and that will either enable her to win, or cause her to fail. Tahlia is hoping for the latter. Aminat gives her moral support, or at least says things like yeah, you go, uh-huh.

Tyra Mail! tells the girls that a runway is a terrible place for excess baggage. They immediately recognize this to mean that they’ll be carrying bags on the runway. Wow. Two for two on the Tyra Mail. Someone’s got some brain cells bumping together this season. Before the challenge, though, Wind In Her Face has to get that Jheri Curl taken care of. She comes back looking absolutely the same to me, only with a hairline so far back on her skull that it bears a striking resemblance to Queen Elizabeth 1. She is so far beyond a five head, that she’s basically a twelve-pack head. The other girls gush over the change. Press on regardless.

The girls are going to walk in Jill Stuart’s Spring Runway Show. Walking and carrying shopping bags. And practicing their runway etiquette. This means no body checking the other models with their bags. Ann Shockett, editrix of 17 magazine will be in the front row with Miss Jay and Jill Stuart, evaluating the girls. And we’re off. Celia starts, and, as one would expect, rocks it. Natalie gets half way back up the runway and does a Mary Tyler Moore “She’s Gonna Make It After All” twirl, swinging her bags. Miss Jay and the rest of the front row are horrified. Natalie voices over how confident she is that she just raised the bar on giving good runway. LondonComeToJesus gets into the music and doesn’t even know she’s on the runway. In a good way. For Jesus. Nijah carries her bags in one hand, and Miss Jay just shakes her head. AllisonKeaneLemur says that she’s scared of narrow spaces, and walking on a runway is going to be scary. She clomps her way down and back, and despite her fears, does not fall off. Fo took Miss Jay’s advice from the morning before and radiates energy and confidence. Go Fo.

Backstage, Jill and Ann give the girls their critique. Jill was thrilled to open her show with Celia, who looked angelic. Fo had a huge personality. Wind In Her Face was a leetle bit stiff, AllisonKeaneLemur was cute and quirky. (And, no. She isn’t. She looks like some big-eyeballed bobble head. She’s just a fly and a blood vessel away from being a Big Daddy Roth Rat Fink.) Natalie had a beautiful walk, right up until she twirled and then she sucked. Tahlia needs more confidence. She was a little weak in the walk. And Nijah was pretty and feminine and needs to walk stronger. The prize will be clothes from the collection, chosen by Jill. She decides to give them to Natalie, despite the twirling debacle. Natalie takes this the way one expects from the smarmy, overconfident girl: she gloats. Then she gloats a little more and points out that she won, even though she screwed up, and that has just got to be intimidating to the rest of the poor loser girls.

As a poster-sized photo of Tyra stares disapprovingly from the wall over her shoulder, Tahlia talks on the phone to her sister, admitting that she’s had her confidence shaken and that she’s ready to come home. Tahlia’s sister gives her a pep talk. Be strong. What doesn’t get you thrown out of the house makes you stronger. Tyra Mail! warns the girls to give it their all tomorrow or they might get thrown under the bus. Only if Natalie and Sandra are standing in the back row, if you know what I mean.

Morning breaks over the lovely island of Manhattan, and the girls see Mr. Jay, wearing the weirdest freaking hat, come out of a double-decker sight-seeing bus. I can’t really pay attention to his speech about the shoot because I cannot figure out what the hell is on his head. It is seamless, and looks like the love child of an equestrian helmet and a baseball cap. Is is felt? Is it molded from fuzzy blanket material? It is blue, that’s for damned sure. The Number Three Surrogate Daughter is just as dumbfounded. In fact, the entire population of Miz Shoes living room quits talking and gapes at the blue helmetcapcloche thing. The RLA and his college pal are dumbstruck. The college pal’s daughter (who shall be known from this point forward as The MB-ette, and who has decided to join us for ANTM bashing on a regular basis) just looks at us and shrugs. I got nothin’ she says. The college pal’s son has a glazed look and can’t form words. The blue is really quite contrasty with Mr. Jay’s orange skin.

Anyway. They will be taking the bus around Manhattan, stopping in iconic places, and doing shoots pretending to be creatures who would naturally inhabit those places. The photographer is Mike Rosenthal, an ANTM semi-regular. Again, and this seems to be a trend this season, the girls will be doing shoots in groups. First up: Wall Street and Fo and Aminat are (power) brokers. They are propped with a lap top and a cell phone. They both get into it, role play and bounce off of each other. It’s a great shoot. Heading north, we go to SoHo, where Kortnie and Nijah are supposed to be Artist and Muse. Which is a joke, because I don’t think working artists have been able to afford SoHo in about 20 years. It’s also a joke because the two of them can’t interact to save their lives. Nor can they pose. They are lame and lamer. Nijah later confessionalizes about the shoot and wearing an American flag do-rag. What is it with head gear this season? Everybody seems to be sporting the do-rag.

Further up town, we have Sandra and Celia and a pram, as the two blondes portray overly-fabulous nannies. They, too, have some chemistry between them and work well together. AllisonKeaneLemur and LondonComeToJesus are supposed to be snotty Upper East Side frenemies. AllisonKeaneLemur is wearing a black sequined leather bar cap, perched in/on her hair. It is not a good look.They are supposed to be telling a story. Neither one can come up with anything. Together they are flatter than, well, they are almost as flat as Kortnie and Nijah. Then we see AllisonKeaneLemur confessionalizing with what seems to be a giant, knitted, baby pink and blue Easter egg on her head. It might be a Rasta knit hat, but it isn’t flopping down filled with dreads, and it isn’t being worn back off her forehead, and it isn’t red, green, black and yellow. It is a HUGE, pink and baby blue conehead dome. I have no idea what she was babbling about, either. The #3SD and the MB-ette both look to me for words of comfort and wisdom. I shrug. I got nothin.

We end at Times Square, where Natalie, Tahlia and Wind In Her Face will be posing as tourists. This should be a slam dunk. It isn’t. Wind In Her Face has a giant pretzel. She takes a bite out of it. Mr. Jay tells her to lose the mouthful, and instead of swallowing, she spits it out. Big, gooey, wet, chewed up pretzel blargh goes over the high side and probably hit some Japanese tourists. So much for poise, grace and elegance. Tahlia was the star of the shoot, and Natalie trash talks her for it. Of course. With that, we are ready to go to judging. AllisonKeaneLemur is scared of judging. Of course. And narrow spaces. And she wishes she had nose bleeds. This child is odd.

Our guest judge today is Jill Stuart. Since they took group photos, they will get group critiques. We begin with Kortnie and Nijah. They did not tell the story of artist and muse. They had nothing about them that said SoHo. Nijah, in particular, sucked. Fo and Aminat are called up and Paulina declares that they both look like models at panel today and that this has now made her happy, as has their most excellent shot. Celia and Sandra are next, and before anyone can go anywhere, Miss Jay tells Sandra that her knees are ashy, and she should spit on her hand and shine them up a little. Their photo garners some raves. So editorial! So NOT nannies, and that’s a good thing. Nigel loves Sandra.

Tahlia/Wind In Her Face and Natalie failed the Times Square Tourist shot. Natalie just phoned it in and was Not In The Moment. Wind In Her Hair has nice teeth, and you could see all three hundred of them, all the way to her tonsils. LondonComeToJesus and AllisonKeaneLemur did not fare well either. Paulina tells AllisonKeaneLemur that she “looks like a hung over Olsen twin.” Schnort. Good one, Paulina. Worthy of La Dickenson herself. LondonComeToJesus gets the damning praise of looking “pretty.” We see a commercial of which former contestant is actually working, and it’s all about Binaca of the Stank Attitude. Apparently she’s the new face of Barbados tourism, or some other Caribbean island. Good for her. We also see that, despite bitching a blue streak when Tyra cut off all of HER hair, she is still working the shaved head full time. Hah. And snap.

Back in the judging room, Paulina says that Kortnie may have more potential than she originally thought, and Nigel says, prissily, that for a shot that was supposed to represent Artist and Muse, it was neither artistic nor amusing. Oooooh, Nigel has his bitch pants on today. You go, Nigel (call me). Nijah is a pretty yawn. Fo, Aminat, Sandra and Celia are all great. Natalie, Wind In Her Face and Tahlia get a pass, but there is some major hating on Natalie. LondonComeToJesus is called pretty and AllisonKeaneLemur is called disappointing. She can do better. She can?

Eleven girls, ten photos. Sandra gets the first photo, and it will be displayed in the house with Celia cropped out. Mean. The rest of the pictures go to Aminat, Tahlia, Fo, Celia, Kortnie, LondonComeToJesus, Wind In Her Face (Tyra says the hair is better now, and so it must be), and Natalie. Ha. Close to the bottom, there, ego-girl. Nijah and Allison are called up for their final dressing down. Nijah is so beeeyoutiful, but she gets lost on film. Allison is a fucking freakazoid, but when you photograph her, she looks like nobody or nothing special. So who goes and who stays? Nijah goes home for being bland and pretty, and AllisonKeaneLemur gets to hang on until Tyra is tired of trying to make this sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Next week, the return of the Drag Queens, Benny Ninja and Celia plots to kick someone off for not wanting it enough. Who would have thought that Celia would be the ringleader of a backstabbing?