The pregnancy pact scandal turned out to be fake.

Which, duh.

The Pregnancy Pact movie on Lifetime turned out to be a whole bunch of un-re-watchable bullshit.
Which, unfortunate. I love a good Lifetime movie.

Basically, these girls in Gloucester, Mass make a secret pact to all have babies so their babies will all grow up to be in the same kindergarten class, and they can all resent their mothers who all never finished high school or made anything of themselves solely based on the idea of having a bunch of dolls to play with which were purchased at approximately the same time.

So, they agree. Like, a million of them agree. And they all get pregnant. All of them!

That’s the movie’s first problem. Like, yeah, teenage girls are fertile, but all of them? ALL 18 of them got pregnant within weeks of each other?

Cameron Manheim makes a twenty second appearance as a sad school nurse who handles used pregnancy tests without gloves WITHOUT GLOVES, UM NO, and petitions the school board for some god damn condoms already. But, when she’s turned down once again, she quits on the spot. And then Cameron Manheim is no longer in the movie in which she was supposedly starring?

That’s the movie’s second problem. The “council” (not the school council or, I don’t think, the town council, but possibly a church council??), based on their strict abstinence-only education program, provides the school with pregnancy tests, but not condoms. “Don’t Have Sex, EVER: the Guide to Using Your Pregnancy Test Effectively” is a yearly seminar for the incoming freshman.

Meanwhile, Thora Birch, who has somehow morphed into Emily Valentine (and I get that that comparison will make no sense unless you watch Thora Birch’s performance in this movie, and then watch Emily Valentine’s season-long run on 90210, which would be a waste of your time, so just trust me, and then impress your friends by telling them that Thora Birch has morphed into Emily Valentine) was a former Gloucester High student who now runs a Teen Issues Blog With Videos On It from her swanky New York City office with a secretary? And she decides to go up to Gloucester and figure out why so many girls are getting knocked up, and film it all to appear in Web Related Video Content for her Teen Issues Video Blog.

One of the pregnant girls is the daughter of the council president. Uh oh!

Thora Birch, meanwhile, is the former girlfriend of the current vice principal. Double uh oh!

Let’s get this out of the way quickly. Thora Birch lived in Gloucester for a couple of years and it’s intimated early that she was pregnant when she was a teenager. By the vice principal. It’s also intimated that she hurt this guy badly and that he’s never forgiven her. It turns out that she got pregnant at 16 and was terrified (normal reaction), and the vice principal, who was also 16, was excited (abnormal reaction) and begged her to marry him (ABNORMAL REACTION!!) and then got really upset when she went off to have an abortion without telling him (sort of normal reaction), but is still convinced that they would have been happily married still had she stuck around and teen-married him, despite the fact that he now is married (to some random hot woman) with children (he appears to love). Oh, yeah. (ABNORMAL ALL OVER THE PLACE!)

It turns out that Thora Birch didn’t have an abortion. Her family was moving to Florida conveniently, so she just told him she’d had an abortion so she could move with her family, have the baby in peace, and give him up for adoption. She eventually comes clean to the vp, and he has, as predicted, kind of an abnormal reaction where he may or may not be still mad at her? Even though she didn’t kill HIS BABY TOO?

Anyway, this is the third problem with this movie, because their message seems to be a warning to parents about the dangers of getting too serious with the boys at school, because you never know who’s ready to get knocked up and then married before they’re even able to get into an R-Rated movie. But, then it puts the vp in the position of sad dad and Thora Birch in the position of evil abortion lady/evil adoption lady. So, one doesn’t know what to think.

Thora Birch goes to a council meeting to find out why they won’t provide condoms for the school (when did mysterious volunteer councils trump school councils/boards for issues related to school funding?) and finds out two things. 1) Last year’s rummage sale made $6000 and this year’s is projected to make $13,000. Um, I’ve been to rummage sales? Everything costs, like, 10-cents. What kind of rummage sales are these people running? 2) The $13,000 will go towards another full spot at the high school daycare center.

The whaaaaa-record scratch-aaaat?

Yeah. The high school daycare center. As in, the place where all of the girls in the school who have already HAD their babies can dump their babies off during classes. As in, your effing abstinence only education is INEFFECTIVE!

Which is the fourth problem with this movie. Preaching abstinence in a church is a given. Teaching abstinence in a school is (I believe) totally irresponsible and without any merit whatsoever. But, teaching abstinence, frowning upon premarital sex, and withholding information about safe sex alternatives for kids who wish to not remain abstinent, and then spending tens of thousands of dollars to provide pregnancy tests and daycare after every kid in the whole school inevitably didn’t follow any of the teaching points in your non-sex-ed lessons is even beyond laughable.

So, that girl I mentioned before whose mother is on the council. Her mother’s pissed and also in some kind of abstinence-only denial. The girl has a bf who off-handedly mentioned getting married, as in, “When we’re out of college, we’re totes getting married and I am totes playing for the Red Sox [boo!].” She heard, “Marriage is legal at 16 and you are 15-going-on-16, so let’s do this!” So, she “tricks him” into getting her pregnant.
Insofar as you can trick a person who knows that you are not on any form of birth control, and who thinks that there is no legal way for a teenage boy to practice safe sex except for the pull-out method (which he admittedly didn’t do every time).

Which is the fifth problem with this movie. Condoms are not an over-18-only item. Anyone can go to a 7-11 and buy some condoms. There’s even a scene where Thora Birch does so for the benefit of some random non-pregnancy-pact-ed girl who’s too embarrassed to do it herself. Granted, the condoms are non-branded, and come in generically packaged strips that you literally have to ask the clerk for a specific number to pull off the wall for you like cheap lollipops. But, still, no council members or parents are working in or even shopping in this gas station convenience store, and despite the stupid abstinence-only program, every kid in 2010 has the internet in some form or another. These boys can’t say they were tricked when buying condoms was always an option open to them. So, the movie manages to make the girls seem like crazy baby-starved demons who stole all the contraceptives in the world and the boys like little gentle forest creatures who were never given the proper tools to deal with love.

Anyway, at a keg party (?) in the middle of the day (?) on a public dock (?) every 16-year-old in town is drinking and smoking. EVERY one. Including all of the pregnant girls. Every single one. There is not one girl out of the whole bunch who’s like, “I read on a blog that smoking and drinking deforms babies, so gross!” There is not one non-pregnant student who’s like, “I know we have abstinence-only education at our school, but we also have a really comprehensive and expensive baby-and-pregnancy-education program, and I think that they said something about how smoking and drinking deforms babies, so, you’re gross!” No, they all continue to smoke and drink at this not-possible-that-it’s-not-known-about-and-or-condoned-by-adults party.

There’s been a media frenzy surrounding the school once the idea of the pregnancy pact leaked and, though all the girls denied it, the Red Sox hopeful bf confronts his gf at the party to tell her that if she tricked him into having a baby, they’re over. I really hope that kid buys a few rounds off the condom wheel because, what an idiot. When he leaves, the girl is so distraught that she starts chugging from the tequila bottle that is suddenly and inexplicably in her hands. She drinks the whole bottle and then almost dies.

Problem number six with this movie. These girls are smoking and drinking constantly, and not ONE of them has a problem with her pregnancy, or with any of their babies. Every baby is born healthy to a healthy mother.

Anyway, the girl doesn’t die, and her mother tells her the big secret about how she boned a lot before she was married and she didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistake. Too late! She also learns her lesson and advises the council to just put some god damn condoms in the school already. No word on what happened to Cameron Manheim.
Thora Birch visits the girl once more before she goes back to her Blogging and Video Blog Making Offices in New York City, and basically tells her that giving a baby up for adoption is still a totally solid option, because having a baby when you’re fifteen is going to be pretty hard. The girl insists that she wants her life to be “getting married and having babies”, like, she literally has no other ambition. And Thora Birch is straight up, like, “Seriously, you’re not living in the 1500s, your life can have marriage and babies and also education and a job if you want and also lots of other things, too,” and the girl looks at her and is, like, “I’m going to be a great mother.” And Thora Birch is like, “Yeah, I’m sure you will. I’m going back to New York City now, where things are a little less creepy, but also a little more implausible, because Bloggers and Bloggers with Video Content on Their Blogs generally work from home in pajamas and not in offices with secretaries. Also, I am Emily Valentine now.” The movie ends with a scene in the girl’s bedroom, now completely overrun with baby toys and clothes and a crib, where we see the girl playing happily with her baby.

So, that’s the seventh problem with the movie, and really the biggest one. Because, what the eff was the message? Wasn’t this a cautionary tale for teenagers and/or parents of teens? It seemed like the whole movie was trying to get at the idea that abstinence-only education pretty much just leads to girls having babies and that kids are totes irresponsible (hello, chugging tequila) and are not ready for the harsh realities that come with being pregnant.

But, I think it was also kind of about how girls are evil and conniving and will do anything to get one over on their bfs? Like, it was sort of like Sex and the City but with pregnancy pacts? (I’ve never watched Sex and the City, but they seem crazy on that show. It’s a show about mental patients, right?) But it’s also about the joys of giving birth to a baby when you’re fifteen? I think it’s about how condoms are ok, but the guy who sells you condoms off the condom roll doesn’t care about you. And abstinence is good, but if you don’t bother with that, someone will be willing to buy $13,000 worth of old World’s Best Grandma mugs and used children’s snow suits to pay for your child’s way. And that giving up babies for adoption/getting abortions when your insane child bf thinks you have the means to support a baby with him is evil, and keeping a baby and effectively ending your life as you knew it as a teenager is angelic and also fun?

I think I got it. The message. Girls are bad/Babies are good.

High School Reunion is still the best show on television. Just ask my awesome passed out friend.

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Persuasion was the last book Jane Austen wrote before she died. It’s about losing love and finding it again and defying your awful family, etc, like some classic literature shit. Anne’s delusional family told her to reject the marriage proposal of the sailor she was in love with because he was poor and they weren’t. Ten years later, when she’s almost 30 and pretty much an old maid, her family’s still delusional but now not as rich, Anne has lead a very sad lonely life, the sailor is now a captain and has tons of money, and Anne has to watch him rub it in her face about what she missed out on as her sister’s in-laws fall all over themselves trying to get him to marry one of them. He realizes, of course, that revenge is pointless because he still loves her, and she still loves him, and omg her family is essentially abusive so no wonder she’s so effed, and he asks her to marry him, the end.

Persuasion, the tv-movie adaptation from 2007 is about the woman from Happy-Go-Lucky

attempting to look sad

- probably due to her extremely painful hairdo -

and running a whole lot

after her former almost fiancee

who’s stopped over from his frat house to invite Anne’s awful sister

Mary’s sister-in-law Conan O’Brien

and her suicidal sister Louisa

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to help him rub it in that Anne is a loser

before finally deciding to get back together with her after she goes blind.

I mean, approximately.

Actually, they did totally eff up the story in the following three ways.

1. The Casting

Happy-Go-Lucky was a great movie. Sally Hawkins was great in Happy-Go-Lucky. I don’t think actors should be pigeon-holed into roles, but SH is so much better suited to someone who sees the joy in life as opposed to someone who’s been lonely and sad and treated like crap by her entire awful family for the past ten years, whose only glimmer of hope came and went quickly, and came back again only to taunt her.

Plus, Capt. Wentworth up there is supposed to be bitter, hardened, angry, out for a little bit of revenge, and has been on a boat for the past ten years. What kind of sunscreen did this guy have? He looks great.

But, Mary. Oh, Mary. Mary, Anne’s younger and only married sister, is conceited and constantly disappointed with her life. Her in-laws don’t like her because she’s annoying, but she thinks they owe her a lot more respect, and her husband ignores her because she’s a shrew. She pretends to be ill in order to get attention and is conniving when it comes to who her young sisters-in-law should marry, though it’s really none of her business since both their parents are alive.

Once upon a time, I got a BS in special education. This is true. So I spent a lot of this movie trying to figure out what special needs Mary has.

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My conclusion is that she’s just generally deranged. There is no help I can give her.

2. The Letter

At the end of the story, Capt. Wentworth overhears a conversation between Anne and a mutual friend where she’s all, “I’m still obvs in love with someone from my past,” and Wentworth writes a letter that’s all, “Serious? ‘Cause if I heard you right, you’re in love with me, and I’m in love with you AWESOME,” and then he makes sure she gets the letter before he leaves and she reads it and goes down to tell her brother-in-law to find Wentworth and tell him that she wants him to come back to her house later for a party, “make sure you wink at him a lot, dude, it’ll get the point I’m trying to make across,” but her brother-in-law is, like, “I have errands to run, and Wentworth has been hanging around outside the front door of your house for the past ten minutes, so why don’t you just tell him yourself?” and then they get married.

In this movie, Anne has the conversation (which is the only solid indication that Wentworth has that Anne really didn’t want to give him up ten years ago, and still wants him back) but Wentworth isn’t there to hear it. And Anne gets the letter (which contains the phrasing from the book, including the part about how he overheard her, but he didn’t overhear anything) while she’s already on some weird jog through the town to find him, but without ever having read the letter, she never would have known that he wanted her back. I’m not one of those people who thinks that movie adaptations can’t take artistic license, but it’s kind of the climax. Which is kind of the important part of the story. Kind of.

3. The Kiss

There are some truly bad movie kisses. This might be the worst. Anne runs through Bath searching for Capt. Wentworth, running into about thirty people on the way who keep sending her in different directions like she’s playing some kind of poorly designed board game. When she finally finds him, it takes them about three hours to just kiss each other already, because I guess the person who directed this movie reeeeally liked Dawson’s Creek.

The description on YouTube says that the actor playing Wentworth thought it was the steamiest kiss he ever did on screen. Ew. Even with the spittle?

But what do I know? There are currently fan videos for Persuasion on YouTube set to I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, Moonlight Sonata (?), Right Here Waiting, Wait for You, Back for Good, Chasing Cars, When You Say Nothing At All, I’ll Never Get Over You (Getting Over Me), Light Up My Life, What About Love, How to Save a Life,  It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, My Immortal, What About Now, Because You Loved Me, and I Will Remember You, so I’m obviously missing something.

I’m almost convinced, but not quite. When a fan vid is made using the Heart song All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, then I’ll concede: best period piece ever.

High School Reunion’s 3rd season started this week, and I figured that I should write about it, but then I fell into this really deep depression, because what is there to say about High School Reunion that hasn’t already been said? But, like, everything, because Sally and I are the only people that watch this show.

Do you like reality dating shows? Do you like uncomfortable situations? Do you like witnessing awkward “oh my GOD what was that guy’s NAME?” moments? No? Well, me neither, but when you mix them all together, you get High School Reunion, which brings a dozen or so members of a 20-year-reunion high school class together and sticks them in a house in Hawaii and gives them unlimited alcohol and sun and lots and lots of forced dates and bonding. It manages to be the best reality show since Jersey Shore, which is interesting, because Jersey Shore started after High School Reunion, and I’ve watched HSR since the first season, but I guess I’ve watched Jersey Shore my whole life, since I live here.

This guy really wants you to stick with me on this one.

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I unfortunately missed the last viewing of the movie A Town Without Christmas today, so I was unable to get any screen caps. And apparently, the only thing about this movie that pictorially exists on the internets is this tiny picture of the two stars:

And also, the cover of the DVD, which is available in the Netherlands, in case you’re looking for a last minute xmas gift.

This movie is about this little boy named Chris who writes a pre-suicide note disguised as a letter to Santa describing how he will go into the woods on Christmas Eve and do what needs to be done if Santa doesn’t bring his mom and dad jobs for Christmas. And then some nosy parker at the post office opens his letter and turns it into a national tragedy/hunt for a suicidal nine-year-old.

Patricia Heaton is a reporter living in Seattle who, I guess, works for the equivalent of New York City’s Pix News. It’s cheap ass, is what I’m saying. She’s sent off to the little fishing town Chris lives in to cover the search for him, alive or dead, and ends up meeting this total weirdo in the train station who’s also headed to the fishing town.

This guy is some kind of failed writer who’s been trying unsuccessfully for, like, twenty years to get this memoir about his boyhood supernatural experience in the woods published. He’s like Joey Potter in that he doesn’t get that fiction writers don’t have to write stories entirely based upon real events from their lives. His story includes something about leaving his foster house on a cold Christmas Eve night to go out into the woods and find the door to the netherworld, and then falling asleep on the ground and almost freezing to death, until a magical lumberjack shows up to light a match – A match – which somehow warms him up enough to survive. So… It’s supposed to be a children’s book, btw, so his publisher is like, “PLEASE write a new story that’s not so creepy and mind-effing and depressing,” and the guy is all, “THIS is MY LIFE and it HAPPENED and it’s REAL!” because he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it at all.

Anyway, did I mention he writes for a greeting card company? His poems include things along the lines of, “Welcome to middle age. Next stop: death.” So, he gets fired right before the Christmas party. Which he actually can’t believe, because he was just sent an anonymous package filled with Thomas Kincaid-esque paintings, and he would have thought that this find – these slightly depressing scenes of a run-down town at Christmas time – would be the next big thing in Christmas cards. The firing doesn’t bother him in the least, because he becomes obsessed with finding the artist, and ends up on his way to the old fishing town, on the same train as Patricia Heaton.

I mean, the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense, so it’s gonna be hard to explain. Like, PH and Dumb Guy go to the same B&B, which overbooked, and end up having to share this basement room together, and decide they’re into each other, but in this way where they’re sort of grossed out by the thought that they can’t do any better but willing to put up with it. And it turns out that the paintings weren’t just paintings but premonitions and every scene in the paintings eventually comes true, but they’re not freaked out by it AT ALL! And Peter Falk plays this angel, Max, who’s actually a real dick, who keeps popping up and acting like he’s a different person each time, and the Dumb Guy is always, twenty seconds in, all, “Waaaaaaaait a minute, you’re that guy from the motel/bar/painting/general store!!”

Anyway, it turns out that the kid who was gonna commit suicide didn’t exist, and was a creation of this little girl whose parents were planning on getting a divorce. PH and Dumb Guy find her out and tell her that she has to let everyone know so they stop wasting time looking for a dead boy’s body in the woods, and when she goes to tell her parents, her father’s like, “Honey, what are you trying to say?” and her mother screams, “Let me HANDLE THIS!!” Assholes. No wonder this kid is making up suicide notes, you know?

Anyway, the best part of the movie is about the last ten minutes. There was supposed to be a Christmas pageant for the town which the mayor (the little girl’s father) cut from the budget because there wasn’t enough money for all the lights to be lit up. So, his wife tells the townsfolk that they’ll have the Christmas pageant without the lights and then everybody wins. And then they hook up lights anyway, and light them all, like, a million of them, and then the whole town loses power, and the woman goes tearing outside accusing her husband of having deliberately cut off the town’s power on a cold Christmas Eve night because he was annoyed that the Christmas pageant was going on, and I told you this movie is confusing.

But, Dumb Guy? He goes to the general store where he encounters Max who tells him that he over-ordered candles and candle holders, like, thousands of them. Dumb Guy grabs a box – A box – goes to his car, and then drives into the crowd of ppl standing in the dark outside of the defunct Christmas pageant, beeping his horn, and screaming like a maniac, “GET BACK INSIDE! EVERYONE BACK INSIDE! I HAVE CANDLES!!!” The one box turns into fifty and everyone grabs a big taper and places a plastic drinking cup around it, which quickly melts and deforms around the candles. Then a bunch of carolers sing Deck the Halls, but half of the carolers just sing, seriously, just sing, “Don! Gay!”

And then Max shows up in the woods in a tuxedo, Dumb Guy and PH stop making out so Dumb Guy can go talk to him, he discovers that Max was the lumberjack, and Max intimates that he may or may not actually be Santa Claus (?) and then disappears in front of them and Patricia Heaton goes, “Hey, who was that?” Like, HOMEBOY JUST DISAPPEARED! Lunatics.

If someone in the Netherlands has the dvd, please send it to me. Thx and Merry Xmas.

I have never been happier to end a cycle. And yes, there is an implied double meaning there. And yes, it’s completely true.

Weird Girl/America’s Next Top Petite Model would like to welcome you to this enormously picture heavy recap.

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The girls are way excited that they’re in the top four. And watching their excitement is actually less exciting than reading about it.

They go to their challenge, which is learning hula hip hop dance fusion and then telling a story about their lives through hula and then hip hop and then hula again. These totally cut hula ladies do the same routine where they hula and then rip off their skirts, like, ten times, so it loses a lot of its wtf impact pretty quickly. Also, Lazy Eye Too seems to think that crunking is pronounced “fronking”. So, they’re taught the routine and then taught some basic hula sign language and are sent off to create individual routines. A few years ago, there was a hula workout routine on Comcast On Demand, and we used to watch it on fast forward because the woman looked like she was floating back and forth across the screen. Memories.

Erin was a cheerleader, and she’s the only one left with any rhythm, so she offers to help the other girls by yelling “ONE TWO THREE FOUR” and clapping at them like she’s the jv cheerleading coach in a lifetime movie. Laura and Lazy Eye Too don’t seem to even be paying attention to her, but Weird Girl needs the help because when she dances she sort of falls into this habit of spreading her legs and squatting a little, staring off into space, and then waving her arms around. Erin is particularly hard on her, and Weird Girl kind of desperately needs the help, but she also wants you to know in an interview that she doesn’t appreciate someone helping her at all.

Miss J and the main hula lady judge the girls, who each dance the routine with the other real hula dancers and then do their little hula life story. Lazy Eye Too is kind of crappy, but they give her props for trying. Erin does the routine okay, but isn’t that great. Weird Girl looks like she’s having a seizure and when Miss J actually flatteringly imitates her, she whines that she doesn’t think she was all that bad, but she was actually worse. Laura is not too confidant, but says that she’s gonna fake it till she makes it, and ends up winning the challenge. They are all impressed with her booty shaking skills, for which she praises Jesus, and present her with an all-expenses paid trip back to Maui to stay at the Four Seasons Hotel. The catch? She has to go with one of the girls left in the competition. That’s so lame. If left to her own devices, she probably would have taken her Grandma, but instead, she takes Lazy Eye Too.

Back at the house, Erin is both angry that her supreme tumbling skills didn’t help her to win the challenge, and also that Laura didn’t pick her to go back to Hawaii after all of the selfless help that she gave the girls before the challenge. Although, now it’s pretty obvious that she helped them so she could a) say she won fair and square if she won and b) guarantee a ride-along on any other girl’s win. So, boo hoo. Her complaining to Laura about how she doesn’t want to hear about the challenge anymore is met with a chipper, “WhatEVER!” from Laura, because Laura is the nicest contestant that has ever been on this show.

At the photo shoot, they meet Mr. Jay and his short shorts on the beach, where they find out that they will be posing as the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. This makes Lazy Eye Too flip her shit like crazy and stare open-mouthed at Jay like he just told her that they’ll all be posing as Lazy Eye Too herself. Like, I’m so sure that Lazy Eye Too had any clue that there was a Hawaiian volcano goddess. Also, Jay tells them that the recession has hit again and Cover Girl can’t take care of the costs of shooting three girls for a commercial in the finale, so there will be no final three this year and two girls will go home tonight. Everyone’s shocked, especially Lazy Eye Too, who, it turns out, might have ptosis of the mouth as well.

Speaking of Lazy Eye Too, she doesn’t do a very good job. She’s seen statues of goddesses “start out” with their hands in a praying position, so she tries it, and the photographer very bitchily tells her that that’s a nice idea for, like, two frames, but now he’s bored. And after being told a hundred and fifty times by both Jay and the photographer to not try to stand on jagged volcanic rocks on her tippy toes so that she’ll stop tumbling forward in every shot, she finally listens somewhere around her very last frame.

Erin is pretty sure that she’ll have to do better than everyone else to secure a spot in the top, since she’s been in the bottom three weeks in a row. Deductive reasoning is a skill I did not think any of these girls possessed. She also used deduced that a goddess in charge of something destructive like a volcano would be kind of wrathful, but apparently goddesses that spew fire are supposed to be soft and pretty. So, Erin just thought of one of those pop songs the teenagers listen to and started singing it in her head. No, seriously, that’s a quote. “I thought of one of those pop songs the teenagers listen to and started singing it in my head.” When she was returning to her underground hobbit cave last night, she passed some children on the beach listening to a boom box, and filed the song away for a rainy day. Then she killed them with her teeth and made an entire wardrobe from their skins.

Laura is super nervous because of the double elimination and says that she doesn’t want to be sent home with nothing at this point, and ends up psyching herself out. Jay doesn’t like that she keeps posing with her mouth open, which is kind of annoying, because there has never ever been a picture of Lazy Eye Too with her mouth closed ever, and no one ever seems to notice it.

Weird Girl, meanwhile, does a great job per usual, and then spends her interview time saying that she’s gone from being awkward to awesome and then blasting all of the other girls’ skills. Because, now that it’s turned out she’s a pretty good model, she can stop trying to be nice to people and start acting stuck up.

Tyra must have an entire room filled with jumpsuits. Did you know Tyra lost 30 pounds? For health reasons? Well, she’s got the clingy jumpsuit to prove it. Atoosa’s troll successor from Seventeen is on panel yet again. I’m surprised Tyra didn’t make a big deal about using her again like it was this exciting surprise and not just a budget cut. Anyway, they like Weird Girl’s picture, natch. Lazy Eye Too’s picture is met with some jeers, but she then makes this big deal about how she did interesting poses in the beginning, and if they had just seen the other pictures, they’d totally love her, but Tyra calls her out and says her face looked like crapola in those pictures. It kind of looks like crapola in this picture, too.

I love that reality show convention, btw. Like, on Project Runway this season when this guy made a horrible looking dress out of newspaper and Tim Gunn said it looked like someone had bled out in it, like, literally bled everything out of themselves and died in it, and the guy crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage and started a new dress, but when that dress was blasted by the judges, he was like, I had made this other dress that was totally beautiful and Valentino-like and you would have absolutely loved it, but I was trying to iron it and the iron spit water out on it, so I’m simultaneously saying it’s not my fault and also blaming FIDM for putting malfunctioning steam irons in the room during a challenge where we were using newspaper as fabric. Or, on Chopped the other night, where this guy was making an appetizer out of turkey breast and the turkey breast was burnt and a judge was like, My turkey breast is burnt and burnt turkey is too gross for words, and the guy was like, Yeah, well, I dropped one of the pieces on the floor, and that one was cooked to perfection and if I hadn’t dropped it on the floor, you would have gotten that one and you wouldn’t have complained, but there was a camera on the one that had dropped on the floor and it looked even more burnt than the one he was defending. Or on Ghost Hunters Academy last night where this girl had left her investigation early and they asked her why she left early and she was like, You guys told me to, and they were like, We didn’t tell you anything, and she was like, Or, someone told me to over the walkie talkies, and they were like, We didn’t hear anything but anyway who told you to leave, and she was like, Ohhhhhh, who was it again, um, wait, what were we talking about? They just never remember there are cameras on them.

Laura ended up looking like Rachel Hunter in her picture, like, exactly like Rachel Hunter in her picture, but she didn’t look that tall. And Erin is sort of praised but also sort of torn down. During judging, Tyra explains once again how she wanted to get a bunch of short models together who can look just like tall models so she can break down barriers in the industry, and everyone else on panel silently nods in agreement like Tyra is such a civil rights movement leader, but no one ever seems to notice that hiring models who can pass as tall and thin and everything the industry is built on isn’t tearing down barriers; it’s putting up even more barriers than there were to begin with. It’s like hiring more black models as long as they’re willing to bleach their skin and appear white in pictures. But, at least they’re getting hired, or something?

They put Weird Girl through immediately and Lazy Eye Too, Laura, and Erin end up in the bottom three. Lazy Eye Too had a couple of bad weeks, but a good body of work. Laura has basically never had a bad picture, but they think she doesn’t have fashion sense or whatever. And apparently, Erin’s picture has magically turned from not too bad into the picture that totally turned everything back around for her. But, Laura gets through because they probably couldn’t rationalize not putting her through, because Laura’s the best contestant on this show ever (tied with the Ukrainian mail-order bride).

This just looks ridiculous. Like an alien from the future (credit to Sally).

I’m having trouble remembering anything that happened on this episode, because it was really boring.

There’s a lot of blah blah blah’ing in the beginning about how all of the little models want to be there to win and how they all think the other models are going to try to take their spot and that they don’t want to be eliminated now because that would mean they wouldn’t win, so thanks for explaining the basic premise of any reality competition to us.

Lazy Eye Too has been getting hammier and hammier each week in her interviews, and it’s getting to the point where she’s punctuating everything with one of those fake choking laughs, and I was REALLY hoping she’d do a crappy job this week so that I wouldn’t have to hear her COMPLETELY OVER THE TOP PHONY TAKE ON EVERY SINGLE MUNDANE THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE HOUSE OMG I POSED FOR PICTURES TODAY AND SO DID THE OTHER GIRLS AND I WANTED TO DO WELL AND WAS HOPING THEY’D DO NOT AS WELL UH HUH HUH GASP! This week she’s particularly annoyed with Weird Girl because Weird Girl is pretty much the best model in the competition and everyone knows it. And now that the girls have all seemed to find their own level and stop hating each other for no reason (especially since the most heinous contestants have gone home and have left us with the most boring + Laura), they know that they have to find drama so that they won’t be the only silent one on the couch at the Tyra Show next month. Lazy Eye Too has decided to scream about how great she thinks Weird Girl is and how much she wants to gnash her with her teeth every time she sees her specifically because she’ll probably win due to sheer talent.

In other news, Sundai was adopted, I guess, and that is where all of her problems stem from, but we won’t know her problems unless she makes it to top four, which means she’s so obviously going home tonight. She also says that if she doesn’t make it to the end and win this fake modeling contest, then her life is essentially over. Like, if she can’t be a model specifically through winning a competition that exists entirely inside of Tyra Banks’ head, her life is over. She’s 18, btw. Maybe her top-four-reveal would have been that she’s in the witness protection program and that, if she left the competition before the final week, the feds wouldn’t be able to protect her any longer and the bad guys would find her and kill her right outside of the Hawaii house. It’s a possibility, I guess.

Also, it’s Laura’s birthday, and she gets birthday spam.

The girls go to the beach and a boat rows up to them with an actual real model (for once) on it, and the girls scream and scream that they think it’s Marissa Miller and it is!!!! but it takes the boat, like, an hour to get to them, so by the time Marissa Miller steps out onto the sand, they’re all just sort of staring at her like they’ve forgotten who she is. MM teaches them to pose in a swimsuit, and they all do fine, I guess, but then they have to put on sneakers with their bikinis, which is so awk, and go up to a cliff where Nigel Barker emerges from his tanning bed to tell them to jump into the water and have their pictures taken on the way down. The prize is the extra frames telephone game, where the winner picks a friend for some extra frames, and then they pick a friend for some extra frames, etc., until the last girl standing gets the razz. The winner is Weird Girl (which causes Lazy Eye Too to FLIP OUT IN AN INTERVIEW LIKE WHAT A SURPRISE) and the old maid is Erin, who everyone declares didn’t get extra frames for being bratty. Erin makes a stank face, like, whatever, bitches, I’ll just do really well with my pitiful amount of frames.

Back at the house, they all prepare a birthday celebration for Laura. While icing the cupcakes, Erin does that thing that some people (in high school, one of those people may or may not have been me) do to be funny where they fake yell at people all, “If you touch that cupcake one more time, I’m gonna kick your ass!” but all of the girls (minus Laura, who gets the joke) are convinced that Erin’s being dictator-like with the cupcakes, but I think she was just unsuccessfully trying to be a laugh riot. Laura is appreciative of all of the love and care that went into the party, because Laura is the nicest person that’s ever been in Tyra Banks’ orbit. I kind of hope she gets kicked off soon, because I’m scared of Tyra trying to crack her open to feed off of her niceness for the next season of the Tyra Show.

The shoot involves getting pictures taken underwater, with a photographer who was a judge on the (sadly) short lived reality competition “The Shot” from VH1 where photographers competed for some kind of big commercial photography prize, and which gave us the amazing line, “The concept for this shoot is ‘Hair Dance.’” Laura goes first and flips out underwater immediately after taking away the oxygen. She got extra frames, so she gets to come up onto the boat and get some tips from Mr. Jay, who is, once again, totally surprised at how good her pictures are, just like he is every week, just like the panel is every week, because they have that amnesia like from Memento where Laura’s consistently good pictures will just never register in the memory part of their brains. The other girls all do fine, except Sundai, who complains about her asthma, water that got in her ear from the earlier competition (where she dove into the water on her side, like a big dope), and water that goes up her nose. Also, Erin blows it because she takes all of her pictures too close to the surface of the water instead of diving down, which she would have been told to do by Jay halfway through if it weren’t for the fact that she didn’t get extra frames. Wah wah.

At panel, Laura has on a blazer over a dress, and Tyra once again, with a disgusted look on her face, conjectures that her grandma made it, and while Laura explains that she saw a designer jacket in a magazine and loved it and told her grandma and her grandma made a copy of it and sent it to her for her birthday, Ms. J seems excited in that way that he seems to be excited by anything outside of his own reality and Marissa Miller says that it would look “good with jeans, too”, and Tyra continues to try to swallow down the bile. But, worse than normal, Tyra says for her to take it off and give it to TYRA and then puts it under her judging table, like Laura brought in a toy to class and the teacher had to confiscate it until the end of the day. I hope Laura’s grandma really hates Tyra.

The pictures are all fine, I guess, but Sundai and Erin end up in the bottom three. According to Tyra, the fact that there were double the amount of chances for Sundai means she should have taken a better picture than Erin, but Erin’s a ringer, so obviously she couldn’t get kicked off. So, she doesn’t. And Sundai starts weeping, just like that girl last week whose name I’ve already forgotten because they obviously both figured Erin wouldn’t be saved so many times in a row, but they were wrong. Hey, also? Maybe Sundai got kicked off because she’s FIVE FOOT THREE. She’s a shrimp. We’ll never know what her back story was, but at the end she does mention that she’ll just have to go on doing what she was doing (guarding her pot of gold?) the best she can since this model thing isn’t gonna happen.

Next week, the recession hits again, and there will be no final three this year. Oh, well!

The show started off with Brittany complaining about how much Erin complains and then continued for an entire hour with Brittany complaining about how much Erin complains. And, since this is Top Model, that means Brittany is out, spoiler alert. Did you know that Brittany is 21, which means she’s way older and more mature than all of the other girls in the house? And did you know that she can remember being 18, in a distant hazy dream-like memory sort of way? And did you know that if Brittany were not a delusional wannabe petite model, when she turns 30 or 40 or, like, 23, she’ll be, like, “God, I was an asshole when I was 21″? But, for now, she complains about complainers.

The girls return to their house, which has been condemned. Tyra explains that “Hazmat Men” had to be called in because of the disorder of the house, and that, when she lived in a model apartment (and it’s good to see that she totally abandoned that whole “do as I did” model mama philosophy by never making the models live in anything less than $5million dollar mansions), the models were much neater, which is probably more due to the fact that models in model apartments totally don’t want to get their shit stolen out of the open suitcase next to their tiny little beds. The Hazmat Men are busy waving very obviously non-operational sprayers around the house while Tyra makes the girls repeat the word “danger” written on the accident tape strewn about. I mean, all of this obviously means that they’re going to “the abroad”, but the girls totally don’t understand and look very guilty and principal’s office-y about the whole thing, until Tyra opens up the door to the backyard and tells them that they’re going overseas to…

Hawaii! I mean, you do have to go over the sea to get to Hawaii, so I guess it’s classified as a foreign country. Hey, did you know Tyra lost weight? ‘Cause she totally did. And she lost weight FOR HEALTH REASONS, but it’s not gonna stop her from ripping off her hazmat suit and donning a bikini and a grass skirt. Not that I care if she flaunts her body, but on her talk show, she will not shut up about her weight loss, but also won’t shut up about her “kiss my fat ass” thing from two seasons ago, so she gets to have a great body and also capitalize on being discriminated against for being, like, a size 14.

In Hawaii, Erin sings a song about her roommates that clues us in to the fact that Lazy Eye Too farts a lot. Brittany thinks it’s immature and is tired and can’t believe the girls still want to stay up so late because she’s so much older than them. I slept a lot when I was 21, too, but it was mostly sleeping off very late nights of drinking.

The next day, the girls learn to surf from some short model who’s been on the cover of Surf Monthly’s Swimsuit Edition – and I’m not making that up – plus some pro surfer. Their challenge is to surf in tandem with another male surfer and pose for pictures while up on the board. The funny thing is, they introduced the challenge by having these two skeevy guys wander up to the girls and ask them if they want to go surfing and then Mr. Jay popped out to say, “Hello, we’re here to work, not party,” but the girls seemed very Stranger Danger when those guys came up. Anyway, while paddling out, the male surfers rest their chins on the girls’ butts, so keep that in mind if you’re ever looking for a good first date activity. The girls all do kind of crappy, except for Brittany and Erin. Erin wins the challenge and gets to take a helicopter tour of Maui. She picks Brittany and Weird Girl to go with her, which I thought was kind of weird, since Brittany seems to hate her, and I thought everyone hated Weird Girl, but whatever. In the helicopter, Erin says that a prize like jewelry or money would have been way more awesome than a helicopter ride, and Brittany complains some more about how childish Erin’s complaining is.

Back at the Hawaii house, Erin reiterates that lunch dates with modeling agency presidents who obviously hate you and Walmart gift cards are cooler than helicopters that you don’t get to keep, and the girls stare at her like she just took the name of the Lord in vain, and I guess she did, since she questioned a prize from the Great Tyra. For shame, they say, and also, stop acting like a brat. Brittany complains some more.

So, the photo shoot. I don’t really know how to describe it except… remember when they had to model as if they were freshly murdered corpses? This was more offensive. There are a lot of biracial people in Hawaii, I guess, and Tyra was their photographer (for the second time, which is the first time this has ever happened in Top. Model. History, and believe me, it has nothing to do with the fact that the girls “are beautiful and inspire” Tyra, and everything to do with the fact that this cycle is way cheap) and came through some reeds to tell them that they were all going to model in blackface. And then she told each girl their biracial combo (Greek and Mexican! Russian and Mongolian! Japanese and Tibetan!) and the girls all screamed and screamed and pumped their fists like they were from Jersey and kissed the ground Tyra walked on, and the only one who was appropriately “WHU?” about the whole thing was Erin, who was like, “I don’t know anything about Tibet, so…”

No, seriously. Blackface. At the shoot, Erin did a crappy job, because she was confused by the concept and also was intimidated by the fact that Tyra, since the last time she photographed them, told Erin that she sucks and has no personality. When she expressed a little bit of confusion about the whole Tibet thing, Jay’s helpful advice was that Tibetans really like rituals, so, you know, use that in your modeling. Laura was Greek and Mexican and Tyra kept telling her she was awesome and then changed Laura’s outfit a little and then Laura was like, “Hey, Tyra, I really like when you don’t dick me over and actually tell me the truth,” and Tyra made fun of her accent and then told her that was doing a terrible job. Then Laura changed everything she was doing and ended up doing really well. Tyra was really shocked by Laura’s request, because I guess it was a hard concept for her to grasp, the fact that someone doesn’t want to be told they’re doing well by the photographer who also is the judge and then told at judging that they were the worst.

Sundai was Russian and Mongolian and they actually put her in a fur Russian hat. Brittany (Native American and East Indian) was put into a giant Indian feather headdress. I’m surprised Laura didn’t pose with a burrito in her hand or something. Laura was being photographed with a gold-plated laurel wreath on her head and Tyra decided halfway through that it was too obviously Greek and turned it around so that the laurels were resting at her temples and going around the back of her head. Like every effing Greek statue. This shoot is such bullshit. Anyway, Lazy Eye Too was stuck until Jay told her that (I can’t remember the name of the country she was supposed to be from) plays a lot of drums or something, so then she channeled National Geographic and did better. Weird Girl did a good job, but I don’t remember what countries she was supposed to be from. And then Brittany decided that American Indians are stoic and regal and then just stood there and looked like she thought everyone around her smelled bad.

Hey, did I mention I hate when Tyra shoots the girls because she stands off to the side with Jay and imitates all of them and then imitates what she would do if she were them and then tries to make Jay say the dumb phrases she makes up in unison with her? Well, I hate that.

At judging, Tyra wore yet another oddly tailored, unflattering jumpsuit, and Weird Girl, Laura, and Lazy Eye Too were all praised for their pictures. Sundai was told that her picture made her look like she was modeling for Gap Kids: World Division, because she photographs short BECAUSE SHE’S SHORT. No one’s going to hire a model who’s 5′3″. There isn’t a trick besides the liquify tool that could possibly make her look tall. She’s short. Get over it. Stop trying to make petite models happen.

Erin and Brittany were in the bottom two. Erin was there because she has no self-confidence. Somehow the fact that Brittany likes math (which =/= being a mathematician, Tyra) landed her in the bottom two. According to Tyra, she mathematically over-analyzed her photo and didn’t compute the integer or whatever that sometimes American/East Indians aren’t “stoic”, but Tyra added 1 + 1 to make Indians wear feathers and Russians wear fur hats forevs and always. That makes Brittany a stoic mathematician and Tyra a dunce.

Brittany’s complaining sent her home, but she’s fine because Tyra opening up ANTM to petite models means it’s just the beginning for her. She should add those numbers up again. I, like Michael Bolton, also forget small insignificant details in math equations, leading me to the totally wrong conclusion all the time as well, B.