Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bo Bice Is The New Clay Aiken, Part I
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 1 | Aired on 01.16.2006
Outside, Crystal babbles idiotically at Ryan about...something. Something about how the show is stupid and doesn't matter, and Ryan tries to make her admit that she did in fact come here to audition, so sometime in the recent past the show was somewhat more important than she's saying now, but that's too fucking complicated for old Crystal, so she just yells about how she will one day be a star. But she's not being completely stubborn, I think, because once he gets her to grasp concepts like "the past" and "the future," she does admit that she's at least heard of the show, and he smiles delightfully at this point. Like he just won something worth winning. Every year there's that one person that slides under my humanist/feminist radar and just presents as actually worthless, and it's always a shock and I have to be like twice as nice the rest of the day to make up for it, but Jesus, Crystal. You're getting what's coming to you, and your mom already did, and neither of you will ever understand how you're asking for it every single fucking second like an emergency beacon shrilling out too high for us to hear, "Please please please fuck me over and take away any chance of happiness or success I might wrest from the jaws of dumb luck, if nothing else, because I am too dumb to live. I lower your worth as an American." I mean, isn't that sad?
Then the Weirdos In Hats montage, which is irritating as shit and I don't want to talk about it except to note that: we would seem to be on a "roll," as they say; people in hats seem to cry more than regular people; there's a cowboy screaming that they have "ripped the heart from [his] chest," and then collapsing in tears -- right out in the outdoors! -- whimpering to himself, "Lord, how...how am I breathing?" and I really, really don't think he's joking; and this total freak with no hat falls asleep on a guy wearing a hat and apologizes and is crazy and homeless some more and then falls asleep sitting up. Okay, it wasn't that bad. The weeping cowboy was pretty cool.
All of which is a narrative device for introducing us to Stuart Benyamin (27, Park Ridge IL), who is dressed like a Small World After All and says that he's related to the "Assyrian Elvis Presley." He explains to the judges that he is wearing traditional Assyrian "folklore clothes" from the Fertile Crescent. He looks like a jackass, and I think he knew that, some time before now, like it was a conscious choice for him, to get attention. But he has forgotten this and he has forgotten that he looks like a jackass. He also forgot he can't sing. He's got that Marc Antony vibrato like the Chipmunks happening, and it's a traditional Assyrian folklore song from the Fertile Crescent about being deserted by a woman, requiring Randy to ask, "Were you wearing the outfit when she left?" ["I know he was fed that line. I knew it when he opened his mouth. And yet, I fell out laughing. I think he had some Catskillsy delivery on it or something, or gave it some eyebrow, but man, that shit cracked me up. Good show, Jackson." -- Sars] Although I think the singing would be the bigger deal-breaker. The judges pass, due to the crappy singing, and Paula asks for his hat. He leaves quickly.
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