(We remember all the stupid things the Judges said last night, and also how Naima made weather, and it occurs to me that this episode is going to be about sending one of these kids home. Hell, maybe two. That would be pretty amazing, wouldn't it?)
Steven Tyler is wearing a giant blue leopard scarf, and inside his jacket it's secret Dalmatians; Jenny's dress has one balloon arm and one no-arm arm. Everybody's clothes are not interested in cooling it tonight.
A grinning tool has a Steven Tyler For President sign, and somebody I agree with gets lots of camera time on their sign, about how Ryan Seacrest is this person's American Idol. Well done, faceless hero.
Facts & Things
1. Tonight's musical guests will be Adam Lambert, and Diddy Dirty Money.
2. Casey is back in the hospital; seems like Ryan is going through the motions when he tells us to send him good vibes and that.
3. Also, they are doing the stupid Judges' Save thing this year.
4. Our first glimpse of the mansion in which these jerks get to live this year.
It's actually very gorgeous, and not stupid like I figured it would be. They all exhaustedly run around pretending to be overwhelmed and excited, even though they just feel tired. Lauren Picklers around and Karen looks a hard-livin' 44 years of age; Ashthon screams all the foods she can think of, Haley cries for no reason, Naima discovers the concept of measurements and Jacob discovers the echoes of the canyon. Still not done? Ashthon's giant ass is good for sliding down the stairs. Casey dips his hair in the pool, and it's cute.
I am so confused by the size of James Durbin in particular. Is it that everybody else is tiny, and he is normal or slightly larger than average? Because he laid down on a queen-sized bed just now, and you couldn't even see the bed. And in a second when they start singing shittily a Michael Jackson medley, Durbs and gigantic Lusk look about the same.
James puts his total ass into the dancing, I'll give him that. Stefano's still scampering around all over the place like a howler monkey, still hasn't chilled out. I think it really was permanent, what was done. Lauren is totally annoying, some more, eternally and forever, but Lusk is still doing great. Paul is, of course, a lurking goblin marionette.
It's to be presumed that they are lipsynching, no doubt, but then why do they sound super terrible while they are doing this? I don't care, I just want to keep watching James Durbin dance around some more. He is like the Brittany of this show. The 100% Bulletproof Total Commitment of these kids to the thing, that is worth thinking about. They are like seasoned soulless automatons with all these impassioned faces at the camera and hopping around like it's the Mickey Mouse Club. Was it always this cheesy and mean when they did this? So much of this show is learning the show all over again every year; I could have been grossed out by this any number of times. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood this week. Surely Dirty Diddy Money will help with that.
Music video, which part by the way now has its own title card. The song is called "The World," and it's pretty dorky, but the video is kind of cool in that 1995 Coke ad way where it's all about collage and neat stuff you can do with the concept of video cameras and green-screens these days. I cannot be making up the idea that these 13 people harmonize more horribly together -- in any configuration -- than anybody ever on this show, including that monstrous Australian/Irish pair of dicks.
Amanda Seyfried thinks she's too cool for Ryan Seacrest but the truth is that she is exactly cool enough for Ryan Seacrest. Then everybody goes to the premiere of Red Riding Hood and Casey is mean to Durbin's autism and there's Jeremy Irons's weird-looking kid and then Lauren tries to track down the creepy Joaquin face-monster known as Shiloh Fernandez -- who honestly stop trying to make fetch happen, he's the Gretchen Mol of dudes, I am so tired of being asked to love him that I never will; plus he looks like Joaquin Phoenix, which is just rude -- and then Nikki Reed is all over Paul, which proves everything we ever thought about Nikki Reed.
Amanda tries to explain to them what watching a movie is like; they don't get it. Stefano gays up about it, and then everybody watches the movie, which is symbolized by pictures of them staring and then the trailer of the movie. Lauren fell asleep at the end of the movie because she is a baby, just a big dumb stupid-head baby, and Pia thinks Shiloh is handsome because she is dumb, and Scotty and Naima loved the twists and turns and whatever, I won't lie to you: That movie is the only thing I've got going on this weekend.
To the Seal: Jacob, Stefano, Ghost of Selena. We remember how two of them kind of sucked, but Karen sucked like a third as bad as Stefano, who sucked out loud. However, he was the only one that the judges really came after, and people are dumb, so maybe people would vote less based on the opinion of like Randy Jackson, maybe that's how that works. Karen reminds us -- late in the game and coming off a little puling if I'm being honest -- that there were technical monitor issues that helped her suck, and then she makes a weird little face indeed, a strange little teeth-jutting crazy potato of a face; Stefano is just the cutest little thing, especially after Ryan reminds him that America didn't even want him in the first place.
So you got the Wild Card and the Myspace person, and then Lusk, which is like just the three different kind of whether you deserve to be there, they've gotta be thinking... And then only Karen is Bottom 3. That storied demographic -- bilingual ghosts, bilingual fans of ghosts -- didn't come through after all.
Seacrest: "Now: The man who is to blame for so very much of the bullshit happening this year on American Idol."
Adam looks pretty great, and there's like acoustic everything and it's... You know how that boy in NYC died and it was so sad and everybody was being such jerks about the other kids involved and whatever, and then everybody wrote the same song about how being gay is great? Katy Perry and P!nk and Ke$ha, and then somehow Lady Gaga got lost on the way to that party because she was making all the good and evil come out of her space vagina? It's that song, okay, but Lambert style. Which is like Lambert to the power of Lambert if you see what I mean.
It's not that I don't support every single part of this -- obviously I do, gay teens are my homies -- but I do think it's funny that we culturally have turned the 2011 corner into a world where now everybody's Alanis Morrisette and all the songs are like, "Remember that you are not alone; that bullying is shitty but also turns you into a person; that Bruno thinks you are amazing just the way you are; that Gary Go wants you to say that you are wonderful."
I cannot wait until REM and Bono and Sting get in on this shit, because then Coldplay will do it. Actually Coldplay already went there a long time ago. All of their songs are already It Gets Better songs. I predict an Ugly Kid Joe backlash-reunion year at the latest. Well, not really, because I think this is just the step of Oprah turning the world into Oprah and that one day we will all be Oprah and we will dwell in Oprah surrounded and enfolded and enlivened by Oprah.
Ryan and Adam are super cute all over the place, and Adam Lambert's band are all from some kind of alien Iceland/Robyn place. Then Adam explains the message of the song, which isn't really necessary but takes a lot of words anyhow, and Ryan casually mentions some charitable act having to do with the message of the song and It Gets Better, and then... Some pop cultural shit happens that I am just completely lost in where J. Lo and Adam do a dance and then everybody does a dance and Ryan knows the dance but nobody will actually do the dance. Except like Stefano and Ashthon, if you know what I mean, because they are down for anything. They've only got one button: ON/OFF.
Then J. Lo is uninterested in all of this suddenly, in a very "You're not allowed to talk to me like we're friends" way toward Lambert, but I still don't know what's going on. I stopped getting Entertainment Weekly and now I have no idea what anything is.
What is this dance? Why is it funny? Why does everybody know this dance? Is there a station where they show music videos and you could learn this dance? Is it just YouTube now? What is this dance? Why are they talking about the dance? j/k I totally don't care. Karen's in the B3, and then we lock them doors and dim them lights so Lauren, Ashthon and Haley can come down to the stage.
Lauren we hate now, for she is rotten inside. A bad, mean person. She works the crowd a whole lot more and it's annoying and she's wearing cowboy boots on her tree-trunk legs and rooster feathers in her hair, and she's safe, because she works the crowd and because they've been jamming her down our throats since Week 1.
Either she or Pia make a noise, back at the couch, that sounds like a mean joke about the disabled but may just be the truth.
Ryan asks Ashthon to reiterate her feedback from last night, but since she wasn't listening and is too goddamn stupid to understand it anyway, she just rattles off whatever bullshit she made up, and they actually cut to J. Lo rolling her eyes at what a jerkoff Ashthon is.
(Haley's wearing horsefeathers from her ears and looks totally nuts and her eyes are still way too close together on her giant face.)
Ryan: "Randy, you alternately praise and criticize Haley for singing songs from different genres with her very specific and lovely quality. Further thoughts?"
Randy: "Somewhere in the middle of all that, Ryan, as I believe I said in the critique. Both more and less individual, but also sticking to just one genre, but also not putting us to sleep by doing the same genre every week. I assumed you were paying attention, Ryan."
Ryan: "Nope. Just wanted you to hear yourself."
Haley: "I like singing whatever. Songs. Songs are my real gender."
Team Seacrest: "Name me a girl cuter than the T-Mobile girl in the dress. Can't be done."
Judgery: "Let's talk about some things forever and ever. Ryan's not really on a timetable or anything."
Ryan: "Honestly, I'm more bored than anything. Ashthon, you're in the B3... As is Haley!"
There is an awesome moment where Haley stops her condescending hug right at the ellipsis and goes, "Fucking awesome, Ryan." Just doesn't even bother hugging Ashthon and pretending that she gives a shit about Ashthon. And then worse than this, Ryan reminds the couch that this means all of them are safe. They don't know what to do about that -- except for Lauren, who has been practicing this, because she is gross -- because they can't be seen cheering for the B3 being the B3, so finally Ryan has to yell at them to celebrate being safe, as though that's the normal American thing to do.
Durbin stands up immediately, because of course he does, and then Paul does more of the ghoulish skeleton dancing, the macabre charade that is his person, Lauren is still staring into space with gloppy mascara rivers on her face and Thia, well, Thia and Stefano aren't real clear on what's happening, ever. But Scotty knows that he and Lusk are the only serious people on the show, so he just mostly tries to stay over there in the shade of the Lusk melon. I hate that all the mansion beds are in one big room for boys and for girls -- which right away there's a problem there I'll leave you to discern -- but also because we're being deprived of roommate stories like how Crystal wanted Dumb DeWyze and Awful Andrew to have Gokey Babies together, still the funniest thing any contestant has ever said: It's a mansion, it is defined by how it has enough rooms for twelve people to have a room.
In the stools, it is just tragedy. You got Ashthon who is too dumb to even think about modulating her affect and is making a straight up bitch face; you got Haley who can't believe any of this is happening still; and you got Poor Desperate MySpace Face at the end there, just hungrily smiling into the camera with cold dead eyes full of disappointment, thinking about all the Selena songs she'll never get to sing to us.
Diddy Dirty Money I refuse to believe exists. They are a Saturday Night Live sketch or something, right? That should not have been given independent life? That's the one where Sean "Puffy" Combs has two scary girls? They were on this show last year, I think. And I don't believe in them anyway. Maybe they have to do with the Dougie Dance. Maybe it is involved with Emily Bieber, or... Zoë Keating? Some kind of vampire lady with halfhearted dreads comes and helps him sing it.
...Oh, God damn it, I do know this song. Didn't he sing this last year? I swear he did because I looked up the lyrics because I couldn't believe that he would write a song about how weird it is for him that he has a million bastard babies by different moms. How hard that is on him.
I can't tell you how much I hate this guy. Are you kidding me, you're going to interrupt your song about how you have a jet to ask me to sympathize with how you have so neglected your children that they're not entirely sure about your sincerity? Plus, he's rude to Ryan Seacrest. Dependably.
Everybody talks so mean about Kanye all the time, and the Black Eyed Peas are like this sad retard asterisk at the end of will.i.am, but it's Diddy that is the worst to me. At least Kanye is a genius, and he never makes the same mistakes twice. But Puffy? There's people under him on my list -- Robin Williams, motherfucking Adrien Brody, I mean, Diddy's not a serial killer or anything -- but he's pretty low on there because there is no other level to him. He's just Diddy, the most boring and reliable ATM machine in the history of the world. An ATM machine that thinks it's a jukebox.
Yeah, so Haley's got those arms akimbo in her weird "I own a geode store in Truth Or Consequences, NM" outfit, and suddenly Karen is safe. So it's Haley who nobody knows, and Ashthon who is the worst in all ways. And but Haley was really good, last night, and Ashthon has never been good ever. So obvs it will be... No! Ashthon! America, thank you! You did it right one time!
Ryan makes Ashthon sing her heart out with that awful Diana Ross song once again, as though -- this is so cruel -- they are going to give her the Save eight weeks too early. Haley tries desperately to care about any of this, and Lauren pretends to comfort her, and I think Haley tells her to knock it off. Karen and Lusk rock back and forth with moronic grins on their weird little faces, while Thia stares into total space. I'm so happy we don't have to deal with Ashthon anymore. She really bothered me. up: Old McDonald.
The judges politely watch this shit go down without even caring, but when Jackson notes the cameras on them, he calls a fake huddle and they oblige, and it's just so Randy.
Ryan: "God, just hold it together for like the one second that is left of this episode."
Ashthon: "I have never had it together. Ever. Even when they got the stylists after me, within five minutes I looked like I'd just given toilet birth at a fancy gala. I am just so messy inside that it makes the outside messy."
Lopez: "Hear this quiver in my voice, Baby? See the tears in my dry eyes, Baby? And how I keep calling you Baby, Baby? Well, Baby, it was unanimous."
Ashthon: "Nobody ever taught me to read."
Stupid Lauren sticks her big old dumb bottom lip out, and then we revisit Ashthon's journey to getting kicked off first -- with David Cook singing a karaoke cover of "Don't You Forget About Me," of course, because how could you not -- and the only time Ashthon really comprehends what is happening is when they hug her and somebody gives her a big long speech in their huddle that I'm assuming is Brett Loewenstern until I remember that he is back in the forest so I guess it's Lusk and I don't know what he told her but I know she was standing up a lot straighter when he was done.