Tonight's pre-credits sequence is cut together like a movie trailer for something called Idol's Eleven. Because the theme tonight is "Songs from the Cinema" and the editors have to push it as hard as they can, because God knows the contestants aren't going to give a crap about it.
After the credits, Ryan brings out the Top 11, who spread out across the stage like they're trying to surround the audience. Ryan reminds them (and us) of the stakes this week, which is a spot on the Top 10 tour. Out come the judges, Jennifer dressed from head to toe in a hot pink number that makes her body glow like a character in a Commodore 64 game. Ryan chats with them for a while, and Jennifer talks about the competitive drive the contestants all need. Then Harry brings everything to a halt, saying he thought of a catchphrase over the weekend and he'd like to try it out now: "You have to be in it to win it!" Well, at least if Randy is still going to be around, it'll help to have Harry mocking him.
Speaking of mocking, as Ryan introduces Sam he explains that the finalists all spent some time this week pretending to be each other, like they were auditioning to play each other. This is the point in the season when you find out which of the finalists is everyone's least favorite. For Sam, everyone basically just wears his dumb hat from last week and monotones a few first-person comments about being cute and living with their parents. The good news is that it looks like I won't need to spend much time on this gag. Anyway, Sam is singing "Come Together," because Across the Universe always saves movie night for at least one contestant by giving them carte blanche to access the entire Beatles catalogue. Unfortunately, he's doing it as an upbeat pop song, which, I suppose, compared to most of his performances it kind of is. The chicks obviously dig it, though, because they always do. Keith likes how he showed a different side and loosened up a little, and Jennifer says he needs a little more confidence to go from baby rock star to big rock star. Harry also thinks he's on the right track, but that Sam needed to make up for the nonsensical lyrics and undemanding melody with something else… like vibe. Yeah, not a whole lot of vibe there. Ryan sends him off to the lounge, while a splitscreen shows him doing a little Rear Window bit, looking out at his voting number through binoculars. I think the bits are probably going to go over better than the imitation bits, if this is any indication.
Jessica is doing "The Sound of Silence," which she performs at all of her sets, so it's lucky for her that it was also in The Graduate. Everyone else imitates Jessica by pinning on some pink hair extensions, riffing on her hometown of Slapout, Alabama and messing up her famous quote about being either a successful musician or a broke one. If they really wanted to nail her, they'd try to capture her faint, but constant air of embarrassment. As for her performance, it starts off well enough, with her just singing and playing her acoustic guitar, although her voice threatens to get a little bleat-y here and there. Then the band comes in, and she's all out of sync with them, so that's not good. Maybe someone's too used to playing one-woman shows.
Jennifer says it should have been the perfect song for her, but she never hit the groove and then pins her to the wall with, "Do you think you can win?" Jessica does, surprisingly, and Jennifer doesn't disagree, but she says it's not always there yet. Harry gives her credit for keeping her focus when the band screwed up, and says that what she did song-wise was kind of her thing, so she should stick with it. Keith advises her to work on backing off the mic, because she's used to shouting over noisy clubs instead of attentive rooms like this. The audience is respectful enough of this point to not drown it out with boos. While Ryan gives out her voting instructions, she gets to star in a parody of the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. That's not going to help with her faint, but constant air of embarrassment.
C.J. is back with his old bush hat and a new acoustic guitar, and he's also doing a song that isn't exactly new to him: "Can't You See" by the Marshall Tucker Band, which he claims to have heard -- and been inspired by -- for the first time at the end of Blow. That's kind of impressive, because I was so angry by the end of that movie, I don't even remember what happened. The other contestants goof on him by posing with an orange trucker hat and an out-of-tune guitar and acting all pious and squinty, which is not inaccurate, except for the part where the guitar was out of tune. C.J.'s version of the song is also not inaccurate, because the song is right in his pocket and it's obvious he's been doing it for years.
Jennifer's chair-dancing when the band kicks in at the second verse, and Keith even gives him a standing ovation at the end. Harry jokes that he looks like he got Pharrell's hat half off, and then says he just picked and sang his way back to the lead. Keith calls it killer and gives C.J. credit for being himself even within the constraints of this ever-so-constraining theme they've shackled him with. Jennifer loved it, and agrees that he's a frontrunner. When Ryan comes out, he cracks that C.J. didn't want to be sharp again this week, and Harry cuts into say that's just it -- he was, and it was good enough that it didn't matter, just like they were talking about last week. So everyone wins, including Alien fans who get to watch a clip of C.J.'s voting number bursting out of his shirt.
For some reason, we come back to see Randy Jackson on the stage with Ryan and Dexter, and Ryan uses Randy as a puppet to introduce the singer. Randy's even bad at that, but I'm sure they'll find some use for him eventually. Dexter is singing "Sweet Home Alabama," which was in Forrest Gump and Sweet Home Alabama and 20 Feet from Stardom and probably so many other movies that it should probably come back around to having nothing to do with movies at all. The others' imitations of Dexter are as uninspired as the other ones we've seen tonight, with a lot of drawling and backwards trucker hats. He's changed up the melody a bit, kicking up the end of each line like it's a question, and picking at his Les Paul with his hair all done up like Big Boy's. Sounds like he's listening to the advice about making songs his own. Keith tells him to keep working on that, especially when he's doing a song as familiar as the one he just did. Jennifer figures he's starting to believe he might win, and Harry thinks Dexter is being smart about this by picking songs that everyone knows and singing them well, but needed to make it even more his own. Other than that, he'll be tough to beat. Ryan's main comment is, of course, about Dexter's new hair. And Dexter's bit with his voting number is from The Hangover, standing in an elevator with sunglasses and feeding it in a Baby Björn. That one took me a second.
Ben Briley has apparently wandered in from the set of Downton Abbey, with slicked-back hair and everything. He's doing an Elton John song, "Bennie and the Jets," that he grew up hearing because of his mom, but he never actually saw the movie it's supposedly "from." The other contestants riff on Ben's hats, and his twang, and his singing-face, and his wife, and Tennessee and deviled eggs. Then Ben's at the grand piano ready to start while Ryan says it's from the movie 27 Dresses. I no longer blame Ben for never having seen it, but this goes to my point of how this theme is always crap because you can pick just about any song ever and then go find a movie it was in. I mean, honestly, 27 fuckin' Dresses? He starts it out just accompanying himself on the piano, lounging up the vocal rather more than is strictly advisable, if you ask me. Then, of course, there's the obligatory point where the band takes over and he gets up from the piano, at which point it gets even loungier.
And the velvet jacket isn't helping. He's not shy with the falsetto, either, which I know is in the original, but everyone has to cut part of every song and that maybe could have been it in this case. Jennifer says she likes watching people's transformations over the course of the season, but Ben's country-to-Elton John swing may have been a bit much. Harry heard a big difference between Elton John's pounding, driving original and what he calls Ben's "lackadaisical walk." He also wonders if we'll ever hear Ben's actual voice instead of whatever voice he seems to be putting on every week. Whoa, that just got real. Keith gets that they're putting the contestants in the position of needing to show more sides of themselves, but still be themselves, but he's not getting who Ben is as an artist now, compared to the "easy authenticity" of his first audition. We get to see a little black-and-white clip of Ben in the shower while his number approaches creepily through the curtain in a clear homage to Psycho, and then Ryan calls Harry up onstage to demonstrate what he meant about pounding the piano. Harry warns that he's going to pound it, but instead gently taps out a little soap-opera music as a dramatic score to Ryan's throwing it to commercial.
Jena's doing Paramore's "Decode" from Twilight, opening him up to reminisce at length about what appears to be his favorite movie. Jena's pretty easy for the other finalists to spoof; all they have to do is wear chokers and say, "Gina, not Jenna!" Then she's at the piano in a sea of stage fog to sing the song, which is a decent match for her dramatic delivery style, as is the way the camera keeps swooping around her. Her singing holds up great, particularly on the big choruses, which she nails in particular. Even better, she avoids the old "getting up from the piano in the middle" cliché, which means that Keith and Jennifer are actually on their feet before she is. Keith appreciates the ferocity of her performances, and Jennifer says she doesn't know what she was doing in the bottom three last week. Well, she didn't do this last week -- that was the problem. In fact, Jennifer calls it the best performance of the night. Harry says he's a Hayley Williams fan, but Jena did it her own way and it was great. Her clip shows her pretending to be in Jaws in the pool being chased by her voting number, and Ryan kindly gives Keith a chance to pronounce Jena's name properly after he got it wrong a minute ago out of sheer excitement.
Malaya is wrapping things up with a song from Dreamgirls, which she kvells incoherently about to Ryan. The other finalists do their Malaya impersonations, which unsurprisingly do not call for a great deal of subtlety, just a bunch of over-caffeinated, glasses-wearing, tuba-tooting tantruming. I was wrong earlier; clearly all these people hate each other equally. Then Ryan introduces her song from the audience, with Randy standing to him holding a tuba. I feel like they're circling in on what to do with him finally; if he's got a contractually-mandated minimum of onscreen time, just make him a prop. The song Malaya goes with is "I Am Changing," and ironically, this is the week she finally reigns in some of her goofiness and just sings the hell out of the damn song. Nailed it, in fact, in that "On your feet, rubes!" way that audiences of this show love; and Jennifer and Keith too, apparently, going by their standing ovations. I can't remember see Harry giving a standing ovation this season, maybe because he's in Mariah Carey's chair and she never did either. They probably have the same reasons.
Anyway, Jennifer gushes that it was killer and that Malaya has an amazing voice. Harry says that people have complained to him that there's no big belter this year, but Malaya just proved them wrong and is only going to get better. Keith says she made the perfect choice to play to her strengths, though he still thinks she could have dialed it back a bit here and there. Then Malaya's vote number movie parody clip totally vindicates my "Sweding" comment from earlier, because you remember the first movie they Sweded in Be Kind Rewind? It was Ghostbusters, and Malaya gets to be attacked by her floating number like Bill Murray. Ryan gives us some results for the second half of the night: male voters have come in for Caleb, Jena, Alex, Majesty, M.K. and Malaya, in that order, at least so far, whereas female voters went Caleb, M.K., Jena, Alex, Majesty and Malaya. Pretty sure that was all meaningless anyway, given that Malaya has had all of one minute to rack up support since her song ended. We'll know more tomorrow, though. And remember, it'll be on later, after Hell's Kitchen. Dammit, I did it again!
M. Giant is a Minneapolis- based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.