Good News: "Sherri" Isn't As Bad As It Could Be

Let me preface this unusually positive review by saying that Sherri is a Lifetime joint, not the new Arrested Development. It isn't subversive, it isn't terribly clever (aside from a few funny moments), and it lays on the Entertainment For Women frosting with a trowel. But for what it is, it's actually pretty good. I have a deep secret I'd like to share with you: when it comes to comfort food entertainment, my drug of choice is the 90's era sitcom. And I don't mean things we all secretly still like, such as Pete and Pete. Remember Cybil? I love Cybil. I could watch Christine Baranski vamp around to a laugh track all day. It's the era I grew up in, and I was born in a house with the television always on. A good episode of The Nanny gives me the same warm, centered feeling that home-baked cookies give to normal people. So imagine my delighted surprise when I sat down with MyLifetime.com yesterday and gave the Sherri sitcom a try. Has this show been waiting in a vault since 1994?

Sherri Shepherd: Mother, Comedian, Photoshop Disaster Waiting to Happen

"Sherri" is the kind-of-fictionalized story of Sherri "Tracy Jordan's Wife" Shepherd, a d-list actress who supports herself with a paralegal gig inbetween appearances on TV shows. She's dealing with being a single parent after kicking her cheating husband out. She has a supportive gaggle of girlfriends, a cute kid, and New York city as a backdrop for her wacky single misadventures. It's basically every 90's girl-power sitcom boiled into a powerful concentrate and injected into the bloated corpse of Lifetime's original programing. It could just be a stroke of luck that this zombie is a lovable Bub/Fido type and not a lobotomized murder junkie. (and yes, that last one is a Re-Animator reference. Good job, pop culture junkies!) I watched three episodes, and here's what I liked:

1: The family interaction rings true. If you ever viewed the evening programmatic abortion that was Reba, the sitcom vehicle for a musician that should have been above it, you were probably dumbfounded by the idea that a woman who got a divorce from her husband after he knocked up another woman became BFFs with that babymama within one season of mean-spirited banter. Sherri borrows that plotline, but takes it in a more believable direction: she is beyond pissed at her husband, but works on a smooth transition to singlehood to make things easier on her kid. The sitcom is firm on the premise that Sherri has too much respect for herself to take the cheater back or play godmother to the new kid. The show allows us to feel empathy for everyone in equal turns, and keeps things realistic in a not-realistic sitcom way.

2: The acting works. Sherri should never be allowed to host a talk show again, but that being said, she's an engaging lead. She's funny and personable, and she can handle a pratfall like nobody's buisness. (Yes, I think it's funny when people fall down.) The supporting cast has some great folks as well, including an icy drunk of an office manager and a funny sweetheart of a co-worker/best friend. It's nothing we haven't seen before, but the actors really give it their all, and the lamer jokes tend to float by on the good grace built up by their performances. There are some weak links (Jersey Girl paralegal, I'm looking at you), but I generally had fun watching these folks do what they do.

3: This show knows exactly what it is and has a lot of fun with it. Yeah, some of the jokes are lame, most of the resolutions to situations are unrealistic, and sometimes the moral platitudes ring false. Hello, every sitcom ever made. This show works the sitcom formula for everything it's worth, and by doing that, it frees itself from expectations to be anything else. You want a quietly crafted melodrama about people dealing with infidelity and loss? Cool, go watch Mad Men. You want to watch a sassy lady act empowered, toss out one-liners with her fun friends, and have a dance-off with her office manager to celebrate a birthday? Sherri will be a treat for you.

Let me make it simple for you. Watch the preview here: If you laugh at someone yelling "Boobs!", you will enjoy Sherri. The end.

In other words, Sherri will not land on your short list for Shows That Represent The Golden Age of Television, but it could end up being your comfort food sitcom this winter. It's like green bean casserole- make it at home, eat it with gusto, and don't tell your friends.

The Messengers

Obviously, I try to stick to Lifetime movies here. It's such a sinking feeling to watch two hours of shlock on the Lifetime Movie Network only to discover that the movie not only had a theatrical release, but it actually debuted at number one in the box office. And all that happened less than three years ago.

So, yeah. The Messengers. A movie that made no impression on me until it was aired on Halloween weekend on Lifetime. And I watched it, so now I get to write about it. No, I don't care if it's a "real" movie and therefore throws off the entire "Hey! It's That Guy!" scale.

And it's not like this movie is good or makes sense or anything.

The movie starts in black and white. Some shadowy menace is killing the shit out of a family (including a distractingly ugly six-year-old) in their North Dakota farmhouse. Cut to the credits and we're back in full color as the Solomon family is moving into that same house. They're moving from the big city to start over as sunflower farmers.

The relevant Solomon here is Jess. Jess is a teenager and she misses her friends! Also, she is angsty and already has a DUI on her record. A DUI caused after an accident that left her three-year-old brother mute! That is the worst kind of DUI you can get! The DUI accident with the sibling in the car...it's like Rachel just got married. I am glad that reference wasn't strained.

Uh, Rachel Getting Married spoiler alert?

Oh, and because this horror movie rips off every other horror movie, the mute toddler can see all the ghosts but no one else can. And they're everywhere! Mom is tucking in her sheets and you see some ghost legs in the bed. Ghosts be up on the ceilings all the time. The ghosts even haunt the stains on the wall.

So, we have the ghosts from The Grudge haunting the kid from The Sixth Sense inside the house from The Amityville Horror.

Dad Solomon is out trying to learn how to farm when he gets attacked by some vicious crows. A guy shoots at them and they fly off. This lonely drifter with a shotgun is giving a farming assistant job on the spot. And he gets to live on the property. Epic bad parenting job. That is worse than handing the keys to your drunk daughter.

Eventually the ghosts attack the kids and Jess can see them now but no one believes her. Jess first takes the wise approach and acts like the ghosts are looking for help. She approaches the child ghost and it is all sweet on it and then it attacks her and tries to eat her face. This makes less sense when the big plot twist is revealed.

Creepy drifter is also attacked by crows. At the same time, Mom finally starts seeing ghosts coming from the stains on the wall and an attempt is made to flee. At the same time, across town, Jess realizes that the Creepy Drifter is actually the patriarch of the murdered family that is haunting people. Creepy Drifter remembers this after the crows leave him alone and he goes into kill mode. Now we're ripping off The Shining.

Creepy Drifter manages to stab Dad with a pitchfork but the ghosts turn the basement floor into water somehow and drag Creepy Drifter to his doom.

So the ghosts were after Creepy Drifter. Then why were the crows attacking Dad? Why did the Child Ghost scratch up Jess's face? Why did Creepy Drifter remember how murderous he was at the exact moment Jess was all, like, "this guy is murderous."

Oh, and in the flashback where Creepy Drifter remembers how evil he is, it flashes back to someone trying to buy the house from him. Presumably with the same offer made to the Solomons to get them to move out. Who was this mysterious land baron!?

AWESOMENESS: 10 (out of 20)

I have never seen anything this derivative before. Or this ridiculous. But it is fun to watch crows attack that guy from The Practice.

HEY! IT'S THAT GUY! n/a

This is a real movie with a real budget so of course there are famous people in it. Jess is played Kristen Stewart from Adventureland, Panic Room, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE WORTH MENTIONING. The bad guy is played that lovable fellow from Northern Exposure and Sex in the City. Even the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files gets in on the action.

LIFETIMENESS: 0 (out of 10)

For obvious reasons. This movie was startlingly low in women's intuition.

GRAND TOTAL :10 (out of 30)

A ten on a reduced scale is pretty bad. Know what's worse? This movie grossed more than Hot Fuzz and Zodiac at the box office.

Visitors Of The Night

FINALLY. No more bashing our brains against the blunt vanilla wafer of this season of Project Runway. It's movie time.

My friends, this movie was really special. Visitors in the Night is the rare treat that occurs when people who write TV movies try to do something other then stories about eating disorders or disastrous proms. Markie Post is a go-go 90's lady with a demanding-but-unexplained job, a distant politician ex-husband, and a snarky little brat of a daughter. Of course she's a brat, she's Candace Cameron, AKA DJ Tanner. (You're reading a blog about Lifetime movies, so I know you are delighted by this.) Anyway, her life is tough, and her problems are only compounded by the fact that she has some kind of weird brain problem that makes her go into a trance and flail violently at random times. The triggers for her trauma are bright lights, exploding transistors, and horses.



Fig 1. A Perfectly Normal Reaction to A Horse

She's hallucinating and blacking out like nobody's business. Most people would have parked themselves in an MRI machine by now, but maybe the Shoulderpad Lady Office doesn't offer decent medical. To make matters worse, her daughter is experiencing the pains of adolescent rebellion, completed with a rat-faced grunge-y boyfriend and a need to "explore the absence of color" through dressing like a slutty goth librarian all the time. This family is desperate for a father figure. Their salvation may lie in the super beefed-out arms of the dad from Pet Sematary, (you know you want to click that link) who is constantly haunting the troubled family with the excuse of being a small-town sheriff. But the soil of a lady's heart is stonier, and Markie Mark has bigger fish to fry.

Maybe the water in this town make you oblivious to obvious things. Not only is Markie unaware of what is almost surely a brain tumor, the whole town is writing off a panopoly of strange phenomenon as teenage stunts. This includes livestock mutilation, crop circles- you know, all that shit you used to do in high school. I always loved to huff glue, listen to Nirvana, and burn huge geometric designs into the soybean fields of my hometown. Candace tags herself a participating punk by scribbling crop circles in her notebook, landing her some serious principal's office time and a fight with Markie. If only they had something to bond on! Some shared trauma or unbelievable secret, perhaps?

Things come to a head when Markie goes out of town to perform whatever vague business she is responsible for. Candace takes this opportunity to throw a bitchin' party and invite all of her scummy little friends. The party quickly gets out of hand, by which I mean the music gets slightly louder then it was and someone burns a pizza in the oven. Candace freaks out, announces that the party is over, and storms away with a bag of garbage. Party foul, Candace. Save the hissy-fit until you're sloshed. Out at the garbage, which for some reason is a half-mile away in a secluded area, Candace hears a noise that freaks out her dog. The picture then abruptly takes us back to Markie, who is giving a presentation on...um, something? Sounds like she's talking about valves? Anyway, she blacks out and we see that she's daydreaming about a bunch of flashing lights in her house, and her parents are dead or something, and...I dunno, she looks scared? The flashbacks lack narrative structure, so it's kind of hard to figure out what's so damn scary. We can probably assume it's aliens. Oh, shit, spoiler alert!

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Candace's issues are not the garden variety teenage trauma that one would expect. After the party, she experiences repeated blackouts and even crashes the family car. She also goes all Jello Biafra on her science class and harangues them about the the inevitable effects of suburban atrophy for some reason. There's a great sequence where she goes to visit her dad at a city council meeting and talks her dad's staff into using green building materials for a housing development. Apparently, alien-themed traumas make you really annoying and eco-conscious. Markie's alien-themed daydreams get more creepily detailed and specific, and her erratic behavior begins to worry the townsfolk. The sheriff makes a weird effort at being a daddy figure for the troubled ladies, but considering what happened to this guy's last family, you can't blame Markie for taking a pass. Instead she visits a hypnotherapist (?!) to try and get some more information about the bullshit tricks her brain appears to be playing on her.

Now here is where you would expect the hypnotherapist to dig up some long-suppressed memories of something traumatic and terrible that her kid-brain would have rewritten as an alien abduction to successfully ignore. But no! Markie was actually abducted by goddamned aliens! We also learn that the aliens put some weird alien junk in Markie's womb, making her baby daughter a freako alien baby. Now the aliens are back- and this time, it's personal.

The aliens are super gross looking, by the way. They're weird butt-headed hybrids of X-Files-style Greys and Tony Harrison of The Mighty Boosh. Observe:


Fig. 2: The Resemblance Is An Outraaaaage!

No wonder they had to abduct Markie Post to get their swerve on. Ew.

Next we suffer through a last minute boring infodump from a "professor" at a local university who happens to specialize in alien abductions for some damn reason. But it's worth it, because afterwards the movie finally allows the aliens to succeed in kidnapping Candace and revealing their nefarious plot. Apparently, they have been trying to make alien/human hybrid babies, and have a whole litter of them up on the ship. But the babies are tiny little sociopaths that don't feel love because "they don't cry". That isn't actually why babies cry, but I guess she's kind of traumatized, so we'll give her a break. Anyway, Candace gets off the ship and is deposited in her mother's loving arms. Everyone goes home, everything's cool-

OH SNAP! THE ALIENS COME BACK AND KIDNAP THEM AGAIN!

Fade to black. No, really, that's the end.

So, how does this mother rate in the grand scheme of things?

Awesomeness: 19

FUCK YEAH. This movie had fucking aliens in it. I don't feel like I need to say anything else here. ALIENS! Just thinking about it makes me want to give someone a high-five.

One point deducted for the creepy rat-faced boyfriend. I just didn't like him. If the aliens had stolen him instead we'd be rolling 20s here.

Star Power: 10

No-Brainer thanks to the poor career decisions of Markie Post. Rule of thumb: if you can find their boobs on Google, they're trashy-famous enough for a 10 on their own. Add in DJ and the gloriously hammy Pet Sematary lead, and it's a perfect train-wreck of TV movie casting.

Lifetimeliness: 6

I'm going to cut the score down here a little. Rusty may disagree with me, but women's intuition completely failed to save the day here. A more Lifetime-y approach would have involved Markie figuring out how to stop the aliens by having a passionate heart-to-heart with them about the pressures of being a working mother in today's fast-paced world. Still, the mother-daughter trauma was the core of the story, so partial credit is due.

35! Not bad, not bad. The score is not really reflective of how amazing the movie is, though. DVR it. Get really drunk. Share it with a loved one. Let us know how it goes.

BONUS OFFICE REVIEW

Harmony and I give up on Project Runway. Seriously. We are done. I think Amelie Gillette perfectly sums up what's wrong with the show here. Any show that allows Logan's haunted crotch pants to survive another day is not a show I am interested in.

So, instead of dealing with writing a review, I'd instead like to talk about last night's wedding episode of The Office. Basically, it was terrible. And writing contrarian reviews of beloved things is a hobby -no, a passion - of mine. And I want to get this on the record.

The episode begins with the entire office vomiting all over the place in a nice Lard-Ass moment. I thought it was the perfect beginning to an episode advertised as a straight romance. Of course, the writers were just prepping us for an episode that throws reality into the wind. Mass vomitings don't occur in the office and a lot of the things happening at the wedding don't happen in real weddings.

To be fair, the first 15 minutes were fairly solid. I loved Jim blurting out that Pam was pregnant as he slowly morphs into Michael-lite. But one thing at the rehearsal dinner really stuck in my craw. When Pam's sisters mistakes Kevin for Oscar's boyfriend, Oscar's livid response wasn't just inappropriate, it was shockingly out of character. One can be repulsed at the thought of dating someone and still maintain social graces. Especially when the show has worked so hard to make Oscar the most competent and friendliest employee. Terrible stuff.

From there, the show deteriorated into cartoonish. Andy tore his scrotum! Yuck, yuck, yuck. Kevin's feet smelled so bad they had to destroy his shoes and he walks around in tissue boxes! Har! Dwight bones Pam's bridesmaid and coldly blows her off because sleeping with people and ignoring them two hours later is something to be laughed at! Haha! Sucks to be you, pretty lady who slept with Dwight!

Pam starts freaking out before the wedding and loses it when she snags her veil on a nail. Oh no! Such drama! How can she get married with a slightly torn veil!? This is what screenwriters and other people in the know like to call "conflict."

Jim cuts his tie in half in solidarity and they decide to run off to get married in private. Two problems here:

1. If I drive five hours for a friend's wedding, I expect two things. Open bar and punctuality. If my friends make me wait in a church for two hours, they are bad friends and selfish people who deserve to get divorced.

2. They basically stole this entire plot from How I Met Your Mother (reruns on Lifetime!). Marshall gets a bad haircut and freaks out trying to shave it off. Lily still loves him and they are sick of the pressures of a big wedding so they sneak off and get married in private. I can't expect the writers of the Office to remember every plot point from every sitcom, but just know that this has been done and it was done better and it was done years ago.

Jim and Pam return from their secret wedding to get church married. Before anyone can walk down the aisle, the office workers play some music from a convicted domestic batterer and a bunch of people that were in no way in the wedding party (namely, the entire office) dances down the aisle.

Apparently, this is a recreation of a Youtube video I have never seen or heard of. You know how Michael is lame for discovering Youtube memes a few years too late and living out the fad? That is what the entire show has done and people are supposed to find it cute or endearing? No. And why would that bridesmaid be so happy to dance down the aisle with Dwight? And why is it funny that she got kicked in the face? And I know it's The Office and not The Realistic Wedding Simulator, but a bunch of people just imposed themselves on this wedding? That's not cool. That's just more horrible, selfish behavior.

Since the episode, I watched the Youtube video in question and it looks pretty sweet and nice and fun and the only thing that sucks about it is that Chris Brown beat the shit out of his girlfriend. Romance fail. Still very nice though. It just didn't work on The Office. Not even a little bit.

To be fair, I laughed a few times. I loved Jim's "Let's talk on the phone for a very long time." I loved Dwight's wedding gift complete with live turtle. Niagara Falls looks very pretty. But the tone, the meanness, the jokes that were so broad that Adam Sandler would be embarrassed (A torn nutsack? Really?)...it didn't work. Not only did it not work, it made me aggressively hate the presence of most of the cast. Well played, Office writers!

So, thank you for letting me vent about a show that isn't even remotely affiliated with Lifetime. Project Runway coverage is done, forever. And Harmony will be posting a movie review shortly. It's a doozy.

Kelli's Last Stand

So Kelli's commentary was conspicuously absent from the last two Lifetime reviews. Kelli actually did respond to episode six...just after episode seven had already aired. So, I skipped it to avoid confusion.

As for episode seven criticism, we have it in spades.

Now, remember, last Thursday's episode was truly the worst episode ever. I was filled with as much righteous anger as anyone else. Anyone else besides Kelli, who was pissed.

I am flipping out about this past week's episode! Yes, Louises' dresses were ugly, but most of them were! I could design an INC look with my eyes closed! I actually realized that I had turned into an old woman when I migrated from the junior's section of Macy's towards the INC section! (While COMPLETELY skipping over the Michael Kors rags too!)

The shows formula is sooooo, incredibly obvious to me now! This episode was so much like my kick off episode (the same time too!), and it played out in the same manner! I am soooo over this crap, I could DIE! I would rather watch reruns of Facts of Life than this shit! AGAIN, it isn't the designers....I actually feel like they are nice people, and talented....it is the show! It is too much like other reality shows, when it used to pride itself in true talent and entertainment.

Also, I would like to vote this season as the WORST dressed season for Heidi. Season 5, I almost broke my neck to see the next outfit....now I cringe!

It also sucks that these auf'd contestants get this speech about how much they suck, when Heidi is just repeating what is said in her ear piece, line for line! And slllooowllly at that! Don't you have a brain to remember a sentence or two? Better yet, don't you have your OWN opinion??? I HATE tv. I HATE the fashion industry. I hate reality show...the line between talented people and Rock of Love contestants is becoming too blurred. I got a chewed gum portrait of me done by some idiot who was trying to show that reality stars last as long as a piece of gum! Great. [Ed note: I would like to see this.] Couldn't you have chosen Heather from Rock of Ass, or something?? She will probably die of STDs soon, but I have a feeling I will be designing regardless. Yuck. Puke. BLAHHHHH!

It's hard to disagree with any of this. My biggest point of contention would be that Heidi's canned lines right before elimination were always a problem, not something that just started happening on Lifetime.

A big moment for me happened last night when I realized I was enjoying Top Chef more than Project Runway. I used to hate Top Chef. It valued personalities more than the food. Iron Chef America spends more time on better recipes and on how to make a flavor profile. Top Chef just has a bunch of personalities say they're going to make something and then it shows up on the plate. Boring.

But, after seeing this season of Project Runway, I trust Top Chef. There is a clear hierarchy of talent. The challenges are usually interesting. And, yeah, the contestants are memorable. That's all I need. And I'm not getting it from Project Runway anymore.

Episode 7: Worst Episode Ever

By the way, I super promise that Harmony and I are going to start watching some proper Lifetime movies. We saw one together, but it needs a sober rewatch. That's happening tonight.

And Kelli's absence last week: I don't know what to tell ya. She mentioned being much busier in the past few weeks and if I had to choose something to slip through the cracks, helping some people I've never met complain about a reality show would be first on the list. Hell, this is my site and I go weeks without posting all the time.

As for Project Runway, ugh. So terrible. Design two blue dresses for Macy's? Really? That's it?

This is the worst challenge on a season filled with terrible challenges. There are no limitations other than that the color blue should be involved. And the best part about these blue dresses? They're only available at Macy's! That makes no sense. Why is that the best part? The best part of Sam's Club seltzer water is that it's only available at Sam's Club? Wait, what?

So we're doing teams because two dresses in one day is difficult. Epperson wins the awesome award for being thankful that he's with a designer he actually respects in Christopher. Haha, fuck you, Qwacks!

(Oh please God let Epperson make it to the challenge where they bring back all of the eliminated contestants and set him up with Qwacks again. It would actually be - gasp! - dramatic.)

So two blue dresses and that's it. And all of the teams get along, so that's pretty boring too. The only extra "drama" is a lot of big talk from Heidi Klum that they might eliminate TWO contestants!

Spoiler alert: They only eliminate one.

So, take all of these factors and what do you get? The worst episode in series history. It was putrid. Unacceptable.

But on to the dresses!

This is Irina's winning dress:


I hate it. Boring and only the flattest of the flat chested could pull it off. I thought Heidi only liked titty dresses.

I much preferred the team of Carol Hannah and Shirin. Those two elf-women provided two striking dresses that were worthy of a win.


To be fair, this photograph makes the dress look like nothing special and, obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about. But I found this to be prettier and more marketable. Team Leader Carol Hannah was robbed.

Epperson, despite being partnered with a designer he respected, still found a way to be on the bottom.


The judges savaged this. Michael Kors said the model looked like a circa 1979 librarian. This is why it's good to have Michael Kors back, even if his taste is questionable.

I...I kind of like this. Maybe it's because my girlfriend bought a very similar piece of clothing a week ago and I don't want to make her feel bad...but I really like this. It's flirty!

Epperson's teammate (and team leader) made something much worse:


Ahhh! The goggles! They do nothing!

This fashion sin was exacerbated by Christopher's crying jag on the runway. I am sorry for the casual sexism here, but man up. You made a shitty dress and you deserve the ridicule. Frankly, that dress was the worst of the bunch and you should be going home.

But I'm certainly not worried that the judges decided to send Louise home instead. Louise sucks. And her designs were atrocious.


The second, more disastrous number, was actually attributed to teammate Nicholas. But Nicholas had immunity. And it was Louise's design. And why the Hell would you ever choose to work with someone who has immunity?

It was a perfect storm against poor Louise. And a reminder that eliminating Ra'mon last week was a tragedy and a waste of a superior talent.

I Question The Specialness Of Episode 6

Last night's Project Runway broke my heart and left a bitter taste in the mouths of all good, right-thinking people who watch reality shows on Lifetime (not many). I refer to the cruel auf'ing of Ra'Mon, one of the only interesting designers in this season's decidedly beige lineup. Not only that, but Ra'Mon lost to a bullshit wannabe flapper cocktail dress sewn by mewling art student trash. But I get ahead of myself.

The episode began with the designers thanking their lucky stars that Johnny Methhead finally got the axe, but also worried that the competition was going to be a lot tougher as the group got smaller. Luckily, their fears were for naught, as Tim and co tossed them another softball challenge. Designing a costume for a movie character COULD have been an interesting one, if not for the fact that each person had the opportunity to pick their own genre to work with, and half of the genres were easy as fuck. 'Period Piece'? Really, Tim? You could even write a story to justify the costume you made, so if you happened to fuck up hard there was a built-in way to excuse yourself. The only people who actually got "challenged" by the challenge were Epperson, who got stuck with a cowboy theme as the last pick, and Nicolas, who decided this was a chance to take his space hooker aesthetic to the next level. And, of course, Ra'Mon. But more on that later.

Is this crop of designers getting really boring to anyone else? I fucking zone out when they're at Mood, when they're chatting with Tim, when they're laying faux-dramabombs about how they "aren't there to make friends" or "they have a vision". Fuck you. Shut up and work. I can't even think of anything worth highlighting about this episode other then the outfits because it was just so dull and formulaic. If you were maybe making an instructional film called "How To Make A Show About Catty Design Students And Their Loving Albino Mentor", this could have been the first half. I think the Weinsteins went through and edited out all the dramatic tension as a lawsuit fuck-you to Bravo if they ever got the show back.

The episode was successful in that it gave the really creative designers a chance to shine. Unfortunately, it also gave the boring designers a chance to, well, be boring again. While Nicolas was glorying in the chance to make the evil stepmother in his nightmares, Louise was crying about someone stealing her fucking thread and the fact that it's hard to make up stories about clothes. You know what else is hard? Listening to someone whine about such a stupid fucking problem. As always, I will only talk about the dresses I especially liked or hated, because the others are too boring to bother with. Observe:

(I admit: I was too tired of fighting with my computer to do this, and it had to go up sometime today, so the following photos are shamelessly ganked from the Una LaMarche at the HuffPo. Sorry dudes. At least I didn't leech your bandwidth.)


Hey, remember Althea's challenge winning design in episode 4? She sure hopes you don't! I'm sorry, but I don't get "baggy jacket and bouncing boobs" as a design aesthetic, no matter how much we know Heidi loves them. People always go on about how clean and polished her designs look. If I made the same outfit a bunch of times I'd probably get good at it too.











Chris had my favorite story of the night. She is a vampire bride, who is going to turn her husband into a vampire, um, like in the old times. Yes Chris, good job. Way to think on your feet. And OK, this is a beautiful dress, but the top of it really bugs me. It looks like a lampshade. But the skirt is gorgeous, and it was made in a day. So OK. This dress deserved top 3, and Chris deserves to fight another day.












I just want to point out that both people who got "action adventure" made these lameass fucking pleather catsuits. Really, guys? There are a LOT of action adventure movies to work with, and a lot of them have some kick-ass heroines with sweet-ass outfits. The challenge was "Movie Character", not "Slutty Matrix-Themed Halloween Costume". Weak sauce, Logan.













Epperson! What is there to say about this dress, besides "Good Job, Eppy"? I'm not a huge Epperson fan, and I still think he's a dick, continually impressed with his ability to do something new every time he comes to the runway. His consistent highlighting on the show makes me think he's final 3 bound. So there you go, the judges and I finally agreed on something.













Louise's dress may look familiar, as it is the exact same fucking dress she makes for every challenge ever. Also, this hit one of my pet peeves about Project Runway: She did not pay attention to the challenge. She said this dress is for an actress at an industry party trying to make it big (hey, doesn't that sound a little like episode 5?), but that wasn't the challenge! And even if it was, her dress is boring and cliched as fuck. This is another Halloween costume, but this is the costume donned by someone who can't pick a theme and just goes with "well, I have a feathered headband and this is the one time a year I can get away with that dress". Louise deserved worse then bottom 2. She should have been canned. And we know she's not going to make final 3, so why the fuck keep her and sacrifice Ra'Mon?! We lost Quacks because she was boring in one episode. By that logic, Louise should be beheaded.




WHY RA'MON WHY. OK, so the Lady GaGa reptile-inspired jumpsuit was looking like a mess. But the way to recoup was not to make an even messier looking dress and cross your fingers that someone did a worse job then you! I actually kind of like some of the ideas with this dress. The bust looks cool and the skirt has some nice bunching going on. If he'd had more time, this dress could have been top-3. But it just wasn't going to happen in two goddamned hours, even if you did give your model a backstory from the Super Mario movie (according to Russ). I still think it's bullshit he got aufed. Boring < Too Weird. Plus, Ra'Mon has consistently taken risks and made interesting clothing. Louise has consistently done crap and made crap. What the fuck, Project Runway. If I wasn't blogging this show, I'd be done.







Finally, Nic wins the challenge that was delivered to him on a platter. I don't want to put Nic down, though. This is a great costume and the details are lovely. This is one of the few wins this season I actually get. Plus, Nic is one of the only interesting designers left on the show, so I am starting to get a Stockholm Syndrome-like affection for him. I hope we get to see him and Gordana pal around some more.










Also, the judges for this episode sucked. If I want to know what the fucking costume designer from Walk the Line thinks about specialness, I will blow my goddamned brains out, because there is clearly no hope or joy left in my life. WHERE IS NINA GARCIA. BRING HER BACK TO ME.

So, that's that. Ra'Mon is gone, with a piece of my heart tucked in his sewing kit, and this season trundles on to it's mediocre midpoint. Whatever. Harmony out.