After their hour, they returned to James. St. James. BTW, do you think he ever goes around and yells "I'M SAINT JAMES, bitch!"? A lot of people were fairly disastrous, including Ebony, who was supposed to be rocking an edgy sophisticated look, but she looked horrible. Then again, if you need your friends to tell you if a $52 tank top is going to be worth the price of admission, maybe you deserve to lose. It was all no bother as Lisa won the event, and as an added bonus to winning this challenge, she got a chance to take home three articles of clothing that any of the rest of the girls were wearing. ANTM being the charitable enterprise that it is, Lisa also got a chance to pick two people to each take one article of clothing, so Kim and Ebony got on the confiscation freeway themselves.

Since the moment she was picked as a finalist, Lisa has been quite the object of confidence. She is a buyer, and she really eats, drinks and sleeps fashion. Everybody else is starting to become really annoyed with what she has to say, since she is giving everybody advice on how they could do better, what poses they should go with, and how they should work their styles, even if they had never asked her for help to begin with. Lisa is definitely a know it all, but so far she hasn't been that far off in what she's actually saying. It probably didn't help matters much when she was drunk whenever she was dishing out her advice, as they started doing impressions of her as soon as she left the room.

I don't know about you, but I think it would be great if more people wrote advice columns while they were drunk. I happen to dispense some of the best advice when I am on the verge of blackout. As for Lisa, sure it must suck for those girls to hear her advice, but she does seem to know what she was talking about. During the semifinals when the judges heard she was a buyer, they asked her questions about top designers and she knew what she was talking about. One of the criteria the judges use to determine a top model is their fashion sense and knowledge of the industry. Lisa is clearly ahead of everybody else in this regard, but she also seems more than eager to dispense advice, so why not take advantage of it?

For this week's photo shoot, Jay brought out a random photographer that looked like a Brett Rattner crossed with Matt LeBlanc. He told the girls that they should split into pairs, with each pair modeling the same outfit, creating a competition within the competition. Jay didn't tell the models that they would be competing with each other beforehand, so it made some of the pairings quite interesting. For instance, the girls had to wear the same dress, which became difficult when you go from size 0 Nicole to size 14 Diane. Speaking of Diane, she got a makeover, but it just made her look like a lot like Gabby Reece, if you could imagine Gabby Reece filmed the documentary Super Size Me. Jay tied to get Diane to do one of those action shots by saying she should jump in the air before her pose, but after she fell and cut her knee, they gave up on that idea. The bigger they are, Jay....

The most interesting competition was between Nik and Bre, who were modeling a couture look on a log. I know, I know, it doesn't exactly blow you away from the description, but it was great to see these two. I am really not that hot on Nik's new look, but the camera is loving her early on. Perhaps she has been practicing like Lisa and just hasn't been telling everybody else about it, but it looks like she is trying her hardest to make good on her promise during the first episode when she said that SHE was the competition.

In another battle that I call Man Hands vs. Man Glands, Sarah and Coryn took pictures next to a horse. Now, depending on which model you like you are saying, "Well, she's not hot, but I wouldn't call her a horse," but I am talking the four-legged variety. Maybe it was the animal that made the pictures look good, but you could tell that their makeovers worked. I still think Coryn's jaw is a little too, umm, formidable, and would make even Jennifer Garner and her homo habilis-like mandible laugh (I’ve been trying to work homo habilis into a recap for years, btw), but maybe she just needs to stop eating for a week to get rid of some muscle tone. Since there was no walking involved, Sarah seemed at ease, even when the horse (no, not Coryn, the other one) sneezed on her dress. I also really liked her new look.

Cassandra was still bugging out about her hair, but quite honestly, it is really striking. If she ever gets over the shock, and learns some model attitude to cover up that pageant passiveness that makes her so docile, I think the look really works for her. She said she was happy to go against Jayla because she thought Jayla was weak, but after Cassandra's frames were finished, Jay said that she would need a miracle.

Posted by J-Unit on September 29, 2005 10:00 AM