Thursday, July 24, 2008

LADY LUCK HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: I'm with the jidges -- this was an unusually good night on SYTYCD. Not much to complain about, but this is ALOTT5MA, after all, so I have to single out a few areas for criticism:
  • Can we PLEASE either eliminate disco as an eligible genre or else find someone -- anyone -- who can choreograph a disco routine other than Doriana Sanchez? We've seen everything she has to offer as a choreographer several times over, and now that she's finally found someone strong enough to do the Patrick Swayze / Jennifer Grey lift (who knew that this was the hardest lift in the entire lifting pantheon? Go Johnny Castle!), it's time to pack it up and go home for a while, a la Shane Sparks.

  • Many of the solos were pretty blah (with one obvious exception, to be discussed in the next set of bullet points) -- Joshua, in particular, looked like a clumsy fire hydrant who had suddenly grown arms and legs and wasn't quite sure what to do with them.

  • I was never really under Comfort, but to the extent that I was under her, I'm over her. "I was just a bad girl from the street until my parents sent me to performing arts school where, shoot, there wasn't no hip hop!" Enough. And that foxtrot (with the exception of the Mark does Tommy Tune bit at the beginning, which I thought was gorgeous and which he didn't get enough credit for) was sad. So we've sacrificed Kherington on Comfort's behalf -- can we please stop before we send a truly deserving girl home?

But there was a whole screaming lot of good, starting with:

  • Will performs an ode to the love child of James Brown and Morris Day. Yes, Will has absorbed the lesson of Danny Tidwell -- it's all well and good to be the best dancer on the show, but America has to want to vote for you.

  • Twitch and Katee perform not one but two dances of rejected womanhood. Unlike a certain disco choreographer of our acquaintance, Mia Michaels has this incomprehensible ability to constantly come up with things that are totally different than anything she's done before. The door dance was phenomenal. Meanwhile, I agree with Toni Basil that Katee's performance in the Broadway number was a little too light-hearted for the gravelly vocal of Sweet Georgia Brown, but the fact that this is the worst criticism anyone can come up with for her dancing should be telling us all something.

  • Courtney and Will's samba (loved the music there, too), both hip hop routines (it was nice to see Tabitha and Napoleon choreograph such different routines), Dmitri's Argentine tango -- all good stuff.

And so for predictions. Bottom two girls: Comfort and . . . I'll go with Chelsie, who I think came off as less charismatic than Courtney. (Although I must say that Courtney is starting to tread a little close to Brooke White levels of shut the fuck up, which may be starting to annoy people other than me.) Bottom two guys: It kind of has to be Mark, right? And I'll toss Joshua into the mix, as he just seemed kind of off.

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