RuPaul's Drag Race

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E08 – “RuPaul Roast” (of Michelle Visage)

May 13, 2017 by krisis

The Second Ru Paul Roast, featuring Michelle Visage, makes for a tumultuous week in the rankings for our queens.

One of the first elements of RuPaul’s Drag Race I ever saw were the “Meet The Queen” videos from Season 6. The girls talked about a lot of things I didn’t understand at all, but one theme kept popping up again and again: they were all afraid of someone named Michelle Visage.

Based on their comments, I expected Michelle to be a force of unmitigated evil and impossible to please. She’s anything but that! Michelle is critical, but she’s realistic. She has some pet peeves she’ll go after every time (e.g., the color green, in-between gown lengths, cinching, “knowing the real you”), but her input is a lot more useful than anyone else on the panel. And, I tend to agree with her.

In this week’s ranking, every queen in the top five got shuffled. That leaves us with one new queen in contention for the finale and another finding it slipping out of her grasp.

That’s a bit of a surprise, since last week was another on-script challenge about being funny. Of course, this week they scripted themselves and had to make it work live in front of an audience.

Our remaining queens are relatively well-matched – they all have at least one win a piece, and four of the seven have been to the bottom two once. (Trinity is the sole queen with a pair of solo wins. Shea has her own win plus a shared win with Sasha. That shared victory is Sasha’s only outright victory, but she just had two weeks of almost winning.)

Basically: it’s still anyone’s race, but some anyones are a little bit better positioned than others.

That makes next week’s challenge absolutely critical. Whoever wins could be solidifying their place in the finale, while if a queen with an existing bottom two placement survives the lip sync she could be dooming herself to fourth place. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E08 – “RuPaul Roast” (of Michelle Visage)

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E07 – “9021-HO”

May 6, 2017 by krisis

This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the cast flashes back 27 years to parody a TV show from before some of them were born!

That’s right, it’s time for one of Drag Race‘s acting challenges.

If you aren’t familiar with them from past seasons, the scripts are “skit from your high school English class that still makes you wince whenever you think about it” realness. The challenges tend to be less about acting or memorization and more about delivering nonsense lines or surviving characters obviously meant to send a queen to the bottom two (generally, any character you’d describe as “butch”).

Yet, this group of queens is so solid that the only person who turns in a real clunker of a performance does so entirely due to her own inner saboteur – and continues her downward slide in the rankings as a result.

Meanwhile, a vague runway theme of “Big Hair” doesn’t help queens like Alexis Michelle, who do better with a little more guidance like they had on last week’s Madonna runway.

Meanwhile, it seems like the season’s top three is starting to really solidify, with a pair of queens sparring for the fourth spot in the last episode before the finals. Can all four girls hold off the competition from the other three remaining queen?

All it takes is a single misstep to sashay away.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E06 – “Snatch Game”

April 29, 2017 by krisis

Every mysterious new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race comes with one hotly anticipated standard episode: Snatch Game!

Based on the 60s TV gameshow Match Game, RuPaul introduced his version of the game in Season 2 and it’s been back every season since (save for All Stars 1, which substituted a similar celebrity impersonator take on Laugh In).

Snatch Game has two simple rules – transform into a celebrity, and make them funny. It’s a make-or break live improv challenge that tends to elevate certain queens from the rest of the pack for the remainder of the season and create quotes that fans will call back to for years.

Last night’s episode delivered another callback to past seasons – a redux of Season 8’s “Night of a Thousand Madonnas” runway theme, which served up four different kimono looks based on the “Nothing Really Matters” video and Drowned World Tour.

With 11 queens in the race already forewarned to avoid the kimono could we avoid duplicates entirely? I don’t know, but I hope this runway becomes a fixture of every season just like Snatch Game. And girls, you betta watch out, because there is no one that knows their Madonna better than your author – except for maybe Michelle Visage … and we’ve both been served with cease and desists by Madge.

The combination of Snatch and Madonna was last seen in 2000, with Miss M lending “Lucky Star” to the soundtrack of her then-husband Guy Ritchie’s film. In the 2017 edition, it catapulted a new queen to the top of the rank after last week, plus shuffled a pair of queens at the bottom.

Who’s that girl? Let’s find out!

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E05 – “Reality Stars: The Musical”

April 22, 2017 by krisis

This week on Drag Race, the queens were faced with an all-syncing, all-dancing tribute to The Kardashians and a faux fur runway.

These pre-choreographed lip sync challenges rarely give any queens a chance to shine, but this week’s was a bit different since almost all of the girls got to impersonate a current celebrity.

Or, at least, I hear they are celebrities. Other than being vaguely aware that one of them is married to Kanye West and that another was a Drag Race judge, I really don’t have the slightest idea of who any of the Kardashians are.

Meanwhile, faux fur was a fail, with most queens looking rather slapdash in their attempt to mix and match fabric and fake animal skins.

Did anyone come out of this week looking good? Three queens rose from last week’s standings, although one was really more about sinking less than her competitors than rising. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E05 – “Reality Stars: The Musical”

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E04 – “Good Morning Bitches”

April 15, 2017 by krisis

This week of RuPaul’s Drag Race felt like a bit of a letdown after last week, despite a pretty lively challenge.

That’s not entirely the fault of the final Lip Sync, which saw British queen Charlie Hides completely give up any chance to save her spot in the show with an already-defeated lip sync.

Part of the problem was also a stilted edit, which gave us only little time with one of the two morning show teams. A basic Naughty Nighty runway theme flew by.

The queens tackled the central challenge with aplomb, hosting a live morning show filled with back-and-forth repartee and little room for error. The show-within-a-show laid bare one of Drag Race‘s big weaknesses – their silly scripted challenges. All eight of the queens who had to adhere to a stricter script were duds, and one of the teams was sandbagged with a dour set of scripted anchor personalities. Meanwhile, all four queens allowed to sass up their cooking and DIY segments were a hilarious success.

I’ve got Drag Race‘s writers in the bottom of the rankings this week, but the top of the race is getting thrilling. Three queens seem to be getting comfortable at the top of the ranks, while two contenders are losing steam again a newly risen queen suddenly back in contention.

Want to know who’s who in that assessment? Keep reading!

RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E03 – “Draggily Ever After”

April 8, 2017 by krisis

This week’s RuPaul’s Drag Race had one of the most peculiar challenges of all time!

The remaining 13 queens presented fully-developed princess characters on the runway, but each one had to be accompanied by a dweeby floating-head sidekick which later had an animated body added to it.

Maybe some fans weren’t into this Roger Rabbit, Space Jam sort of realness, but I loved the juxtaposition – plus, I adore any challenge where the queens have to get literary.

This week on Untucked, the safe queens opined that most of them belonged in the top group, and I can’t help but agree. I think all of them were better than the queens that remained on the stage (yes, even Trinity).

Despite loving drag even as a child that I’ve only been in what I’d call “full drag” – with makeup and everything – twice in my life. One of those times was for Halloween, the other was on stage. Both were now half a life ago during my willowy, longhaired youth when I would easily pass for a woman just walking down the street.

Thinking and looking back at those occasions, getting dressed up specifically to read as “woman” and not “man in dress” was still a challenge. Even with an easy-to-dress figure, soft features, and no issue with affecting a feminine walk, there were still a hundred details to presenting myself as womanly I had to figure out. Not just padding, make-up, and jewelry, but how to stand with my legs held demurely or how to toss my hair.

That’s why for me drag is not only about a heightened reality of womanhood and blurred gender lines, but also a reminder of the exceptional expectations the world places on every woman, every day. Women are held to a ridiculous standard of seamless beauty whenever they leave the house, always treated by some as an object which must always make itself worthy of attention.

And, if they have the temerity to appear in front of a camera? I believe the term for the world’s expectation is “picture perfect.”

Is there some hypocrisy to me – a guy who hasn’t been in a dress for many years – ranking queens who do this professionally multiple nights a week on their picture perfectness? Absolutely! At the same time, there’s a reason why I watch Drag Race and not a single other reality TV show, and that’s to see people at the height of their craft showing off their abilities.

I know that even on my best day I probably couldn’t do drag as good as the last-place contestant in any season of Drag Race. However, I’ve also done a lot of the other things they have to do to win – some professionally – and I think it’s fascinating to dissect their performances.

With that off my chest, let’s begin! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E03 – “Draggily Ever After”