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Krisis covers RuPaul's Drag Race, international Drag Race, Dragula, and more in their incredibly in-depth essays and recaps on Drag.

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 4 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille” acting challenge & “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway Review & Power Ranking

March 12, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fourth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille,” a scripted acting challenge spoofing real-life documentary Ni juge, ni soumise. It was paired with a “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway celebrating surrealist painter René Magritte – plus, the library was open for a reading challenge.

If that sounds like a brainy episode, it was! But, it also showed how prepared the top group of queens remaining on this season are when it comes to surmounting any challenge thrown their way… except, perhaps, a reading challenge.

These Belgian queens seemed to be literally shaking in their boots when Rita Baga opened the library for the reading mini-challenge. Several of them seemed to be too nervous to even hold their prop glasses up to their eyes.

That made me wonder to what extent reading is baked into the culture of Belgian drag. Of course, there is a certain playful cattiness to most drag queens and drag scenes, and we’ve seen that on display in the workroom and in confessionals. Yet, reading tends to be a very direct, confrontational version of that cattiness. I get the sense that doesn’t come as naturally in Belgium as it does for queens other countries – like, for instance, New Zealand.

That stands in contrast to the acting challenge and the runway, which both seemed to capitalize on the cerebral qualities of the queens and Belgium’s appreciation for the arts. I wasn’t expecting much from a spoof of a documentary or a modern art runway theme, but this cast of queens came ready to impress.

My French is not good enough to have perfectly understood the acting scenes without subtitles and translations, but I got the impression that two of them went off without a hitch and were thoroughly amusing. The script relied on the broad humor of badly-behaved citizens facing off against a dour but impulsive magistrate, which means the queens all had genuine characters to act rather than simply spouting catchlines or delivering physical humor.

The same is true for the Magritte-inspired “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway theme. On other franchises I’d expect perhaps one or two queens who really understood the assignment of capturing the thematic qualities of a surrealist painter in their fashions. Here, no one missed the mark entirely. The same was true on their bande dessinée runway on episode two.

It seems clear that the average drag queen in Belgium is expected to know her cultural references and appreciate the country’s artistic heroes. I find it refreshing to be watching a version of Drag Race where the queen’s references are not simply drag, reality TV, and fashion. I don’t think any other franchise has seemed so enamored with connecting drag to the fine arts.

What does this cerebral episode mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s “Festival Realness” design challenge? One queen descended precipitously due to some factors out of her control, while a pair of winless queens jostled to secure a spot of runner-up to our clear front-runner.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

[Read more…] about Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 4 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille” acting challenge & “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway Review & Power Ranking

Filed Under: teevee Tagged With: Acting Challenge, drag, Drag Race, Drag Race Belgique, Drag Race Belgique Season 1

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 11 – “Two Queens, One Joke” Review & Power Ranking

March 11, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

RuPaul's Drag Race Season 15 Episode 11 - Two Queens One Joke - Comedy Luxx Noir London Loosey LaDuca

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the eleventh episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Two Queens, One Joke.” It’s a typical Drag Race stand-up challenge with the added twist of being performed in pairs, a la All Stars Season 2. Plus, a voguing mini-challenge, a “Rip Her To Shreds” runway, and an all-time best lip sync!

There’s a reason that Drag Race places stand-up comedy challenges towards the back half of the season, and it’s not just to have enough run-time to show comedy sets from every queen.

Comedy challenges are some of the most-subjective Drag Race challenges of all. It’s easy for producers to craft any kind of narrative they want for a queen purely by having RuPaul laugh more or less during her set and then matching Ru’s energy in the edit. Even a genuinely hilarious queen like Bianca del Rio could be stopped short by complete silence between her jokes..

While queens have a little bit of control over their fates in writing their own jokes, it’s not much. There have been many re-edits of iconically bad past comedy challenges where the addition of an audience laugh track or Ru’s own screaming laughter makes seemingly dead jokes come alive. There’s a version of Laganja Estranja’s iconically bad stand-up set with laughter included that makes her out to be mildly amusing!

With that in mind, it’s no coincidence that “Two Queens One Joke” was used to dismiss a queen who did perfectly okay but who would’ve likely crushed her competitors next week. That would have made the road to the finale more complicated and potentially cost us several front-runners along the way. Of course, this is exactly what I predicted last week, because I have seen a few (dozen) Drag Race comedy challenges before!

Luckily for us as viewers, the challenge yielded a highly-entertaining lip sync to Doja Cat’s wildly fun “Boss Bitch.” It’s a song I am utterly addicted to even without a lip sync to pair with it! It helped that the lip sync ran a full two minutes and five seconds of a 2:14 song.

RuPaul's Drag Race Season 15 Episode 11 - Two Queens One Joke

That’s not totally unusual. The Ariana Grande lip sync on the full-length Episode 2 was a couple of seconds shy of two minutes. However, last week’s “Single Ladies” was a slim 1:47.

Eighteen more seconds in a lip sync is a lot of time for queens to endear themselves, especially when it means we get a full song with virtually no edits. Even some of our favorite evenly-matched lip syncs of all time like “Shut Up & Drive,” “Sorry Not Sorry,” and “Miss You Much” are heavily edited, and it’s obvious we lost some material to the cutting room floor. Here, we saw the nearly entire thing.

That longer lip sync was a result of this week’s second lucky turn for viewers: this was the first week of Drag Race returning to a 90-minute TV runtime on MTV, which means an hour-long episode edit! The episode had so much more room to breathe with an extra 20 minutes of footage. The return of seeing the judges in their private deliberations reinforced for me how essential they are to keeping the narrative of the show moving forward.

What does this mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s interview challenge? Absolutely nothing when it comes to the dismissal (which I anticipated), but this episode’s placements shook up our potential final four in a major way for the first time in several weeks.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!

[Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 11 – “Two Queens, One Joke” Review & Power Ranking

Filed Under: teevee Tagged With: Doja Cat, drag, Drag Race, RuPaul's Drag Race, RuPaul's Drag Race Season 15, Stand-Up Comedy Challenge

Drag Race Sverige Season 1, Episode 1 – “Start Your Engines” Review & Power Ranking

March 7, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the first episode of Drag Race Sverige (AKA Drag Race Sweden) Season 1 – “Start Your Engines.” This is a standard-issue international Drag Race first episode, with a silly photo shoot and a two-look runway that includes a hometown theme.

I love getting to know the drag scene and queer culture of a new country through the lens of Drag Race (which I realize isn’t always 100% accurate or representational).

One of the first things that stuck out to me about Sverige is that it’s international… but not in the same way as some of the other European seasons.

Franchises like Drag Race UK and Drag Race France have felt international because they have centered immigration stories from their cast members. Drag Race Sverige has that from the Brazilian Fontana, but they also have the opposite story – an emigration story! The cast features a pair of returning expats in Antonina Nutshell and Endigo, who live in the UK and Japan, respectively.

I think that said something interesting about Sweden and the relative size of its drag scene. On one hand, of course you’d want to come back to your home country to participate in Drag Race given the chance! On the other hand, with both of these returning queens ranking in the bottom this episode (alongside a queen with little experience), it was giving “We barely filled the cast” vibes.

That’s pure speculation on my part. Plus, first seasons of any reality franchise can be hard to fill with contestants. Once the host country sees the show, then more players emerge from the woodwork for a second season. But, there definitely a sense in this cast that there are a few major contenders and then some obvious fodder for early eliminations.

(I won’t call them “filler,” because they’re each a talented, worthy queen – but, it seems pretty plain who is meant to last past the halfway point in this cast.)

The other interesting aspect of this first episode is that Sweden’s drag aesthetic seems to de-emphasize the familiar form of glamourous pageant drag for something a little more edgy. Out of 18 total looks this episode across two runway themes that openly invited a pageant aesthetic, we only wound up with two looks that fit that vibe. And, the queens took a decidedly dark and twisted view on the benign, “One Night at the Castle” theme which could easily invoke royalty and princesses.

Even Admira Thunderpussy, who turned in a gorgeous pageant-ready look in the first runway, took a more martial approach to the second.

I’m curious to see if this diversity in runway fashion holds up across the season. We might even see a “fashion girls vs. punk queens” divide begin to emerge amongst the frontrunners.

The runway this week made absolute chaos out of my pre-season power ranking, with an unexpected queen on the top and a highly-ranked queen slipping down the rankings. That could go topsy turvy all over again next week, where the challenge is a Talent Show that could see several queens at the middle and bottom of the rankings score high placements over this week’s top queens. I can’t wait to see how this one turns out!

(Want to watch Drag Race Sverige outside of Sweden? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Läsare, start your engines. Och må den bästa Drag Queen vinna! 

[Read more…] about Drag Race Sverige Season 1, Episode 1 – “Start Your Engines” Review & Power Ranking

Filed Under: teevee Tagged With: drag, Drag Race, Drag Race Sverige, Drag Race Sverige Season 1, hometown runway

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 3 – “Festival Realness” Design Challenge Review & Power Ranking

March 5, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the third episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – “Festival Realness,” a combination ball and design challenge with just a pair of looks and a loosely-defined brief (and one of my all-time favorite songs as a lip sync).

It’s always fascinating to see the first design challenge of a season and that’s doubly true for the first design challenge for an entire franchise. Will the constructed looks trend haute couture or plaintive and practical?

I think the Festival Realness results fell somewhere in the middle of that range, partly because the brief was so vague. How exactly do you combine the pragmatism of a festival look with runway-ready fashion? I think the solution is likely something fantastical like you’d spot at Burning Man, but all of these looks are fairly conventional in form and function save for one (and it’s no coincidence it was the winner).

If the Festival Realness looks weren’t surprising, the outcome of the episode certainly was! From shocking top placements to an indecisive three-way lip sync, everything about the judging this episode was a little puzzling. What did that mean for my Power Ranking compared to last week’s comedy challenge? Honestly, it involved lot of guesswork on which way the judges would lean in the future after tonight’s unpredictable results.

I recently went on a diatribe in my write up of the US franchise’s lip sync Lalaparuza about how I find lip syncs to be a dull form of entertainment that I eschew both as a drag fan and as a potential drag performer. However, if there is ONE SONG that I have lip synced to more than ANY OTHER SONG in my life, it is Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” I’ve previously told the story of how I carried my boombox out to the curb of my grandparent’s house to choreograph my own performance in the middle of their tiny side street every evening after seeing the group open for Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour.

I think my nightly pre-teen dance routine probably could’ve beaten two of the queens in this lip sync, if not all three. “Pump Up the Jam” is all about its non-stop thumping beat and rocking your body the entire time. None of these three queens lived up to that for me.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

[Read more…] about Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 3 – “Festival Realness” Design Challenge Review & Power Ranking

Filed Under: teevee Tagged With: Ball Challenge, Design Challenge, drag, Drag Race, Drag Race Belgique, Drag Race Belgique Season 1

It’s time for Drag Race Sweden Season 1!

March 5, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Drag Race Sweden Season 01 Promotional ImageStarta dina motorer, för det är dags för Drag Race Sverige – AKA, Drag Race Sweden!

The first episode of Drag Race Sverige is available NOW to watch internationally on WOW Presents Plus (although word is that future episodes will arrive slightly later in the day at Saturday 8pm US ET).

I’m extremely curious to recap this season, as it will be my first time recapping a season that will be entirely in a language I don’t speak or comprehend. (Much to my surprise, a lot of Drag Race Philippines was conducted in English.)

Plus, all things Sweden are a complete blind-spot for me beyond the obvious (and obviously tired )IKEA jokes, so I’ll be coming to this season with fresh eyes and a lot to turn about Sweden and it’s queer culture. Add to that the fact that we didn’t get any “Meet the Queens” interviews with this cast, and I’ve never gone into a season of Drag Race with less knowledge than I am with Sverige!

My coverage of Drag Race Sweden will debut mid-week with my Power Ranking for Episode 1. Until then, you can read my Pre-Season Power Ranking. And, if you don’t have Wow Presents Plus, you can watch all of the Sverige queens enter the workroom for free on YouTube!

Ses nästa tisdag!

(I don’t get an affiliate bonus from referring you to WOW+, but as a major fan of drag and Drag Race it’s probably my most-used media subscription. At a pricey $8.30 a month I know it’s competing for your budget against things like Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, and more. All the more reason to keep up with my recap and power rankings, and then subscribe for just a month or two to binge all the parts that sounded interesting to you!)

Filed Under: teevee Tagged With: drag, Drag Race, Drag Race Sverige, Drag Race Sverige Season 1

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