Denis Richards: It’s Complicated Recap (Bikini Shape)
Denise tries to get in shape for her Hawaiian vacation
Daytime at the Richard’s Ranch. Irv enters a room and goes “Jeez! Oh my god, that’s disgusting!” We are treated to a particularly fecal looking pile of dog vomit on the floor. He calls Denise into the room. “Lucy got sick.” There is a lot of commentary about how bad the pile of vomit smells. We see a shot of a dog, presumably Lucy, looking on dispassionately. Irv interviews, kind of angrily, that the animals in the house are starting to drive him crazy.
New assistant Dan (Oh Sho! We hardly knew you!) enters and adds his two cents by pulling a face and saying “That smells really bad”. Irv and Denise pretend to clean up the mess with paper towels on the floor while Denise instructs Dan to “go get a candle in here.” Irv says, not unreasonably, that he can’t care for all of Denise’s animals while she’s in Hawaii. Dan comes back with two lit candles and asks “Do you want red currant or boo-shee perfume?” To which Irv awesomely replies “How ‘bout a New Balance in your butt, Dan?”. I’m not sure why Irv is mad at Dan exactly and ,from his expression, neither is Dan but still: Irv!
Credits: Glamour Girl. Gold digger. Single Mom. Bitch. Sex Symbol. Husband Stealer. Paparazzi magnet. Daddy’s Girl. Movie Star. Tabloid Queen. Denise Richards: It’s complicated. I notice that at the end there’s this flurry of other words including : Sister. What the hell? Are these credits supposed to be things that people think Denise is, but she’s actually not, or a list of things that she really is? Who calls themselves a Gold Digger and means it? I guess it’s complicated.
Early morning at the Richards compound and it’s Irv’s turn for some charming physical comedy with the animals. He’s in bed, surrounded by dogs, with one tiny one sitting on his chest licking his face. He “wakes up” groaning at “George” and heads to the bathroom where a few cats annoy him. I didn’t even realize they had cats. He’s in his boxers – we really do see Irv in his skivvies kind of a lot, don’t we? He moans and groans as some more as slapsticky music plays and we see him “cleaning up” some other pet mess with paper towels and griping to Denise that these dogs are killing him.
Off-camera, one assumes that the actual housekeeper cleans the floors after he’s done. Unless Single Mom Denise would like us to believe that in addition to not having a nanny she also cleans her own house. Or maybe she makes Irv do it. Dan is clearly best-suited to standing around and looking more camera-ready than Sho.
But this subplot can wait, we need to get to the “heart” of the episode, which is about Denise’s bikini. We see her in the Walk-In-Closet of the Poor Single Mom again trying to shimmy into some tight designer jeans. They don’t fit and Denise is very upset because she’s going on vacation next week and is nervous that she won’t look good in a bikini. More shots of Denise trying on jeans. This is fascinating stuff, guys.
Denise meets with Dan to discuss her travel plans. He says that he got four tickets and asks if she knows who prefers window or aisle. She cuts him off with “I prefer window” which apparently is the end of that discussion. Then he says that “they’re sending over the bikinis today” and Denise interviews a plug for some place called “Cynababy” that is giving her free bikinis, which is “so nice.” She can, however, look this gift horse in the mouth, because she’s worried about how her body looks because she’s gained weight. “To be perfectly honest with you” she interviews “I’d be perfectly happy wearing a one piece and a sarong.” She says this as if she was talking about wearing a burqa.
Denise complains more to Dan claiming that the “paparazzi are ruthless and vicious” and that they’re going to say that she looks like a “fat ass on the beach.” This is a subject (one of few) that I’d generally give Denise credit for knowing more about than I do but aren’t the paparazzi merely the photographers? They just take the pictures, its people like Perez Hilton that point out that you look like a fat ass. I’m just saying, Denise.
“You know whose fault this is?” asks Denise. “My dad’s.” Leave Irv alone! A montage of her dad making her fat by cooking pasta and harmlessly serving himself ice cream that she then mooches. “The lasagna is almost ready” says Irv cheerfully in the flashback food montage. I wish Irv lived at my house. Denise: Ask your father to make you a fucking salad. He likes to be helpful.
Dan, who seems nicer than Sho already, insists that she is not fat, but ruins it as she grabs her love handles to show him by saying “that’s your love. Not your love handles”. I have utterly no idea what he means by that and he says it again later and it still doesn’t make any sense. She insists that he call her girlfriends over for an emergency meeting to discuss her fatness, or presumably, they won’t get paid this week. It’s a good thing none of them appear to have much else to do.
Serious techno music plays as naked Denise mounts a bathroom scale, moving her hair to cover her side boob, mermaid-style. “[Bleep]” says the closed captioning.
We cut to outside where some unmentioned construction project is going on and Irv is fucking around with some wood. He says “nice job Walter” sarcastically to one of the dogs as he uses a hose to clean off a pile of dog crap on the lawn. I’m not sure that’s actually the best way to handle that particular problem, but given he’s the only person we ever see doing any work in here, including Denise’s various personal assistants, I’m willing to cut him some slack. “This is almost like running a farm” he says. Movie Star. Almost Farmer. It’s complicated. He threatens the dogs with the kennel again.
Denise is in the kitchen with Dan complaining about being fat. He clarifies his earlier statement: “I said that’s your love, I didn’t say love handles.” It doesn’t make any sense this time either. Denise is fretting about her dad’s (still totally reasonable) threat to put her dogs in a kennel for the week. Dan tells her that his dog DIED in a kennel, coincidentally enough, while he was actually vacationing in Hawaii. Dan: Speaking on behalf of Irv, unless you’re willing to spend the next week cleaning up dog feces, instead of fannying around with scented candles, cut it out with the Urban Myth kennel horror stories. Of course what happens in the background of the next scene renders this entire subplot and its eventual denouement as silly and pointless as the rest of the episode, but still. Not. Helping. Dan.
Irv walks into the house observing some dog pee on the floor, carrying a different dog and lectures Denise in the kitchen about how the situation is ridiculous. “Didn’t anybody see that pee in there?” he demands, and I kind of like him, I think, because even if they’re feeding him his lines they still seem like the sort of thing he would say. Of course, at this point, behind him in the kitchen we see a chubby, normal -looking woman whom we’ve never seen before scurry through the door carrying paper towels like a royal scullery maid running to hide when the king enters the hall. She shoots a quick, anxious glance at the camera so you know she knows she’s not supposed to get caught. It’s her! The mystery maid. Who clearly just cleaned up the spill herself. So if we hadn’t figured it out, and we’re smart, so we had, all these scenes of Irv and Denise getting down on the floor with paper towels and blurred out spray bottles of cleaning products happen after our friend in the blue sweatshirt, or one of her colleagues, cleans up the actual spill. Which is fine with me. If I had as much money as Denise, I wouldn’t clean my own damn floors, or make my father do it. Though it must be said, we’ve seen no footage of Dan even getting down on the floor to do the faux cleaning, so the above admonition still applies.
I love moments like this, just because it’s a tiny gleam of the real in this constructed world, and makes me think about how many other people are in the house, not even counting the film crew, cleaning and walking the dogs and watching the children while this pantomime of a life goes not. I’m not sure if they left it in by accident – it was quick, and I didn’t catch it until the third viewing, or more likely, someone noticed, but didn’t care, not because they think we’re stupid, but because they know we don’t really care either. Kind of depressing. I wonder if the girl in the shot played it for all her friends – her big moment on E! Carrying paper towels covered in dog piss and making a run for the door.
Denise addresses the assembled “friends’ in her bedroom to announce, basically, that’s she’s fat. The fact that they don’t promptly tell her to stuff it is as good an indication as any that this isn’t the same day and that they’re all getting paid anyway. It takes a while for the names of the friends to come through, but they do eventually, so: there’s Michelle, the sister, Trish, the skinny brunette friend and Kim, the older-looking blond one who’s sassier and calls Denise on her shit with a little more venom so I like her. In response to her announcement, Michelle says, not unkindly “Well, you’ve gained weight.”
The free bikinis are on a rack in the room and they proceed to try them on. Denise claims that she can’t fit into the bottoms on one and size 0 Trish ridiculously claims the same. Of course, this episode wouldn’t really work if it was just DENISE attempting to lose ten pounds in a week, so after Old Blonde Friend says they should try “that lemonade diet” Trish helpfully suggests that they should go to the gym. Standing there with her tiny frame and abs of steel, she makes this suggestion like they don’t all have personal trainers on speed dial. This episode really would have been a lot better if they all just went to get lipo together. I watched Jessica Simpson get Lasec surgery, I’m easy. It combines my two consistent television interests – surgery and celebrities. Though they never get gory in a Ricki-Lake-homebirth-video kind of way. It would be weirdly awesome to see Denise all markered up like a Doctor 90210 patient and then bags of gross white fat being hauled out.
Denise, it must be said, looks amazing for a woman who’s given birth to two children, but not, it must also be said, perfect. And I’m more sympathetic than you might think to the pressure that she probably feels to be perfect. But watching her flail around trying to lose ten pounds when everyone in the free world knows that she’s simply just going to get plastic surgery is a little painful. Is this supposed to make us think that she’s just like us? We’re not like this, are we?
Someone in Denise’s life, one of these people who do genuinely care for her, should have told her that this exercise in increasing her fame by inviting us to get to know the “real her” wouldn’t work because, at the end of the day, she just isn’t likable enough. She is beautiful, and the camera loves and has loved her, and she doesn’t seem like too terrible a person, but she just can’t come across, in these fake scenarios or elsewhere. So the whole project is a failure and was destined to be so and I reckon that there are people in her life who know this, and cared enough to wish it wouldn’t happen, but she’s worked her magic and they’ve swallowed it and now they don’t tell her the truth anymore. And I understand why, because she wouldn’t listen, she would just get angry, and if she got angry enough at you she might tell the world about your predilection for online porn and transvestite prostitutes, just to be spiteful.
Which is why I can get infuriated about the inconsistencies in shows like this because they are fiction, but they are all also special pleading about something non-fictional and in this case the plea is “like Denise.” And it rankles, because while they are spectacularly failing at the main goal of the show, they could at least respect us enough to toss us a situation that isn’t completely incomprehensibly nonsensical. Let Denise try and behave in a way that will make us like her while doing something contrived that’s it’s at least plausible she would actually do. Go-Karts and crash diets? Daddy makeovers and playhouse construction projects? Come on, that’s not how Denise spends her time, it’s not even a fictionalized version of how she spends her time, it’s just a ridiculous game show with an unlikeable host.
I think with some of this stuff – the stripper pole and the conversation with her nephew about Playboy they are shooting for some kind of TV tabloid trainwrecky “reality show clip time” moment. You can almost see in the editing that they are going for maximum “clippability” – a 20 second snippet that doesn’t need a back story. But it all comes off as rather lame, because as mentioned, it doesn’t appear that Denise even drinks, she apparently has no current sex life to speak of and none of her friends are famous or even interesting. Well, I guess there was that Kat Von D episode but I really think that probably just proves my point. I mean, we exist in a reality television world in which a show gathers together women purely BECAUSE they have emotional and substance abuse problems and makes them live in a house together. Denise is kind of a nerd, and obviously protective of her image, just bad at it. She can’t rank with that shit. She can’t even admit that she’s going to get Lipo for Christ’s sake, she’s never going to run around the house in curlers banging on a pan and screaming.
Old Blonde Friend and the sister hop into Denise’s SUV where she continues to complain about being fat, Old Blonde Friend mocks her quite bitchily “ you’re so FAT!”. It’s funny and I might be kidding myself but I think Denise looks genuinely annoyed. There follows some boring shots of the women working out and doing Pilates, while Denise tells us that they will be working out with her personal trainer and doing Pilates with her Pilates trainer. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that his workout schedule with her battalion of hired help isn’t, you know, her normal week, but instead a special schedule just for Hawaii preparation. It is during this section that we learn that Old Blonde Friend’s name is Kim. They work out and complain. Things are bleeped. Pilates looks really hard.
Denise steps on the scale, fully clothed this time and is disappointed with what she sees, so after walking through the kitchen (Irv adorables : “You want some ice cream?” as she passes through and she harasses him about how she needs to lose weight. In case you missed it, Denise feels like she needs to lose weight. Entertainingly, Irv seems to forget this in every scene and continues to tempt her with food) she attempts to walk several of her badly behaved miniature dogs all at once for about 6 seconds before giving up.
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