Christian Movie Muscle, Fey-Palin Reprise, Top-20 Simpsons, More

The Simpsons: Picking their Top 20 episodes could definitely cause fistfights.

Fox

• In a development that shows the muscle of both block ticket sales and Christian-themed films marketed through church organizations, a movie many people have never heard of, called Fireproof, starring Kirk Cameron (from Growing Pains!), made $6.5 million this weekend. As Slashfilm notes (in a post that is definitely having some fun at Kirk Cameron's expense, so be warned), that's more than Spike Lee's new Miracle At St. Anna made. Make of this what you will.

• For the second week out of the last three, the big news coming out of Saturday Night Live was a Sarah Palin sketch starring Tina Fey. I've never thought of Tina Fey as a gifted mimic, but politics aside, you've got to admit, she's got the cadences down.

• The New York Times had an interesting piece this weekend about where gay actors stand in Hollywood these days. From the piece:

"The industry is persuaded that being known as gay will undermine your credibility both as romantic lead or an action star," said Larry Gross, director of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and author of a book on media portrayals of gays and lesbians.

"They don't test it," he said. "We're waiting for the Jackie Robinson moment when someone tests that assumption and discovers it's not true."

• The kind of list that's sure to set off arguments among your friends, if your friends are anything like my friends, who literally could make the creation of a similar list the subject of a year-long series of hours-long seminars: Top 20 Episodes Of The Simpsons.

• If you're the kind of nerd who obsesses over mix tapes and associates specific songs with specific moments in your life, and if you are the kind of big-gesture-maker who might hire a favorite musician to serenade your girlfriend, I commend to you most highly this weekend's episode of This American Life, which chronicled just such an effort.

--Linda Holmes

10:03 AM ET | 09-29-2008 | permalink

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