'Dancing' Heads For the Finish Line While 'Twilight' Opens Strong, In The Monday Roundup

by Linda Holmes

• It's that time again -- tonight on ABC is the final performance show of Dancing With The Stars. The finale will feature former NFL player Warren Sapp, model and TV host Brooke Burke, and N*Sync veteran Lance Bass. (Could they be any more famous?) Above is Lance's surprisingly enjoyable jitterbug from last week -- watch for the shocking plot development around the 45-second mark. You never know what will happen on live television.

• To the surprise of no one, Twilight performed well this weekend, bringing in about $70 million at the box office. Even more popular than the movie itself are the "taking a bite out of the box office" jokes now showing up in the headlines of practically every major outlet that is covering the story. If you come from one of those families where everyone has a working knowledge of every fish and every cheese and every kind of tree, just in case the need for an endless string of fish puns or cheese puns or tree puns should arise at the dinner table, you will not be surprised by the fangs, teeth, blood-sucking, and other vampire tropes arising in these headlines.

Do note, however, what Steve Mason points out at Slashfilm: the thing dropped like a rock between Friday and Saturday -- it was "hyperfrontloaded," as he puts it, meaning that if you didn't go at your first possible opportunity on Friday, there's a decent chance you're not going at all.

• In case you think you're the only one who can't make digital projectors work when you have a big presentation scheduled, consider this story of an attempt at screening the upcoming Oscar-hungry film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, which was called off when everything came up green.

• Via a link from the lively romance-novel-enthusiast blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I found my way to this bare-knuckled Guardian piece about the value of reading bad books. One of the problems with criticism, I find, is a certain reluctance to call garbage garbage, and you certainly won't find that problem in this post, which (among other delights) names what writer Stuart Evans considers "possibly the worst sentence ever written." Thoroughly unsurprising: the ensuing war in the comments.

• If you still haven't watched the video, now rapidly becoming infamous, of the group of girls watching last season's American Idol finale, please do so right now. If nothing else, it's a great example of how, among some groups of girls, coming of age is a contest to demonstrate who can care the most about everything, who is the most invested, and who is the most consumed with feeling. While it is my sense that, among some groups of boys, coming of age is a contest to demonstrate who can care the least, who is the least invested, and who can be the most aloof.

• The latest celebrity baby is named Bronx Mowgli. I'm not saying you should care about this; I'm suggesting that Hallmark create a new greeting card that says, "Dear Mom and Dad: Thank you for not naming me Bronx Mowgli. And also for not making me a celebrity baby."

• If you enjoyed last season's writers' strike, you're sure to enjoy this season's possible SAG strike. Puppet shows for everyone!