Idol Chatter

The long-anticipated FoxFaith Movies, a division of 20th Century Fox, officially came into being this week, a great triumph for whoever is putting out the new division’s stationery, with little relevance for the rest of us. Fox has been in the Christian movie business for some years, mostly in distributing DVDs of films as big…

Perhaps the best way to describe last night’s debut of the CBS series “Jericho” is that it is something like “Lost” meets “Left Behind.” The show borrows storytelling devices from both, but with only moderate success. Last night’s pilot introduced us to the tiny, old-fashioned fictional town of Jericho, Kansas. But before we can become…

Innovative jazz musician John Zorn is having a good month–he’s won two prizes, though most people only know about one of them. Even hardcore Zorn fans may not know that the jazz musician and founder/CEO of Tzadik Records took the prize for Best Blend of Jazz and Heritage at the Oyhoo Jewish Music and Culture…

The ever-rising star television series creator and producer J. J. Abrams has done it again: “Six Degrees” (which premieres tonight at 10 on ABC) is riveting, complex, and promises something simple but essential for TV drama: good stories. Reminiscent of the film “Love Actually” in more ways than one, the pilot opens with scenes from…

Idol Chatter readers may remember a post I wrote back in January on my love for Duane “Dog” Chapman, the unlikely star of the A & E series “Dog: The Bounty Hunter” and a deeply faithful Christian. The long-haired, leather-wearing, born-again Dog (God spelled backwards, of course)–along with his wife/business partner Beth, son Leland, and…

The Russian Space Agency recently turned down Madonna’s bid to get a spot on an upcoming mission. This must come as a disappointment to those Christians who would love to see the pop diva shot into space, once and for all. Barely recovered from her latest U.S. concert tour–which includes the spectacle of the star…

September marks the premiere issue of Good, a magazine founded and funded by Ben Goldhirsh (son of media-multi-millionaire Bernie Goldhirsh). Good is for the “growing number of people tied together not by age, career, background, or circumstance, but by a shared interest,” writes Goldhirsh in a letter to potential readers on the magazine’s website. “This…

Which book did you like better–Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” or Dara Horn’s “In the Image”? Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated” or Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein”? This showdown of sorts among contemporary–and in Bellow’s case, deceased–Jewish writers is taking place as part of the 2006 Jbooks.com People’s Choice Award, a prize for the book…

Website-creator turned author Janice Taylor brings her food-obsessed, playful, confessional ourladyofweightloss.com to the printed page, with a new book titled the same: “Our Lady of Weight Loss: Miraculous and Motivational Musings From the Patron Saint of Permanent Fat Removal” (Viking Studio). As someone who grew up in a house filled with saintly paraphernalia and an…

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