Stuff.
Rufus Sewell will play Michael Dibdin's Venetian detective Aurelio Zen in three feature-length dramas for BBC One. Golden Dagger award-winning Dibdin wrote a dark and unusual Sherlock Holmes pastiche (The Last Sherlock Holmes Story) before creating his famous anti-hero. His Zen novels are satires and travelogues about contemporary Italy, often surreal and very funny, each set in a different location as they follow the weary, sometimes disgraced detective from case to case. Antonia Moras says about the novels:
'The conspiratorial tangles of Italian politics - the rumors, the games, the mirages, the corruption, the misteri d’Italia - are always part of the background to Zen’s cases, but he himself is not a political player. He is a stranger in his own bureaucracy, in which he has survived almost in spite of himself. Dibdin is very good at catching the tone of bureaucratic languor - the petty gossip, the rivalries, the thwarted creativity. Zen is detached, ironic, carrying a certain ingrained sadness - still the boy who lost his father during World War II. Many of his police successes are flawed and temporary. Events happen around him and he responds as best he can. He’s not fashionable or trendy. He isn’t even always very clever.'
Dibdin was heavily influenced by hardboiled crime writers like Chandler and Hammett, and his Aurelio Zen (despite a physical appearance that clearly evokes the mythic Sherlock Holmes, he of the aquiline nose and lean, dark figure) is very much a noir character. The fact that Zen is (how should I put it?) a bit of a loser in his personal and professional life, was always one of my favourite things about him.
Edit: The three novels that will be adapted are Ratking, Vendetta and Dead Lagoon (notable skipping over Cabal, the third book to be published), according to this 2009 article in The Guardian. I see they're tending towards the moodier, more violent novels in the series.
Ian McShane will play legendary pirate Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. He joins Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz in the film, directed by Rob Marshall. (THR)
Katee Sackhoff will star in a new ABC crime drama. The as-yet-untitled show centers on a beautiful female detective (Sackhoff) who teams with a disgraced ex-cop to solve crimes and untangle the conspiracy that sent him underground. (THR)
The meaning behind Sam Adama's tattoos on Caprica. (Show Patrol)