* Boardwalk Empire, a new HBO series about Prohibition-era gangsters created by The Sopranos‘ Terence Winter, directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Steve Buscemi, Leonardo DiCaprio doppelganger Michael Pitt, Omar from The Wire, and whatsername from Trainspotting and No Country for Old Men? I’ll eat it and ask for seconds! (Via Keith Uhlich.)
* Zak Sabbath’s I Hit It with My Axe, the video companion series to his brilliant blog Playing D&D with Porn Stars, has begun!The funny thing about it is that Sasha Grey is my audience-identification character! She’s an RPG newbie being introduced into an ongoing campaign involving more experienced players, which was my exact position during the one D&D campaign I ever played. This should be fun to watch. And as Rob Bricken says, you really need to be reading Playing D&D with Porn Stars. It’s pure gold.
* Typically astute stuff from Todd VanDerWerff in his Lost review/recap for the week. I liked hearing him echo a comment made by our very own Tom Spurgeon in the comments for my Lost thoughts on yesterday’s episode. Go chime in!
* I share Jason Adams’s intense ambivalence about Human Centipede. My situation is that not wanting to watch more than five seconds of something as much as I don’t want to watch more than five seconds of Human Centipede makes me wonder if maybe I need to watch more than five seconds of it.
* This Aaron Renier contribution to Covered is most delightful to this Ewok-lover. As always, click the link and celebrate the full-sized love.
* David Bordwell gently annihilates the notion that film criticism is a dying art. I’m sure you can think of a few comics people who’d be well served to read this essay, right? And music, too, if that’s your thing. Anyway, every boldfaced section header in the piece is a gem, eg. “Writing style is overrated.” I feel like I’m being extra-effusive in this Carnival, but if you care about criticism at all, you need to read this one.
What’s odd is that VanDerWeff seemingly has never heard of The Fugitive.
That’s my oblique way of saying the sideways Kate character isn’t without a show — rather, she’s in one that’s from the incredible popular modern western genre: Kung Fu, The Fugitive, Incredible Hulk, etc.