TIFF ’23: The Dead Don’t Hurt

Viggo Mortensen wrote and directed this Western drama that is filled with recognizable Western tropes but Moternsen neither completely rejects them nor subverts them, he simply uses them to fill out his story about an immigrant couple that finds themselves living and loving on the edge of a corrupt Nevada town in the 1860s. The…

The Leopard (1963) – Luchino Visconti

The next film on the What Else to Watch list from DK Canada’s The Movie Book following my screening of Ossessione is this three hour epic starring Burt Lancaster. Lancaster plays Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, the ageing patriarch of a dying dynasty. It’s Sicily in the 1860s and political and social upheavals cause Fabrizio great…

Star Trek: Ishmael (1985) – Barbara Hambly

My journey with the non-canon Star Trek Pocket Books continues. And this novel from 1985 demonstrates what was happening in Trek pages before Paramount took a stronger stance on what the novels could be about. Previous to this we’ve encountered Trek novels with slash overtones between James T. Kirk and his science officer, the Vulcan…

Steamboy (2004) – Katsuhiro Otomo

  I can’t seem to pull myself away from the Sci-Fi Chronicles book, and was very appy to settle in for this one that combined anime and steampunk, and ran with it. Now, don’t judge me, but I watched the dubbed version, I usually prefer watching a film in the original language, but I only…