Tonight’s edition of the FORT90 FILM CLUB will explore the art & science of assuming a totally different persona or bringing out your true self, front and center, for the stage, for a film, or just in real life. Starting off with a movie that stars a man best known for leaping tall buildings, yet unquestionably his greatest role takes place almost entirely in a home in Long Island…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrhvnkNjyjg
Afterwards is another film starring another actor best known for playing a superhero, this one a metacommentary on life after tights…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJfLoE6hanc
Am also excited to finally screen a long time fave of mine, that asks if there is life after dying on screen tens of thousands of times…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1a0Ia8wbtE
Last but not least is maybe the most challenging of the bunch, and will entirely be contingent upon one’s love & tolerance for theater kiddies bullshit…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_ezPTjSSPw
Stream starts at the usual time, 8PM EST, and at the usual destination…
I watched Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys (2004) the other day.
It's the one that is most overtly inspired by NGE and set in a dystopic Vancouver where visitors are issued passports into the surveillance state, tracked by the Pokéverse's Nerv HQ equivalent and receive all the burgers and hot dogs their Munchlaxes can eat in exchange. Deoxys, which is basically an angel, shows up looking for its counterpart and aggros Rayquaza in the process. They develop an understanding by the end, as Pokémon is really all about **friendship**.
Like I been saying, this is an Eva fanwork. Deoxys is Game Freak's angelsona. The similarities are so unabashed, I too cannot believe it wasn't mentioned on [bulbapedia](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Deoxys_(Pok%C3%A9mon)), as echoed by [this bogleech article](https://bogleech.com/pokemon/p386deoxys.html).
And the similarities don't end at the city's governance or Deoxys' appearance. This movie also has its own Shinji: Tory, the son of a professor trying to revive the dormant Deoxys, is left so traumatized in the opening scenes of the movie by a stampede of Walreins that he is deathly afraid of all pokémon as a result. For him, "getting in the eva" means "cuddling plusle and minen." Jealous!!
Not my favourite of the pokémovies! That would have to be ***Pokémon 4Ever - Celebi: The Voice of the Forest* (2002)** for its time travel and lush setting. Sometimes I think Pokémon's vision of an athletic wear near future utopia of universal verterinary care is something to strive for but it is just a fantasy built on cockfighting and technofetishism.
@“AUGH нннн, whad’a great PICNIC!”#p78761 news to me yeah. Looking at the list, there are some good ones for sure. Have my eye on that 1978 Lem adaptation
@“connrrr”#p78797 man… I saw this movie way too much when it came out (how? on TV? idk) but never put together the Eva connection. NOW I KNOW why Misato's flashbacks always seemed so familiar—that Tory kid surviving the walrus stampede in a polar region looks similar in circumstance to Misato in Antarctica. Man… MAN!
@"yeso"#p78804 Just seems like a treasure trove, I doubt I've seen a single one of the features. I'm looking forward to going through the animations
@“edward”#p78801 there's definitely been weirder, but yeah!
@"captain"#p78813 [you weren't the only one to see it](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/remarks.php?trope=Anime.PokemonDestinyDeoxys)! It opens in the arctic, where there is a **literal** impact. How is this not on the bulbagarden wiki?? I've half a mind to register and start making some edits.
I’m watching the restored 1951 Native Son film and I gotta say I’m shocked by how not totally awful Richard Wright’s acting is. Is it a problem that he’s 43 and playing a 20 year old? Yes but somehow it’s not actually that bad
I watched Stand By Me (1986) for the first time since I was just old enough to start watching movies and understand their plots well enough to retain bits and pieces of them into adulthood.
I remembered the leech scene because it scared me so much as a kid and Richard Dreyfuss's IBM XT because my father had one until we got Macs and became a Mac household.
Good movie with good pacing, great performances. Unexpected companion to Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, which I'm nearing the end of. The movie was [big in Japan](https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-does-japanese-pokemon-reference-stand-by-me/), I found out. I never knew!
I recently finished watching Krzysztof Kieślowski‘s film/series Dekalog. I personally would consider it more of a “show” than a “movie,” but it tends to get brought up more in the context of movies, so I’m putting it here, possibly perpetuating the misconception. Regardless, it's a great whatever-it-is.
For those unfamiliar, Dekalog is a series of ten short films from 1989 set in an apartment complex in (then) contemporary Poland. Each episode presents its own characters and situation, but what ties the series together is each one is a riff on one of the Ten Commandments. I say "riff" because the Commandments are never named, the show is not explicitly (and mostly probably not even implicitly) religious, and the moral dilemmas presented in each episode are not simple, black-and-white, good and evil problems. They often fit the Commandment only in a loose or tangential way.
So, that's the gimmick, but fortunately, there is so much substance behind the gimmick. I like the morality of these stories because it's neither presented as absolute (the situations are often muddled and complicated and leave no easy ways out) nor as entirely relative (it's always clear to the viewer and often the characters that they could have and should have handled things more wisely). Kieslowski is a brilliant director because he works at these characters slowly and softly; each step into the problem feels earned and natural, but he's always cranking up the tension and complication until by the end we are somewhere we never thought we would be. And of course, it's not just one-note heavy more drama: he's good at throwing in levity and jokes and distractions and annoyances at interesting times so the series rarely feels contrived.
I don't want to say much about the specific plots because there are often twists and turns (though somehow Kieslowski seems to elevate/sanctify these and they never feel like O. Henry plot tricks, even though on paper that's what they look like), but if you want to watch either a very long movie or a very short TV series, I couldn't recommend this more.
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@“rearnakedwindow”#p79110 my dad kept trying to get me to watch these but I was renouncing catholicism at the time so there was just no way that was going to happen.
Tonight is a special Friday night edition of the FORT90 FILM CLUB, mostly cuz today’s date (7/29/22) is the three year anniversary of when I started showing movies at Wonderville! And given that the original focus was video game films, specifically those on the more obscure side, that’ll be the focus of tonight, which kicks off with an intro to/a double dose of filmmaker Joel Potrykus….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ItXBvGWkE
Tho Potrykus’s most recent movie is, legit low-key maybe the best video game movie (that’s not a documentary) you’ll find anywhere…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGI0lfavk3E
Third is a movie that will no doubt be HIGHLY contentious, but because it totally fits the bill for totally obscure video game movies, plus it’s by the legendary Agnès Varda that I kinda HAVE to show it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADXW_ml4Vf4
And finally is legit one of the most obscure movies, regardless of subject matter, period. Only in recent years did it get a IMDB entry; as far as wacky, no-budget 80s movies that attempt to meld the hot craze in pop culture at the time, plus nonsensical usage of T&A, this one reigns supreme (here’s a trailer from when it played at a film festival a few years ago, where it was “discovered”, but my rip if from my personal VHS copy that I’ve had for about 10+ years)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDl0oTgbXOs
Stream starts at the usual time, 8PM EST, and at the usual destination (but once again, not the usual night)…
@“chazumaru”#146 posted A Pistol for Ringo in the language learning thread, so I watched that, and then The Return of Ringo last night. First one is a fun somewhat Yojimbo-y christmas movie, the other is uh not as fun—more serious and bang bang gunfighty. The movies' two Ringos are polar opposites.
It's one thing to know that Tarantino ripped soundtracks from his favourite movies, but quite another to discover their [context](https://youtu.be/I64OYs8As00?t=1746) for yourself completely unprepared.
