New York City, 1985. Prior Walter announces to his boyfriend Louis Ironson that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. Unable to cope with this, Louis leaves. This abandonment leaves Prior shattered. At the same time, Roy Cohn, a powerful lawyer and a right-wing political conservative is diagnosed with AIDS but demands that his doctor say that he has liver cancer as he does not want his homosexuality known in the circles he moves in. Cohn grooms his assistant, the milquetoast Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt, to go to Washington in order to protect him from a disbarment trial. At the same time Joe’s wife Harper has become deeply unhappy and addicted to valium over the fact that Joe does not seem to want her sexually. Joe finally comes out and admits that he is fighting homosexual desires. When he calls to tell his mother that he is gay, she sells up everything she has in Salt Lake City and rushes to New York to help, but Joe has vanished – in fact has met and taken up with Louis. As he becomes increasingly more ill, Prior receives visitations from a female angel who has sex with him and then implants a holy book inside his body, telling him that he is a prophet and must sound the warning that human progress be stopped. And as Cohn falls ill in hospital, the ghost of the Communist spy Ethel Rosenberg, whom he helped convict and execute, comes to gloat at his nearing death.

The play/mini-series is largely designed to confront modern American attitudes towards homosexuality and the reactions to the AIDS scare during its first appearance. All of the characters have been designed to reflect some facet of this – from drag and flamboyant camp to the closeted man struggling within the social expectations of a marriage and of course the conservative religious reaction. The most fascinating of these is the character of lawyer Roy Cohn played by Al Pacino. What many do not realize is that Roy Cohn was a real figure, who was active in the Communist witch hunts conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s, where he was McCarthy’s chief legal council and most famously headed that the trial that tried and executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953 for supposedly passing classified information to the Soviets. The fascinating fact about Roy Cohn was that he was also gay and died of AIDS in 1986, although vehemently denied that he was gay or infected right up until his death. Moreover Cohn also quite hypocritically supported ardent right wing issues and the prosecution of many others for being gay. At the end of the mini-series, Tony Kushner finally reaches an almost Utopian vision of harmony and hope for the future. The final scene has all the remaining characters directly addressing the camera and Justin Kirk offering what is clearly a manifesto upon Kushner’s part: “This disease [AIDS] will be the end of many of us. But not nearly all of us … And we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths any more. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens when the time has come.”

Director: Mike Nichols
Writers: Tony Kushner
Cast: Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson,
Producer: Paul A. Levin, Celia D. Costas
Cinematography: Stephen Goldblatt
Music: Thomas Newman
Production Company: HBO, Films Avenue Pictures, Avenue Entertainment
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 00mn

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Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Nichols – Angels in America (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Young lovers Hero and Claudio, soon to wed, conspire to get verbal sparring partners and confirmed singles Benedick and Beatrice to wed as well.

2.14GB | 1h 50m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/077C5BD43FF3E14/Much.Ado.About.Nothing.1993.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Kenneth Branagh – Much Ado About Nothing (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Legendary Scots rock ‘n’ roll outfit The Majestics find themselves in trouble on the eve of their 25th anniversary tour when their singer, Big Jazza, is killed in a car crash. But with the appearance of his younger brother, Danny, their problems appear to be over. If only it was that easy…

Rock and roll mythologises itself as a rejuvenating rebel music, an image embodied by the Rolling Stones, who claim the music keeps them fired up and excited despite their advancing years. However, entry into the ranks of rock and roll originals has failed to bestow the same energising favours on The Majestics, Scotland’s very own (fictional) survivors of the 1960s beat boom.

Tutti Frutti (BBC, 1987) tells the story of the band’s final preparations for an ill-fated jubilee tour. Unfortunately, The Majestics’ lead singer, Big Jazza, has just died and his replacement, his younger look-alike brother Danny McGlone (Robbie Coltrane), is unenthusiastic about fronting a band that is at best a footnote to the history of the 1960s music scene. His disdain for the project is played out in a series of rancorous squabbles with The Majestics’ original members, especially guitarist Vincent Diver (Maurice Roeves), whose pregnant young girlfriend comes on the tour.

John Byrne’s six scripts are finely-tuned pieces of comedy writing that expose his male characters’ inflated egos to toe-curling effect. Their final dispiriting tour of Scotland’s less salubrious clubs and pubs is punctuated by childish backstage squabbling and a series of personal disasters, including the suicide of Diver’s girlfriend and the revelation that she wasn’t pregnant after all. There is also the fractious on-off relationship between McGlone and waitress Suzi Kettles (Emma Thompson) who inadvertently ends up joining the band for their final shows.

The series has numerous strengths, including an excellent cast, a darkly witty script and a near-perfect pastiche of The Majestics on Ready, Steady Go (ITV, 1963-66). There are also several standout comedy moments, such as Big Jazza’s police record inadvertently saving his brother from arrest when Kettles’s violent husband identifies McGlone as his attacker, only to be told that the person whose photograph he’s picked from their volumes of mug shots is dead. However, nothing can save the band from its path of slow self-destruction, which drives their manager Eddie Clockerty (Richard Wilson) to ever-higher levels of frantic despair, much to the frustration of his acerbic secretary/girlfriend.

At its simplest, Tutti Frutti is the story of a disintegrating rock and roll band’s final tour, but what makes the programme such a joy is its deeper focus on a group of failed and delusional men and the women who love and support them despite their obvious failures.

Extras included are an excellent interview with the wonderful John Byrne and a short interview with Emma Thompson

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https://nitro.download/view/A2137B7876A50E5/John_Byrne_Interview.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Tony Smith – Tutti Frutti [+ Extras] (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Howards End is a luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England. Emma Thompson won an Academy Award for her dynamic portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, a flighty yet compassionate middle-class intellectual whose friendship with the dying wife (Vanessa Redgrave) of rich capitalist Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) commences an intricately woven tale of money, love, and death that encompasses the country’s highest and lowest social echelons. With a brilliant, layered script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who also won an Oscar) and a roster of gripping performances, Howards End is a work of both great beauty and vivid darkness, and one of cinema’s best literary adaptations.

2.86GB | 2 h 22 min | 1024×440 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/56892095CF390FD/James_Ivory_-_(1992)_Howards_End.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post James Ivory – Howards End (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A rule bound head butler’s world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in pre-WWII Britain. The possibility of romance and his master’s cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.

2.58GB | 2 h 14 min | 1024×428 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/43F94DEDB920A9C/James_Ivory_-_(1993)_The_Remains_of_the_Day.mkv

Language(s):English, French, German
Subtitles:English

The post James Ivory – The Remains of the Day (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot:
Based on the Margaret Edson play, Vivian Bearing is a literal, hardnosed English professor who has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. During the story, she reflects on her reactions to the cycle the cancer takes, the treatments, and significant events in her life. The people that watch over her are Jason Posner, who only finds faith in being a doctor; Susie Monahan, a nurse with a human side that is the only one in the hospital that cares for Vivian’s condition; and Dr. Kelekian, the head doctor who just wants results no matter what they are.

1.22GB | 1h 35m | 716×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7E8AD5E01C234C1/Wit_2001.PAL.x264.ac3.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, French, Italian, German, Turkish, Swedish, Slovenian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, Arabic

The post Mike Nichols – Wit (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Carrington is the true story of the tragic relationship between the English painter Dora Carrington and writer, Lytton Strachey. Between the First World War and the early 1930’s, they experimented with a way of life beyond the conventional standards of their time, a life which broke all the taboos of society of their desire to live as freely and honestly as they could. They acknowledged openly what most of us are aware of but still reluctant to discuss: that a great many differences can exist between spiritual love and physical desire.

	
Christopher Hampton - (1995) Carrington.mkv

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Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Christopher Hampton – Carrington (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.