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

https://nitro.download/view/52DBBFB2899E69D/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_1.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/BE88CA3390441D1/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_2.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/4B26E4BF60B6A5D/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_3.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/63BE32E59FCEA17/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_4.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/662B5C7D06FE808/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_5.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/81222DB20F40F6F/Tutti_Frutti_Episode_6.mkv
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.

” Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts” – Jacques Derrida

“At first I thought that ghosts would be forgotten in this new electronic age. But as things turn out, they began to use electronic gadgets for their own purpose. Now they often fly down telephone lines, jump on radio waves, and take you by surprise when you are listening to music. There are many recorded cases of ghosts appearing in electrical shops…”
GHOSTDANCE

Any synopsis gives inevitably a very selective account of Ghost Dance. In particular, it gives no sense of the importance of the various voices -sometimes associated with the film’s characters, sometimes not – which are woven around the images and the ‘action’. These voices are the most obvious (dis)embodiment of the film’s concern with the role of ghosts in the electronic age’, and also provide sub-texts which, by by introducing myth, history, dreams, ritual, etc. both shape and fragment the text. Perhaps the single most important observation inserted this way is the suggestion that at times when society is breaking up, there is a concomitant psychic fragmentation. Myths then spring up as a way of ‘making historical sense of historical chaos’. Fragmentation invades every area of the film, from its mix of of present and post-industrial landscapes, to the division into chapters which bear no fixed relation to any narrative progression, to the treatment of character.

The latter is appropriately ‘flexible’. A feeling expressed by a female voice-over of the self being split (‘I and me became separate people’) is diagnosed by a male voice as an effect of social decay. But the idea of identity fracturing is given positive force for the two female central characters, who gain strength and magical powers as their disparate personae come to complement each other. Elsewhere figures adopt roles according to the requirements of individual scenes, embodying Derrida’s suggestion that ‘memory is the past that never had the force of the present’. Thus the man who violently refuses to repurchase Pascale’s electrical goods (explaining, in a short, sharp economics lesson that they are only worth something at the point where he originally sells them to her) later turns up as a guide delivering a lecture on the Paris Commune revolution. Similarly Robbie Coltrane, whose George is as stable as he is manic, is allowed a brief vignette as a photo-copier operator with a ghost in his machine which refuses to copy Pascale’s thesis). And this flexibility likewise allows the figure of Derrida, playing himself, to function appropriately as a source of ideas and reflections, simultaneously within and outside the function.

With a narrative structure in which such elements can be played off against each other, there is an inevitable tendency for ideas to spill out of the film, in a ‘playful’ manner, rather than be developed to any degree. And occasionally, with casually offered lines such as ‘History’s just a point of view like anything else’ there is a sense of glibness (particularly when coupled with a sometimes over-obvious use of metaphor). Also the predominant association of female characters with the eruption of repressed myths is a tricky area, leading perhaps into rather reactionary mysticism. But these doubts aside, and given the anti-pleasure strategies still so earnestly adopted by so much post-68 British independent cinema, Ghost Dance still has much to offer. In particular, the constant tempering of its overt intellectual content with a sense of atmosphere and humour, coupled with an excellent music track, makes this particular dance on capitalism’s grave a highly enjoyable one.
Steve Jenkins
Monthly Film Bulletin
February 1984

extras include: interviews with Leonie Mellinger ,(Actress, Uk), Dominique Pinon ( Actor, France) Bernard Steigler ,(Philospher, France, Oscar Guardiola- Rivera (Philosopher, Columbia), Jean-Max causse (Director, Filmoteque, France) and David Cunnigham (Composer, Uk -(as labeled in file)

1.08GB | 1 h 34 min | 704×544 | svi

https://nitroflare.com/view/4469244C5B8DA9F/Ghost_Dance.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/6736273AAF158F5/Ghost_Dance.part2.rar

Language(s):English/French
Subtitles:English srt

The post Ken McMullen – Ghost Dance [+Extras] (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Subway Riders is an epic NoWave/NY noir-melodrama,
in which a nocturnal saxophonist morphs into a bewitching
serial killer. With transcendant performances by John Lurie,
Cookie Mueller, Glenn O’ Brien, Robbie Coltrane, Bill Rice,
Charli Kaleina, Emilio Cubera and Susan Tyrrell, it captures
the colorful junkie landscape of downtown Manhattan in the
late 70’s with fearless bravado.

– Amos Poe-

https://nitro.download/view/527A1179141A589/Subway_Riders.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Amos Poe – Subway Riders (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.