jamaican films

[soul calibrator]

last week i saw them all again

-the harder they come (1972)
-rockers (1978)
-countryman (1982)

so i was wondering, are there more ?
and how did you like them ?

btw my favourit is Countryman, but Rockers also great movie

COUNTRYMAN is my favorite too.
Have you seen STEPPING RAZOR RED-X, the Peter Tosh documentary ?
That's a hard one to find, but I found a bootleg copy. Even though it's a documentary, if feels like amovie, and Peter is doing the narration.

[soul calibrator]

havent seen it, but now i must see it !

try to see , smile orange , thats a great one

[ali]

Not a Jamaican film but also worth checkin out is Franco Rossi's"Babylon" which was released on DVD last year (I got it as a xmas gift) and is well worth a look for an insight in to the late 70's-early 80's London soundsystem scene.........

This from The Guardian -

Brixton, 1979. Fat Larry's record shop. Reggae soundsystem wannabes Ital Lion are trying to strike a deal. Days before their Christmas showdown with Jah Shaka's soundsystem, the crew are looking for the right track. Two tunes are given an airing on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. "Exclusive, straight from J to me, pre-release," says Fat Larry. Dreadhead sneers, dismissing the first track as "prewar." An offer is made for the second. Dreadhead pulls a melon from a brown paper bag. It's followed by a telephone directory-sized bag of weed. Then a couple of £10 notes. Unimpressed, Fat Larry caves in when the Ital guys begin leaving, but demands Dreadhead's pendant as part of the deal. Melon in hand, Ital Lion are satisfied that the conscious Warrior Charge is the tune that will shut Jah Shaka down.

Warrior Charge was written for the film Babylon by British reggae band Aswad. Revolving around south London's soundsystems, Babylon was the first British non-documentary to centre on reggae. Former child actor and Aswad member Brinsley Forde is the alienated Blue, a car mechanic by day and toaster by night. In the lead up to the soundclash with Jah Shaka, the tensions in Blue's world increase: racism, a two-timing girlfriend, family problems, peer pressure and police brutality.Sharing the then-recent Scum's brutal neo-realism, Babylon is a unique musical time capsule.

A few whites, like the Clash and the film's Ronnie (played by Karl Howman of Brush Strokes fame), might have ventured into the half-lit dancehalls, but scriptwriter and director Franco Rosso knew exactly what he wanted to portray. As the editor of Horace Ové's seminal 1970 documentary Reggae (why isn't this out on DVD?) and director of the BBC's Lynton Kwesi Johnson documentary, Dread Beat An' Blood, he was the only British film-maker with a track record in covering reggae. With future Quadraphenia screenwriter Martin Stellman, he'd conceived Babylon as a BBC TV play in 1975. The BBC passed and it took another four years to get funding. Rosso and Stellman were determined to capture the scene in the raw and took their cameras into south London's smoke-filled reggae hideouts. The footage of the righteous Jah Shaka is priceless. Babylon couldn't have been anything but authentic.

"It was great to have a script that was real, even though someone in the film said to me, 'You can't be dread and be an actor,'" recalls Brinsley Forde, with a laugh. "It is accurate, the reality of the soundsystem. But how does this little soundsystem go against Jah Shaka? They have to make this amazing dub! To this day you can go to a Jah Shaka show and that is what you will see. You get the soundsystem in its natural form."

[DubRifles]

check also Dancehall Queen and Third World Cop.
Also Roots Time, this movie hasn´t much of a script and no professional actors but the scenery is amazing.

[DubRifles]

There´s an horrible film called Shottas starring one of the Marley kids doing a jamaican version of Tony Montana. But the soundtrack is good.

This is a nice thread.......I remember watching a lot of those movies on 'vhs tapes' in the 80's & 90's [ah those were the dayz of stoned haze haha.] I guess 'the harder they come' is still my fav.......sometimes i still play the soundtrack, as well as rockers & countryman,good soundz.

If you watch jamaican movies,you will see the odd familiar face,can't think of the guy's name....but he is in nuff films. I think dancehall queen is also a good view.


I have been waiting for what seems like a lifetime to see....... a BOB MARLEY movie.'Scripts' have been a plenty for many years......yet we have had to wait & wait & wait,[still waiting to see a blockbuster film about the legend & icon].......a whole new generation will be drawn to this movie.........

[soul calibrator]

hey, there's quite more than i expected.. thanks people
Babylon sounds interesting.. hope i get the chance to see it sometime

obviously i like the vibes of those films, the way they talk etc.
and like Willy say, the feeling of the good old days, when the ganja was still cheap and high hehe

keep them coming

[Jahkricky]

here you can see the first 5 minutes of "rockers"
Searching Videos for "rockers" | Veoh

the other 50 minutes you can see when you install a crappy software :-(.
but its gratis.