Rude Boy makes a Mess

Although interesting and entertaining it somewhat jarred in the conflict between documentary and scripted storyline, with contemporary news and street documentary, and fake documentary, footage thrown in.

The treatment of young black kids was unsympathetic - one wonders if Ray's racism was actually a reflection of the director/screenwriters opinions.. On the other hand the National Front was not sympathtically treated - although not critical either.

An Unstirred Mixture

The archive footage used to illustrate was fascinating but the film didn't really give a clear exposition of what its subject was about - unless it is true that he was just a confused intellectual thinker. Much of his talking head seemed to be spouting high sounding high falutng ideas that were not very clear.

Cultural Studies seems to me now to have been a middle class construct (I somewhat dipped into that stuff as a young man) that didn't really produce any understanding of the sub-culures that merge together to create our society's overall cultural identity.

For me it is more like lixing different colours of pain in a pot - when you add a new colour at first it maintains its identity as swirls and lines in the body of paint but as it gets strirred or shaken it merges in to adjust the overall tone. Hall, and cultural studies ingeneral, seemed to be more about trying to keep the mixture separated.

Yawn

Frankly today this appears somewhat absurd. The role of the pscho-investigator who gets into the mind of his subject is now an overworked trope, and the "dramatic" action in the FBI offices and helicopters as they try and close in on the serial killer before a deadline comes across as laughable - rminiscent of the old channel 4 tv series Treasure Hunt with Anneka Rice rushing around in a helicopter trying to solve clues for a team of investigators in the studio managed by avuncular Kenteth Kendall - at least that was entertaining at the time. Manhunter is not.

Of interest only because it was the first Hannibal Lecktor film before Silence of the Lambs (which was a bit better) and watched because I stumbled across a reference to it in a completely different context which made it sound interesting. It really isn't.