Languid with Violence

Watched over two successive nights so it didn't seem too long. It is very slow and intense paced with occassional bursts of action. Very much the style Leone pioneered or brought to the fore with the spaghetti westerns. 

Elizabeth McGovern is far too baby faced to play the older 1960s Deborah when she would be over 60. De Niro and Woods and the rest of the gang and hangers-on manage the transistion from teenage/young men to the 60s ok. (we know they were all born in 1905 ish from gravestones). This rather mars the closing sections. They are all played by different child actors as young boys in the 1920s.

The cutting between timelines is sometimes confusing. I didn't get the final twist until near the end, although it is telegraphed early on.

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.