Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I was torn about what rating to give this as it's not without it's merits. The film works as a time capsule of late 70's Britain with real life footage of National Front protests and anti-fascist counter protesters clashing with police. The concert footage of the Clash in action is undoubtedly the highlight. As a narrative led film it's kind of all over the place. Ganges unsympathetic main character fails to hold the viewers interest. He basically wanders the film in an alchoholic haze, can in hand. His character is utterly useless in his capacity as a roadie for the band and leads to some continuity confusion when two other roadie characters are talking about him as though he's gone yet the next scene has him still there. The sub story about a group of black youths falling foul of the law which seems to have no connection to the main Clash story is puzzling as well. It appears to be a critique of police harassment of black urban youth yet the featured characters are actually portrayed as engaging in criminal activity so it kind of misses the point.

Put simply, this is awesome Clash footage of their late first album/early second album shows. I'd suggest getting a DVD version though, because having to fast forward through all the "plot" is really annoying after a while. I basically only watch it for the Clash footage, because Ray Gange's character is a real tool and practically unwatchable after once through.I must admit I love the scene when Joe is washing his Brigade Rosse shirt and he holds it up and widens his eyes when he's talking about it, like it's scary or something. It's also funny watching this gritty punk rocker scratch dirt off the shirt with his fingernail or Topper kicking the hell out of Ray in a yellow jumpsuit for no reason whatsoever.Joe comes off real well, Topper and Paul come off as party guys and Mick comes off as a real jerk. I don't know why, but this may be his jerk rock star coke phase, hence the goofy puffy shirt and vest ensembles. I heard he was a real nice guy though.

...despite copying the musicians in the studio trope, the porn-shop as symbol of capitalism and the black/white subplot. However "Rude Boy" perhaps deserves a little more attention than it seems to have received.As a 'proper movie' it's kind of a washout. Aiming for an improvised cinema-verite feel, it's hamstrung by a fatal lack of tension, having apparently been assembled by people with little grasp of editing, narrative or any kind of cinematic style. Despite this, the concert footage of The Clash is indispensable to anyone with an interest in the era, and shows why they were one of the all-time great rock and roll bands. We have very few 70's punk bands recorded properly on film as opposed to video and the difference in quality is striking. Also, Joe Strummer's death is still quite recent as I write and seeing him here in his prime is poignant in the extreme.In general there are very few film documents of punk. We have Jarman's "Jubilee" which was more of a neo-Elizabethan fantasia, "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" with its McClarenite rewriting of history and come-lately nonsense like "Breaking Glass". "Rude Boy" at least doesn't fall into any narrative clichés (if only by barely having a plot) and by its very lack of creative flair may succeed best in giving a picture of the time. For example, unlike the myth-making of the likes of "Sid and Nancy", this shows punk gigs as they actually were - largely populated by lads with feather-cuts and tank tops. By concentrating on hanger-on Gange instead of the band itself, the filmmakers turn the story into one of the relationship between the band and its fan-base - pointed up by having Strummer sing "All The Young Punks" right through in the studio without the backing track to distract us from the lyric. The commentator who said this did not give a true picture of the politics of the time is surely wrong. I was there and it seems pretty accurate to me. We see the resurgent National Front, the Anti-Nazi League, the bullishness and racism of the police at the time (which would shortly lead to the Brixton riots) and the rise of Thatcherism out of the bankrupt Butskellite consensus. Ray Gange's character in the film seems intended to represent the British white working class at the time - confused, politically disengaged and borderline racist, the attitudes which led to the Thatcher victory we see at the end of the film. The left, variously represented by the SWP (bureaucratic) and Strummer (by turns tokenistic and diffident) fails to capture Gange's imagination and it is the right who seize on the desire for change and turn it to their own advantage.Rude Boy is a strange curate's egg, then. There may have been a really good film struggling to get out of this morass, but we'll never know. The special edition DVD has a "Just Play the Clash" function which lets you view only the concert footage and I suspect this will get a lot of use.Rating? 3/10 for the story, 10/10 for the music.

...and smash the video box.If The Clash really was indeed "The Only Band that Matters", they deserved a better film than this. If you ever saw 'em back in the day, you know just how exciting it was. This movie doesn't do the experience justice, but then again, it really wasn't trying to, While this movie gets some props for attempting to merge drama with a documentary, it really leads to nowhere. When Mick Jones tells Rude Boy to "Get the F**k off the Stage", I should have done myself a favor and hit the stop button on my remote. Somehow, I slogged on 'til the end, but other than the live performances, there ain't no payoff. "Stay Free" of this one.