Challenges around the home (new kitchen & Utility room), plus a rush on completing vocational exams means I just got around to watching some movies again, so I think I’ll put a personal view on the hyped up efforts this year to date.

First up then the recent effort by Richard Curtis, a tribute to the 60’s and specifically Pirate Radio in a story that is very loosely based Radio Caroline and his ‘love’ of pop music.

The cast is pretty strong, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, and Rhys Ifans taking up the mainstay in a male dominated close encounter aboard the good ship Radio Rock, where any amount of frenetic 60’s dance moves can be practised when the music plays, which is all the time! The plot has young public schoolboy Carl (Tom Sturridge) being sent to live with his father on the boat by mother (Emma Thompson), which prompts a good many coming of age moments throughout. Meanwhile back in Blighty, the anti-pirate official vastly overplayed by Kenneth Branagh attempts to find ways to close down ‘Radio Rock’ by any means at the government’s disposal. Cue a good many set piece attempts to create some form of comedy from a mostly ship bound group of chummy males using paper thin sexual tension as a platform, and a stiff upper lipped minister for whom you feel….well nothing at all really.

The music and performances from the lead players is the only salvation, whereas relationship between father and son remains unexplored and the serious side of music and why DJ’s considered the music mattered so much is also ignored. The movie panders to the modern video-byte style of depiction, playing music with shots of various happy groups hanging onto every word from the radio, with the obvious innuendo producing schoolgirl giggles from the listeners. Overall it disappoints because the story is too thin, in fact it is a sentimental and barely credible pastiche with dolly birds on the one hand and barely interesting ‘zany’ DJ characters on the other. Worse still, the laughs in a movie billed as a comedy are limited to single numbers, and even those are more of a smirk than a chuckle.

3.5/10 Curtis seems to have lost the plot with this one, too much reliance on the sentimental and the music, with no filler in terms of comedy. Sunk withoutΒ  a trace.