Posted by Got the Itch on November 13, 2009 at 21:25:39:
I'll see this regardless of any review as it has to do with radio and I'm a geek like that.
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?Pirate Radio' rolls when it should rock
No movie can be all bad when juiced up with a soundtrack of more than 50 classic rock tunes.
The best thing to say about Richard Curtis' "Pirate Radio" is that it's all about the music, man. The Kinks, the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix -- these are the stars of "Pirate Radio," and the well-chosen songs are the main thing keeping the film afloat.
The movie's merry deejays, blasting illicit rock ?n' roll into stodgy mid-1960s Britain from a boat offshore, are mere roadies, bearing great songs in service of a sloppy story that has about as much to do with the spirit of rock as a Casey Kasem top-10 countdown.
Writer-director Curtis takes his inspiration from the offshore renegades he listened to as a boy, a time when official British broadcasts virtually ignored rock music and floating radio stations filled the void.
"Pirate Radio" is true to Curtis' boyhood memories -- it's a child's vision of sex and drugs and rock ?n' roll.
The sex is AM radio sex -- safe, tame, almost chaste, and talked about more than experienced, played for laughs more than lust. The only narcotic seems to be the music itself -- lulling the big cast of characters into a weird seafaring complacency that's almost as sedate and orderly as the society against which this music supposedly is rebelling.