If there’s one thing movies have taught me, it’s that people who
like rock music are zany and fun and wear colorful clothing which they
remove to lovingly express their sexuality through the divine gift of
genital-genital contact.
Meanwhile, government officials who dislike rock music have boring
haircuts and dull parties where they wear outfits that express a lack
of rockingness. So, and therefore, they are evil and must be defeated
by humiliation or assimilated into the rock organism at which point
they will loosen their tight hairdos and succumb sexually to
counterculture erections.
You can pretty much spin the rest of the plot of Pirate Radio out of that terribly original premise by adding two-dimensional
characters and dialogue that sounds like it was picked up off the floor
of a freshman screenplay-writing class at a community college for
robots. Essentially, Pirate Radio is every rock movie
cliché stuffed together into a boat while taking itself way too
seriously for even the medium amount of fun that such things are meant
to offer.
Philip Seymour Hoffman inexplicably stars as The Count, a DJ on a
pirate radio station broadcasting to the United Kingdom in 1966. He and
his fellow DJs and hangers-on live on a rusty ship anchored in
international waters so as to provide quasi-legal rockage to the
music-needy people of England.
You see, their government—as epitomized in the Minister of
Flaccid Penises and No Fun, Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh, who
used to do Shakespeare, and now, from the looks of him, apparently does
crack and Metamucil)—has decided that rock music is veddy
veddy bad, because it promotes, like, I don’t know, sex or something?
That part’s not really well-explained. Let’s just say he’s opposed to
boners.
So Sir Alistair tries to find a way to shut down the pirate radio
stations that dare to R-O-C-K in the U-K. To that end, he employs his
assistant, Mr. Twatt (Jack Davenport), to invent new laws that will
unrock England. Of course, it’s hilarious that a man is named Twatt,
since “twat” is a slang word for “ladypart.” Yes. This movie actually
stoops to the sub-college-comedy trick of naming its characters after
quaint terms for genitals.
Anyway, I guess there’s sort of a plot revolving around an
18-year-old boy named Carl (Tom Sturridge) who comes aboard the pirate
radio ship when he’s kicked out of boarding school. His mother, a
slutty former slattern and practicing tramp, fearing that Carl might
not be getting enough drugs in his diet, sends him to live with his
godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), who owns and runs the pirate radio
boat.
Then there’s the incredibly original subplot wherein young Carl
tries to lose his virginity. It’s about time someone made a movie about
a boy getting laid. Other narrative threads include a rivalry between
The Count, who’s actually of American extraction, and the no. 1 British
DJ, Gavin (Rhys Ifans); Carl’s search for his father; and the general
efforts of the various crew members to rub up against anything that
might lactate. Surprisingly, though, there’s no onscreen nipples or
hard drug use. (There is some marijuana, so those who are not so
rocking in their attitudes toward the doobage should, like, chill out,
comma, man, because: rock ‘n’ roll, exclamation point.)
The film is pretty male-centric. There’s a rule on the boat that no
“chicks” (i.e., female human beings) are allowed as permanent residents
unless they’re gay or married to one of the perpetually randy and
bachelor-type DJs. So there’s one regular female, a lesbian who makes
food and cleans up after the men, and a rotating cast of mini-skirted
eye-candy-types who come out to lubricate the crewmembers’
pants-dragons, and then must head back to shore before they ruin the
party-osity with their inherent feminine inability to truly rock when
not being fornicated. (I realize that’s an intransitive verb; please
substitute the transitive term of your choice.)
The characters are painfully shallow, and none of the little
subplots go anywhere except precisely where they’re expected to go. So
I guess creating a predictable story with flat characters and a lack of
original content is the new way of expressing nonconformity and the
awesome attitude of rocking. Other than that, the only truly
objectionable thing about the film is a sequence wherein young Carl and
a pudgy DJ named Dave (Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead and
Hot Fuzz and now, to his eternal shame, Pirate Radio)
conspire to rape a young woman. It’s actually pretty disturbing that
they even plan it, and as they’re conspiring, it never seems to occur
to them that this is a very bad thing to do to a person. Luckily, the
rape doesn’t go off, and then the audience is supposed to laugh, I
think, as the naked would-be rapist runs down the halls of the ship
cupping his manly bits so as to hide them from our sensitive eyes. ROCK
AND ROLL!!!
On the upside, Pirate Radio is beautifully shot. It’s loaded
with the kind of cinematic trickery that was popular back in the ’60s:
The camera and central figure rotate around a room; wide-angle and
distorting lenses are used; and my favorite effect, the
track-in/zoom-out, gets some play. But mostly, the visuals are great
because of the careful placement of figures and the use of large
patches of bright, solid colors.
So if you were tripping on five hits of acid, and your heightened
consciousness was somehow filtering out all the dialogue, Pirate
Radio would be a pretty good movie.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2009.