Ledger Pop Journal - Celebrity News & Sports

Movie review - Pirate Radio. Overall Great - 4 out of 5 beams. Kicks ass: 70% LOL, a sly script and exuberant sex & drugs & rock & roll make this a really fun movie. (To be fair, sex & drugs aren’t shown, just celebrated.) Redoubtable comedic auteur Richard Curtis bases his movie on real events, bringing it to life with a terrific ensemble and occasional flourishes of 60s style absurdist filmmaking.

Pirate Radio: Sly and Exuberant Fun

Oh, and great music, natch. The Who dominate but are paced by the Stones, Hendrix, Procol Harum, Otis Redding, the Kinks, and the Neville Brothers to name a few.


Writer-director Richard Curtis creates lump-in-your-throat comedies as well as anyone, here using romantic treachery and a titanic turn-of-fortune for the ship itself to brace the humor with pathos. He’s proven time and again to be a master of this sort of thing, as in Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill.

The R rating seems harsh given the lack of actual nudity and sex. That said, the movie celebrates rock-n-roll radio’s ability to lead kids into sin, so this is hardly proper entertainment for a church group.


On a serious note, the movie highlights a couple of momentous societal developments.

First, it demonstrates how 60s rock culture made sacrilege hip: The notion that religion could be taken seriously became absurd in this milieu. While mildly dangerous within Western society, this if-it-feels-good-do-it atheism has proven intellectually disarming in our current era of Islamist Jihad against Britain, America, Denmark, Israel and the rest of the Western World.

Second, offshore pirate radio proved that electronic media will always find a way to evade governmental control. The internet proves that in spades, as the tyrannical regime in Tehran has come to learn, to pick just one current example.

Full Review by D. Benjamin Wickowitz (aka Wick) at WikPik.