The Last Movie I Saw

By almost any objective standard, Pirate Radio, directed by Richard Curtis, is a bad movie. It's does a crummy job of plot construction, character development is spotty at best, and visually it is unnecessarily chaotic and choppy. It is well cast, and the soundtrack is pretty good (despite a couple odd anachronistic insertions), but aside from that it's pretty much a mess. But I'd have to throw it in the guilty pleasure category for its adoption of the increasingly quaint notion that "rock and roll can save the world," and sticking to it. That really did seem possible in 1967, when the film is set, and I'm just enough of a musical romantic to want to believe that message has not become completely irrelevant as time has passed. Part of the problem the movie can't quite overcome is its tacit insistence that it was that specific moment in time alone that was ripe with possibility, kind of leaving contemporary audiences (or at least that segment that wasn't around in 1967) scratching their heads about what to do with a message that the film itself implies is embedded-- maybe that should be "embalmed"-- in the past, despite the montage of subsequent album covers that accompany the end credits. As someone who loves rock & roll and radio, on many levels this seems like a terrible missed opportunity; but then again, maybe a big part of rock radio's charm is its inherent sloppiness, which can only be expressed by wallowing in the mess-- in which case, maybe Curtis and crew deserve more credit than I'm giving them here. But I doubt it.