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Nov. 17th, 2009 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coyotegothHuh; I see that The Boat That Rocked, which I saw at the Embassy in Wellington back in April, has finally been released here... as Pirate Radio. (Are they hoping it'll be mistaken for a Johnny Depp film?) I don't understand the title change, otherwise; The Boat That Rocked is a rather thin play on words... but who the hell knows what pirate radio is, anymore (other than my brilliant LJ friends, of course)?
Under either title, it's the new film by Richard Curtis, who did Love, Actually; it's a movie whose heart is in the right place, although I did think it was trying too hard in places. There are several times where the main characters tell embarrassing stories about each other, and then laugh nostalgically, so that we know they're friends; the editing is surprisingly fast-paced, in what feels like an attempt to capture the old Richard Lester energy (the film is set in the '60s, as about the same time Lester was making his Beatles films, and there are scenes of characters gooning for the camera in the patented Lester fashion), although without Lester's cinematic energy, it just seems pointlessly frenetic; there's a central plot revelation about one of the character's parenthood... which turns out to be not all that central, really. Oh, and Kenneth Branagh's character has an assistant named- wait for it- "Twatt." Also,
The ending is simply a pointless ripoff of Titanic; did we really need all that shipwrecking to no great effect?
Still, I have to admit, I've never seen Philip Seymour Hoffman take the center of a film so effortlessly; he's relaxed and charismatic as the leading man, and it's wonderful to see.
Under either title, it's the new film by Richard Curtis, who did Love, Actually; it's a movie whose heart is in the right place, although I did think it was trying too hard in places. There are several times where the main characters tell embarrassing stories about each other, and then laugh nostalgically, so that we know they're friends; the editing is surprisingly fast-paced, in what feels like an attempt to capture the old Richard Lester energy (the film is set in the '60s, as about the same time Lester was making his Beatles films, and there are scenes of characters gooning for the camera in the patented Lester fashion), although without Lester's cinematic energy, it just seems pointlessly frenetic; there's a central plot revelation about one of the character's parenthood... which turns out to be not all that central, really. Oh, and Kenneth Branagh's character has an assistant named- wait for it- "Twatt." Also,
The ending is simply a pointless ripoff of Titanic; did we really need all that shipwrecking to no great effect?
Still, I have to admit, I've never seen Philip Seymour Hoffman take the center of a film so effortlessly; he's relaxed and charismatic as the leading man, and it's wonderful to see.
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Date: 2009-11-17 04:35 pm (UTC)I wonder why they didn't go for "Rock the Boat" as a title: the play on words (considering the political situation vis-a-vis commercial radio broadcasting in the Sixties) would've worked a tad more subtly, imo. Maybe it just didn't play to the focus-groups, idk.
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Date: 2009-11-17 08:35 pm (UTC)