Director Richard Curtis is a talented fellow. Love Actually is a Christmas perennial, Notting Hill a daydream of a movie, and, as the man who along with Rowan Atkinson invented Blackadder, he knows from period comedies.
So there is zero excuse for the execreble Pirate Radio (called the Boat That Rocked in the UK but equally awful with any title). based upon the mid-sixties alternative radio Luxemborg which transmitted on the ses just outside British jurisdinction when the UK radio stations they had a brief but splashy run brought to an end by BBC launching Radio One and blowing em out of the waters.
Not a bad idea you might thin, but like the filming of a Nick Hornsby novel it seems to be made by people with absolutely no clue how radiosor pirates work. A truly, stupendously, stupid movie with an insipid coming of age story tacked on (why didn’t Curtis rent Adventureland to figure out how its done if he’d forgotten) and a cartoon caricature of a villain, the whole thing stuffs.
As a kid growing up in the UK I listened to Radio Luxemborg all the time and this movie had nothing to do with my memories or anybody elses. They should be ashamed of themselves.