The Boat That Rocked (2009 Richard Curtis & scr)

Absolutely hit it last time - it's way too cut, we deduce it's nerves on the part of the director (his second after Love Actually). You begin to yearn for a shot that lasts longer than one second (helpfully it does settle down a bit). Also suffers from slightly OTT tricksy split screen bits.

"I have been thinking about the fact that in the movie Philip Seymour Hoffman talks about these being the best days of our lives and I think that in some ways the film is about a time a lot of people have between 20 and 26. I think a lot of people when they leave home, move into a horrible flat with six people – they hate two of them, like two of them, one of them never washes, one of them always has sex with everyone, one has never had sex with anyone and you listen to a lot of the music of your period. I lived in that sort of house and we listened to Madness, The Specials and The Police and stuff like that. I think in a way the film is almost autobiographical more about that sense of what it’s like hanging out with your friends and playing and listening to music than it is about my youth where I was the little boy who listened to music under my pillow."

(Indie London interview)

The music, the times, the scenes at home, clearly fit into his time frame (born 1956) - odd then that the collection of album covers at the end are all from a later period - and I notice an absence of David Bowie:

It's a great soundtrack. And likeable performances. But somehow doesn't quite hit the same note as his more successful comedies perhaps because the focus of the story is on the pirate radio station more than the characters.