December Language Toolbox

One of the hardest things to do when trying to improve your language skills is to increase your vocabulary. There is no easy way to do this and the best way is certainly by reading as much as you can.

Film reviews are an excellent source of rich, colloquial language and are especially good to read when you have already seen the film so you know what it’s about.

This toolbox exercise looks at how you can extract the more descriptive langugae from a film review, and put it into meaningful categories to help you record it and remember it for future use.

We’re going to look at a review of the film “Pirate Radio” (original title, “The Boat That Rocked”) adapted from http://www.film.com.

In ancient historical times, i.e., 1966, the officially licensed radio stations in England didn't play rock 'n' roll music. That would have been no great loss in, say, the mid '70s, but 1966? That was the high point of British rock music: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Cream, The Who, et cetera, et cetera.

To fill the need, there arose certain "pirate" radio stations, so called because they operated without licenses. The film Pirate Radio draws from some of the experiences of those real stations to tell a highly amusing fictionalized version of the battle between rock 'n' roll and Her Majesty's government.

Pirate Radio (released in the U.K. under the title "The Boat That Rocked") is a tad oversimplified and not very deep … but the important thing is that it's also a lot of fun. These fictional pirates operate a floating radio station called Radio Rock, and, since their workplace is on a ship, they have to live at their jobs. The station's grown-up owner, Quentin (Bill Nighy), straddles the line between businessman respectability and rock 'n' roll freedom, pragmatically urging the DJs not to swear on the air since the government hates them enough already.

Our introduction to this motley crew comes by way of 18-year-old Carl (Tom Sturridge), a misbehaving lad whose mother has sent him to live with his godfather, Quentin, for a while, in the hopes that it will straighten him out. The guys onboard take him in as one of their own and become his new family. (Carl's boozy, footloose mother, played by Emma Thompson, appears for only two scenes - long enough to establish why Carl is in need of a real family, even an unorthodox one.)

Back on land, we meet Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh), a government official who is the very picture of conservative, horn-rimmed British stuffiness. He teams up with an underling named Twatt (Jack Davenport) - yes, this movie is sophomoric enough to name a character Twatt - to find some kind of plausible justification for outlawing Radio Rock.

That part of the story stays in the background for most of the film, leaving the emphasis on the station's in-house antics. Some of these shenanigans are a little wheezy and implausible, but the film is at its best when it's simply letting the radio guys be themselves, cracking jokes and broadcasting every part of their lives over the airwaves.

Radio Rock is a sort of reality show; one of the DJs even gets married on the air. An off-kilter fellow known as The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the only American staffer and the station's most popular personality until the return of Gavin Cavanaugh (Rhys Ifans), a legend in the underground radio world. Angus (Rhys Darby) is the dork that the others make fun of. Dave (Nick Frost) is the tubby, good-natured horndog. Mark (Tom Wisdom) has a late-night show in which he plays records and barely says a word, yet somehow has all the young women of England swooning over him. Bob (Ralph Brown) is older, wild-haired, and truly obsessed with the music. Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke) is known for being thick-headed.

What writer/director Richard Curtis (Love Actually) does very well is make us feel like part of the gang, and quickly, too. Not every vignette with every character is a winner, and the eventual showdown between Radio Rock and the British government strains credulity. But most of the story is funny and cheerful enough to outweigh those shortcomings, and it's bolstered by an utterly fantastic '60s rock soundtrack that can't fail to put you in the right frame of mind for the film's raucous spirit-of-radio revelry.

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