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Hello, good people! Make an Argument is back after a blippy hiatus. As you might know, the column is a biweekly thing, but it ran just once in the month of November.

I’d mailed one in about two weeks ago, but through various circumstances it didn’t go. At the time, I’d taken it as a sign from the BOP gods that I’d be offered a chance to work out my column’s flaws. And then I proceeded to do nothing with it.

You see, the idea behind my Make an Argument of two weeks ago was in analyzing Horrible Bosses in an unexpected way. That might sound well and good, but the result wasn’t as pretty as I pictured it being. I’m actually very happy that only me and David Mumpower have ever read it.

I decided to squander that idea for a new one. And that leads me to Pirate Radio, which I’ll be taking the liberty of discussing this week. If you haven’t seen it, Pirate Radio is a delight of a film. It stars my guy Philip Seymour Hoffman as that same drunken professor-y type mentor we all had in college, only this one’s really into rock music and, well, commandeers a boat’s worth of fools off the coast of England to make a living off of saying whatever he wants to say, and spinning whatever he wants to spin, on radio.

I hadn’t been privy to it beforehand, but apparently back in the ’60s, in England, anyway, despite the proliferation and widespread success of a little thing called rock music, it was frowned upon by the government to clog up the public air with The Who, The Rolling Stones and the rest of it. (Despite rock music’s enormous popularity among everybody and their mom.) So, to combat that problem legally, disc jockeys took their squatty selves to the high seas, and beamed backed their messages to Englanders on land.

Pirate Radio is an eclectic mess of fun. Bill Nighy is Hoffman’s peculiar, partially flamboyant (but totally heterosexual) boss and ship showrunner, Nick Frost is a gnarly radio personality who’ll get naked for really anyone at anytime and Kenneth Branagh proves he makes an exquisite villain; he’s the asshole government head who’s seeking to shut down Nighy’s station with whatever he and his team can throw at it.

So, a flock of quirk - among them: love struck Simon (Chris O’Dowd - the love interest in Bridesmaids); young boy Carl, aboard to learn something and maybe lose his virginity; big mum Charlotte (Emma Thompson), bringing the feist and the sass - mixed with big politics attempting to sink it. And the soundtrack, of course, is the tunes we know and love from the ‘60s.

I didn’t love this movie, but I certainly liked it a lot. It was far funnier than anticipated and had me genuinely laughing way more than other comedies I’ve seen recently. Yet as I watched the thing, I couldn’t help but be confused at how the film seemed to introduce new plot without it realizing much significance. (Or, if it did, its practicality could have developed another way.)

As much as I like her - and it runs deep, friends - Emma Thompson is in the movie all of five minutes and could have been done away with altogether, Chris O’Dowd gets married to January Jones out of nowhere and then she packs up and goes as quickly as she arrived, we never quite understand the friction between The Count (Hoffman) and DJ Gavin Kavanagh (Rhys Ifans), outside of Gavin’s obnoxiousness and them both being big personalities, and so on. There seemed to be a lot that needn’t be there at all, thereby clunking the movie with periods of slowness. (And we in the States had 20 minutes cut from the official version.)

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