“To paraphrase the Beatles, here comes the sun.” (Quote from the movie, “The Ballad of Wallis Island”.)

When I am looking for a movie to stream, I often look at the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes rating.  If you are not familiar with Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a website that aggregates various reviews of a movie from a wide range of critics and calculates a rating in the form of a percentage.  The best being 100%.   When considering a movie to watch, if I can find a movie in the 60% rating range, I usually give it a try.  That percentage may sound low, but that is about the average rating for the website according to my research.

On a recent flight, I was fortunate to be on a very new plane with the individual screens, bluetooth enabled with a wide range of movies to choose from.  My head phones were fully charged and I was a captive audience of one for two and a half hours. In spite of the many movies to choose from, I was challenged to find one that interested me.  I was about to give up and listen to podcasts, when the title of one of the movies caught my attention. I took a chance on a movie I had never heard of – “The Ballad of Wallis Island”.

It has been a long time since I laughed so hard I was crying.  And then minutes later had to fight back tears for the opposite reason. This is a delightful movie that elicits both ends of the emotional spectrum. The acting (British actors), which included no actor I had previously heard of, was exceptional. The humor was LOL funny. It was a dry humor.  Think Bob Newhart.  The quote I included above is an example. The movie was filmed on an island off the coast of Wales with spectacular scenery (above image.)

The lead character is a lottery winner who took his earnings and moved to a remote island where very few people live.  He uses some of his lottery winnings to try to convince two members of a defunct band duo to come to the island for one last concert for admirable reasons later revealed. I have to say that the premise is not something that would normally drive me to watch the movie, but fortunately I had no idea what the movie was going to be about so I just watched it.  Glad I did.   The movie has a number of themes including nostalgia, the power of music, artistic authenticity, loneliness and letting go.

After the fact, out of curiosity I went back to see what the Rotten Tomatoes rating was — 96%. An astounding  50% higher than the average across all movies on the website. Apparently the critics agree that this one is worth watching.  Check it out.   It is available on a number of sites.  I watched it again (Amazon Prime $5.99) when I was back home from my trip and laughed just as hard the second time.

See other post at this link.