Bruce........... the Boss
- Blinded by the Light review by JD
Excellent coming of age movie. Based on a true story, it shows a young Asian lad discovering the music of Bruce Springsteen.
Linking some great Springsteen tracks with social problems of the 1980’s , in Luton, England, the acting is first rate and it is an uplifting tale of family life .
Please give this movie a look, you will be rewarded.
10 out of 11 members found this review helpful.
Problems with the boss...both of them.
- Blinded by the Light review by Strovey
In all honesty Blinded by the Light feels very much like a movie where the makers have gone the ‘stock plotline’ shelf and picked out the box labelled ‘rebellious teenager fights parents and expectations to follow their own path'.
There is nothing in the bare bones of the film you have not seen before. The clash, the seeming end of the main characters dreams, the uplifting ending where everyone changes their point of view overnight (despite being entrenched for the majority of the running time) and the conclusion the works for every main character with smiles and laughs all around.
Blinded by the Light keeps its head about the bland because it approaches this from a different viewpoint. The main characters are British-Pakistanis living in Britain where the National Front would hold marches in Southall and Luton, purely coincidence would say the spiv-like overlords of these ‘organisations’. This is the strong point of the story. It is not the first British-Asian film made but it certainly is one of a small number if we are being honest. Something I have no experience of and no real idea about so having these stories told is interesting and for me enlightening.
Having said this skin-colour and place of family origin in the end always seem to be over-ridden by human nature, the more I see different cultures explored in the movies the more I see that we are basically all alike. My Irish-born mother has more in common with Javed’s Pakistan-born mother than she didn’t. This is why more view-points more stories must and should be explored. Always.
The acting is uniformly good with lead Viveik Kalra as Javid and his best friend Roops, Aaron Phagura, having good on-screen chemistry and making the story fun, pleasant and engaging.
Stand-out is Kulvinder Ghir as Javed’s father playing the all-important patriarch Malik, Javed’s dad. A role that no doubt started off in ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ to become a full-fleshed out less comedic character. Incidentally Goodness Gracious Me is giving a beautiful full-on ‘nod’ near the end of the film. Alongside his role and diametrically opposite is Nell Williams as Javed’s middle-class ‘right-on’ green warrior Eliza, who even in my sheltered life in the 80s I recognised. She hit the nail on the head. Hayley Atwell as the sage-like figure is the plot driving force but it is to her credit that she makes this 'pat' role believable.
More confusing to this old western white man’s eyes is the homage to the great Bollywood films made for a market that do not always have regularly access to movies, so romance, violence, intrigue, singing and dancing, all fired into the same story. In story about Luton I was not sure if the sudden dancing and singing really fitted properly.
The whole story was clipping along at a fair pace, I seemed to have the hang of it, when suddenly we got some over-the-top dancing and skipping around – including some nice wiggy action from Rob Brydon, not quite sure why or what he was doing in the film but it did not detract.
To my mind it seemed as if the makers were testing the waters with a more Bollywood inspired style-story but just not enough for it to be full-on and so for me just enough to be confusing.
Blinded by the Light is light frothy take on what in reality was probably a tough, fraught time in a young man’s life and the UK as a whole. For me this was the biggest weakness, it was neither one thing or the other and did not have the courage of its convictions.
This sounds like I did not enjoy Blinded by the Light but this is far from the truth. Frothy, fun and engaging there is much more to enjoy about the film than not. Engaging, well-acted, characters in a film well-paced with slice of ‘nostalgia’ for people like me who were in their twenties in the 1980s, it is a fun romp, even if there is more of a feeling of split-personality about the story-telling.
2 out of 3 members found this review helpful.
Enjoyable skate across the surface of the 1980s.
- Blinded by the Light review by TE
A pretty good entry into the field of 'coming of age' films set in Britain in the 1980s.
The backdrop of Thatcherite economics (no jobs and no hope) and the National Front (racism and violence) is very well captured. However, the film mainly treads the path of youthful optimism and ignores the truly darker side of life. "Blinded by the Light" indeed. We are never left in any doubt about the cheery outcome.
The film makes a convincing case for the universal appeal of Bruce Springsteen's music. In keeping with the general tone, it is the anthemic songs that are foregrounded as opposed to the bleaker material, like the 'Nebraska' album.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.