Blinded By The Light (Movie)

[Eileen]

2 minutes ago, MacBruce said:

I wish my English teachers at school had been like the one Javed had in the film.

I agree - apart from her (I think) opening shot. Rest was fine.

[Born To Walk]

On 8/13/2019 at 6:45 PM, Born To Walk said:

Three days to go and they have now sold four seats

Up to thirteen 

[Born To Walk]

11 hours ago, Daisey Jeep said:

a bit long winded 

and i sure as hell don't listen to Bruce Springsteen for nostelga 

from Queen to Speingsteen, why are there so many music films.bbc

Other "cheesy" tracks like Marrs' Pump Up the Volume, Mary's Prayer by Danny Wilson and Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now were also used to "provide a counterpoint" to The Boss.

 

Mary's Prayer isn't cheesy 

[MacBruce]

13 minutes ago, Born To Walk said:

Other "cheesy" tracks like Marrs' Pump Up the Volume, Mary's Prayer by Danny Wilson and Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now were also used to "provide a counterpoint" to The Boss.

 

Mary's Prayer isn't cheesy 

Agreed. Classic 80's pop song.

[East]

Just watched this. Loved it. Great story and perfect choice of songs and timing of them. Really good.

[AMIW]

4 hours ago, Born To Walk said:

Up to thirteen 

That is 

the hearts fc fan club in York

[JimCT]

Even The Economist weighs in 
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/08/15/blinded-by-the-light-captures-bruce-springsteens-universal-truths

Everybody’s got a hungry heart
“Blinded by the Light” captures Bruce Springsteen’s universal truths
How an American rock star inspired a British-Pakistani teenager

Aug 15th 2019by J.T.
MANY FANS of Bruce Springsteen, an American rock star, would struggle to identify the exact moment at which their passion began. Not Sarfraz Manzoor. In 1987, during his first week at a new school in Luton, a humdrum town just north of London, he made a friend called Amolak—who, like him, was the son of immigrants, albeit from India rather than Pakistan. Amolak gave him a handful of cassette tapes, explaining that they contained “a direct connection to everything that is meaningful and significant in life”.

Lying in bed that night, Mr Manzoor started to listen to a live version of “The River”, a song about growing up in a deadbeat town. The recording begins with Mr Springsteen narrating a story: “when I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time, over almost anything.” The 16-year-old was stunned. Pop music, as he knew it, was plastic nonsense about dancing on the ceiling and total eclipses of the heart. He had never heard anything that reflected his own life: the suffocating sense that he was going nowhere, the resentment of his traditionalist father. Hearing those emotions set to a harmonica and guitar was almost a religious experience. “Having stumbled in the dark for so long,” he wrote years later, “on that September night I was blinded by the light.”

Hence the title of a new film based on Mr Manzoor’s adolescence. “Blinded by the Light”, which is also the name of Mr Springsteen’s debut single, draws heavily on a memoir that Mr Manzoor, who became a journalist, published in 2007. A teenaged version of the author, who has been renamed Javed, is played by Viveik Kalra. Amolak, now called Roops, is portrayed by Aaron Phagura (both are relatively unknown British actors). In the director’s chair is Gurinder Chadha, who has worked on several comedies featuring British-Asian families. Her most famous, “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002), was about a Sikh girl from London who wants to become a footballer.

Like that movie, “Blinded by the Light” derives many of its laughs from the divide between conservative parents and defiant children. Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), Javed’s father, is horrified when the solitary cricket bat that hangs on his son’s bedroom wall is replaced by posters of a rock star wearing the Stars and Stripes. He is convinced that Mr Springsteen is Jewish, thanks to his surname, a recurring gag that causes Javed much embarrassment. Malik tells his son that he has already given him plenty of freedom in life, since he can choose to become a doctor or a lawyer or an estate agent. When the 16-year-old gazes longingly across the road to where his white friend Matt is hosting a rave, Malik shouts: “Pakistanis don’t go to parties!”

But the extent of the racism depicted in the film makes it much bleaker than “Bend It Like Beckham”. In his memoir, Mr Manzoor describes the skinheads who menaced him on his way home and a pig’s head that appeared at the local mosque. Those incidents appear in his screenplay, along with bigoted graffiti on the garage door, young boys urinating through the letter box and National Front thugs disrupting a family wedding. (The chants of “send them back”, written into the film long before they featured at a rally for Donald Trump, sound uncomfortably familiar.)

Mr Manzoor’s script also renders his family’s hardships as poignantly as his book does. As Malik, Mr Ghir captures his father’s choked-up shame after being laid off by the Vauxhall car factory. He continues to help friends with financial matters while demanding ever-greater efforts from his wife and children. Memorable details from the original story survive, such as the suit that Mr Manzoor’s unemployed father puts on each morning, the bundles of sewing that his working mother piles high each evening and the swimming goggles he wore when chopping onions.

Mr Springsteen’s lyrics come roaring into this disappointing life. Javed’s moment of epiphany occurs during the great storm of October 1987. The first song he hears on Roops’s cassette is not “The River”, but “Dancing in the Dark”. “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face / Man I ain’t going nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this,” Mr Springsteen howls, as thunder booms above the council houses of Luton. For every frustration in Javed’s life, there is a verse that distils it. When some white teenagers try to bully him and Roops into giving up their seats in a restaurant, the pair face them down with lines from “Badlands”:

“For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside,

That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,

I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me,

I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.”

At times Javed’s insistence on reciting lyrics to other people becomes irritating (his girlfriend, a white anti-Thatcher campaigner who did not feature in the book, tells him off for being a prat). The grins and cheers that spontaneously break out in the restaurant feel contrived, as they do whenever Javed uses the words of “the Boss” against his tormentors. And enjoyable as it is to hear “Born to Run” in surround sound, the five-minute dance sequence involving most of Luton could have been shortened a bit.

But although this telling of Mr Manzoor’s life occasionally veers towards an American high-school movie, it does so only to demonstrate the universal appeal of Mr Springsteen’s songs about longing and resilience. Even Malik understands that, eventually. After listening to one of Javed’s tapes, he explains to his son that the songs are about working hard, not giving up and respecting your parents. “This man,” he exclaims, “must be Pakistani!”

[Daisey Jeep]

48 minutes ago, JimCT said:

Even The Economist weighs in 
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/08/15/blinded-by-the-light-captures-bruce-springsteens-universal-truths

Everybody’s got a hungry heart
“Blinded by the Light” captures Bruce Springsteen’s universal truths
How an American rock star inspired a British-Pakistani teenager

Aug 15th 2019by J.T.
MANY FANS of Bruce Springsteen, an American rock star, would struggle to identify the exact moment at which their passion began. Not Sarfraz Manzoor. In 1987, during his first week at a new school in Luton, a humdrum town just north of London, he made a friend called Amolak—who, like him, was the son of immigrants, albeit from India rather than Pakistan. Amolak gave him a handful of cassette tapes, explaining that they contained “a direct connection to everything that is meaningful and significant in life”.

Lying in bed that night, Mr Manzoor started to listen to a live version of “The River”, a song about growing up in a deadbeat town. The recording begins with Mr Springsteen narrating a story: “when I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time, over almost anything.” The 16-year-old was stunned. Pop music, as he knew it, was plastic nonsense about dancing on the ceiling and total eclipses of the heart. He had never heard anything that reflected his own life: the suffocating sense that he was going nowhere, the resentment of his traditionalist father. Hearing those emotions set to a harmonica and guitar was almost a religious experience. “Having stumbled in the dark for so long,” he wrote years later, “on that September night I was blinded by the light.”

Hence the title of a new film based on Mr Manzoor’s adolescence. “Blinded by the Light”, which is also the name of Mr Springsteen’s debut single, draws heavily on a memoir that Mr Manzoor, who became a journalist, published in 2007. A teenaged version of the author, who has been renamed Javed, is played by Viveik Kalra. Amolak, now called Roops, is portrayed by Aaron Phagura (both are relatively unknown British actors). In the director’s chair is Gurinder Chadha, who has worked on several comedies featuring British-Asian families. Her most famous, “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002), was about a Sikh girl from London who wants to become a footballer.

Like that movie, “Blinded by the Light” derives many of its laughs from the divide between conservative parents and defiant children. Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), Javed’s father, is horrified when the solitary cricket bat that hangs on his son’s bedroom wall is replaced by posters of a rock star wearing the Stars and Stripes. He is convinced that Mr Springsteen is Jewish, thanks to his surname, a recurring gag that causes Javed much embarrassment. Malik tells his son that he has already given him plenty of freedom in life, since he can choose to become a doctor or a lawyer or an estate agent. When the 16-year-old gazes longingly across the road to where his white friend Matt is hosting a rave, Malik shouts: “Pakistanis don’t go to parties!”

But the extent of the racism depicted in the film makes it much bleaker than “Bend It Like Beckham”. In his memoir, Mr Manzoor describes the skinheads who menaced him on his way home and a pig’s head that appeared at the local mosque. Those incidents appear in his screenplay, along with bigoted graffiti on the garage door, young boys urinating through the letter box and National Front thugs disrupting a family wedding. (The chants of “send them back”, written into the film long before they featured at a rally for Donald Trump, sound uncomfortably familiar.)

Mr Manzoor’s script also renders his family’s hardships as poignantly as his book does. As Malik, Mr Ghir captures his father’s choked-up shame after being laid off by the Vauxhall car factory. He continues to help friends with financial matters while demanding ever-greater efforts from his wife and children. Memorable details from the original story survive, such as the suit that Mr Manzoor’s unemployed father puts on each morning, the bundles of sewing that his working mother piles high each evening and the swimming goggles he wore when chopping onions.

Mr Springsteen’s lyrics come roaring into this disappointing life. Javed’s moment of epiphany occurs during the great storm of October 1987. The first song he hears on Roops’s cassette is not “The River”, but “Dancing in the Dark”. “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face / Man I ain’t going nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this,” Mr Springsteen howls, as thunder booms above the council houses of Luton. For every frustration in Javed’s life, there is a verse that distils it. When some white teenagers try to bully him and Roops into giving up their seats in a restaurant, the pair face them down with lines from “Badlands”:

“For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside,

That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,

I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me,

I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.”

At times Javed’s insistence on reciting lyrics to other people becomes irritating (his girlfriend, a white anti-Thatcher campaigner who did not feature in the book, tells him off for being a prat). The grins and cheers that spontaneously break out in the restaurant feel contrived, as they do whenever Javed uses the words of “the Boss” against his tormentors. And enjoyable as it is to hear “Born to Run” in surround sound, the five-minute dance sequence involving most of Luton could have been shortened a bit.

But although this telling of Mr Manzoor’s life occasionally veers towards an American high-school movie, it does so only to demonstrate the universal appeal of Mr Springsteen’s songs about longing and resilience. Even Malik understands that, eventually. After listening to one of Javed’s tapes, he explains to his son that the songs are about working hard, not giving up and respecting your parents. “This man,” he exclaims, “must be Pakistani!”

oh dear

im afraid i have to side with Mr Manzoor regarding the cricket bat coming off the wall 

while Bruce is beyound doubt a far superior idol than 99% of sports stars, cricket - the actual game itself is cultural heritage that can never be replaced

i wounder why they renamed the lead character in the film ?

[Daisey Jeep]

https://i.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/114989265/blinded-by-the-light-movie-a-tribute-to-bruce-springsteens-music--and-so-much-more#comments

not nearly as good as Jim's economist 

[Pregnant Sally]

5 hours ago, Born To Walk said:

Other "cheesy" tracks like Marrs' Pump Up the Volume

Pump Up the Volume is included?  Fuckin' A.

Dance, Dance!

[Daisey Jeep]

just saw it advertised durring Aussie Mastercheif on tv1

prime time viewing after the news 

[Bosstralian]

I don't know what's going on here in Australia, only release date I'm seeing here is 24th October !!??!!??

[red headed woman]

If anyone is listening to Radio 2 today sometime between 12 and 2 pm Sarfraz is on at some point discussing the film

[Eileen]

20 minutes ago, red headed woman said:

If anyone is listening to Radio 2 today sometime between 12 and 2 pm Sarfraz is on at some point discussing the film

Plumber permitting, I'll be listening as usual.

Ah, forgot, the iplayer thingy. Excellent!

[Rizla]

14 hours ago, Born To Walk said:

Other "cheesy" tracks like Marrs' Pump Up the Volume, Mary's Prayer by Danny Wilson and Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now were also used to "provide a counterpoint" to The Boss.

Mary's Prayer isn't cheesy 

I've never heard that before.  I'm in no hurry to hear it again, either.

[Eileen]

Blimey! I missed the first half-hour cos I'd tuned it to Radio 1 instead! I wondered why I was listening to such naff 'music'!

[Eileen]

1 minute ago, Rizla said:

I've never heard that before.  I'm in no hurry to hear it again, either.

Which one? Mary's Prayer? Fabulous song.

[Lesley]

1 hour ago, red headed woman said:

If anyone is listening to Radio 2 today sometime between 12 and 2 pm Sarfraz is on at some point discussing the film

Also Gurinder Chadha on Steve Wright this afternoon. They are certainly rolling out the publicity in Uk.

[Eileen]

The River is on now - the film to be discussed after the News.

[Promise61]

BBTL is number four in this weeks Top Ten film chart.

[jukeblue]

I will definitely watch it again this week. What I'm keen to work out is if that shelf he looks at in his college dorm room was containing his diaries or were they springsteen brucelegs/cassette covers? Anyone else see that clip?

[Lesley]

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7339599/amp/BRIAN-VINER-Reviews-car-crash-dog-movie-Springsteen-biopic.html

Review from Daily Mail last week. Sorry it’s the Daily Mail. I must point out this it not my normal reading matter. I saw a paper version today at the cat rescue centre. We like the Daily Mail there as it’s the perfect size & thickness for lining the cat poo trays.

[BruceHistory]

Too bad they cut Clarence out on the dudes-shirt on/for the promotion poster!..... I don’t care how the original album cover looks; he should be in full view! He’s plays on 90% of the movies songs. WTF

 

Brad

[rosiejaneymary]

2 hours ago, jukeblue said:

I will definitely watch it again this week. What I'm keen to work out is if that shelf he looks at in his college dorm room was containing his diaries or were they springsteen brucelegs/cassette covers? Anyone else see that clip?

I thought they were his diaries.  I’m going again tonight.  I’ll see if I can tell for sure.  

[Daisey Jeep]

10 hours ago, Bosstralian said:

I don't know what's going on here in Australia, only release date I'm seeing here is 24th October !!??!!??

that can't be right

thats two days after NZ 

....wait a minute

OCTOBER 

something is definatly not right