Blinded by the Light (2019) (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Springsteen's version, I mishear:
"Cut loose a little deuce, a little runnin' in the night"

Manfred Mann's version, I mishear:
"Wrapped up like douche, another runner in the night"

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Springsteen on VH1 Storytellers years ago recalled hearing the Manfred Mann version for the first time and wondering why the song was now about feminine hygiene products.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Saw this film today. My wife and I are casual Springsteen fans - we know the hits that everyone knows, but that's about it. That said, we loved this movie. Very uplifting, well acted, emotionally resonant. Compares favorably with the movies that have used Queen, Elton John, and the Beatles thematically recently.

It's a Gurinder Chadha movie, which means it's going to tell a very specific story about a South Asian family in the UK, but tell with universal themes that most audiences will be able to connect to.

I felt like not just Javed, but Javed's friends and family really grew by the end of the picture. As Javed's father takes him to university, the family's financial situation is arguably the worst it's been in the whole film. But there's a lightness to those scenes because the fault lines in the family have been bridged.

I wasn't necessarily expecting the sheer brutality of the situation that the protagonist, Javed, had to deal with growing up. I felt so bad for this kid, who is being raised in England by a Pakistani-immigrant father who doesn't want his children to acknowledge or accept the country that they're being raised in. I might have felt worse watching his father berate him than I did watching the local racists spit on him for simply not being white, and that was pretty brutal too.

It's very, very rooted in Thatcherite Britain, at a time when the working class were losing jobs in droves as the Conservative government waged war on the trade unions. Amidst all of that economic turmoil, Pakistani immigrants were a convenient scapegoat for the rage.

You can understanding Javed's father without understanding where he came from, and what he experienced once he got here. His edicts throughout the movie are undeniably wrongheaded. But they reflect his need to protect his son from a world that has shown its ugliness to him over and over and over again.

"Blinded by the Light" is a wonderful coming-of-age high-school movie set in 1980's England. It's both nostalgic and a completely new perspective on '80s teen films for me. It also did a remarkable job of illuminating Bruce Springsteen. A complete delight!

It's very much a formula picture, right down to the family storming in at the last second for the big moment on stage. But the formula works, and the formula here is harnessed to tell a story with such specificity.

But the quasi-musical numbers just don’t work. As a lifelong Springsteen fan (my next show will be my 80th), I found a few of those singalongs to be cringe-worthy. Still, it was a very good cast and it told a familiar story very well.

On some level or another, I think you were supposed to find them cringe-worthy. At those moments, Javeed is all in on Springsteen and he doesn't care what any else things about it. So even though he looks objective riddiculous from the outside, those are moments of strength and self-liberation. They're moments where he shows himself the world, unfiltered, and invites the world to reach back. And the community he has lifting him up by the end of the picture is the result.