Educational Media Reviews Online

This self-indulgent video depicts popular tenor Andrea Bocelli singing eleven songs in Italian, their selection or composition “based on and inspired by his own memories and fantasies.” Its backdrop is the landscape of Tuscany, but it also contains scenes of Bocelli noodling on a guitar or flute, at the keyboard, and at home with his kids, a Larry Weinstein signature (though as in his other films, Weinstein also creates scenes doctored to look like home movies – Bocelli “fantasies,” perhaps). One song is presented at a recording session, with parts of it done as a duet with a young woman introduced as Helena. Though the mainly insipid narration (Bocelli finds the countryside peaceful and loves the sea) is subtitled in English, the texts of the songs, whose melodies and tempos all have the same mild character, are not. Bocelli wanders around outside, sings, comes in to sit in a chair and interact with his sons, and goes outside again to sing, once in a gentle snowstorm. Images of horses, boys, fathers, a caressing couple in bed intersperse with shots of Bocelli standing around singing. This is not gripping or musically deep enough for adult library programming, and it lacks discernable educational value, even for collections devoted to biographies of singers.