A seventeen year old travels from London to the Austrian Alps to attend the legendary Mozart boarding school. There, he discovers a centuries-old forgotten passageway into the fantastic world of Mozart's "The Magic Flute".
21 Jul The Magic Flute (2022)
Peril at Vienna End
I found everything about this a failure.
There’s a lot swirling around. An entire opera more or less. A parallel world with a portal where some shared challenges are met, but it is unclear what those challenges are. Confidence? We end up with fragments of films with overlapping dynamics of these two worlds. At least one could have been made to work. Why not find that one?
Stories about love. At least four stories of peril. A music school from which we hear no music…
Someone threw some effects in helter skelter with no apparent coherence.
Whether in the opera or the real life story this is passionless, where the only point — hammered over again — is about passion. Can a girlfriend evoke the kind of passion they mean? Probably neither of the ones we see.
Can the absolute tumble into intense experience we expect for us in the hands of this musical giant be conveyed in a movie? Even if this weren’t sliced up the way it is, probably not.
For some reason they decided to have the school be in a Bavarian castle. A music school? I guess because it hints at some masonic magic. For some reason, they start out and revive from time to time the old father trope. Here we have three fathers.
Our hero’s father was a great singer. Or was he?
Mozart was often criticised for not doing serious music, rather ornamental entertainment. He was Pop in his day. The music that was supposed to awaken the soul, kindle love and span worlds? A young Michael Jackson.
This is a shambles.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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