12/14/2023 0 Comments Jack and the cuckoo clock heartWhen the script meanders from even fairy tale reality, there are still the visuals to engage the viewer. The poetry that was written for the lyrics (and occasionally for recitation) is not consistently sensible or logical, but then poetry rarely is. While the music sometimes intrudes in the story telling with its abrupt rhythmic cacophony, the interruption is not only refreshing, but often liberates the film from floundering in schmaltzy melodrama. The schizophrenia of Jack's courtship includes encounters with Jack the Ripper, George Méliès (the renown French "cinemagician") and a circus carnival of horrors, all inspired by Victorian Europe. Jack, as we expected, inevitably strays from his sequestered life and falls in love with the equally-overly-adorable songstress, Miss Acacia from Andalucia, who is, quite literally, the love of his life. He plays lyrical music from over his shoulders. The fragile lad grows up uneventfully in Madeleine's whimsical household amid characters like Arthur, the decrepit old man whose withering spine has been fortified by a functioning xylophone. Wind up Jack, and he comes tick-tick-tocking back to life.īut the transplant comes with a price: Jack must not touch the hands of his clock, get angry, or fall in love. The mom's magical midwife, Madeleine, resuscitates the newborn's frozen heart by installing a cuckoo clock ticker. But as the story unfolds, the viewer awakens to the baffling question of who is the audience? A pregnant mother-to-be trudges through snow, frostbitten in her nighty and cape, to deliver and abandon Jack, her semi-stillborn son. At its onset, the sights and sounds of the movie seize you with grand expectations: that this movie will transport you to computer-generated nirvana.
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