#8 The Tune

January 8, 2021
The Tune (1992) ***
The Criterion Channel
Free
Wildcard

I left it to super late again, which I really must stop doing, so it wasn’t until 12.38 ayem in the middle of the damn night that I started watching this film, chosen because it is 70 minutes long and I wouldn’t have to concentrate on much of a plot. There were a couple of hour long mysteries from the ’30s on TCM, but my brain didn’t have the bandwidth to watch a mystery.

Bill Plympton was such a face of animation in the ’90s, and of course I saw all of his shorts on MTV, but never any of his full-length features. The Tune is the story of a schlub songwriter, Del, who is trying to write something so that his boss won’t fire him and that his girl (the boss’s secretary) won’t go back to her hometown.

He ends up, while on the way to a meeting with the boss where it’s hit song or get fired, in a strange town called Flooby Nooby where everyone has songs flowing out of them like water, since they are connected to their hearts. Del tries to connect, and also tried to get to the meeting, and on the way, sees many many hallucinatory images and hear a lot of great songs.

This is either the perfect movie to watch in the middle of the night, when you want to go to sleep and don’t want to watch something complex, or the worst movie to watch, because it is extremely lulling. I kept awake, though about fifteen or twenty minutes before the end, my wireless crapped out, so I had to continue watching it on my phone, which I did in bed. Not the best way to stay awake, but I did it!