To Moving Image! …on Tuesday evening. Being shown on the multiplex screen in the poxy village hall was Tuner.
I’d seen the trailer a few times as part of our cheapo, cheapo, Sunny Colch grubby fiver deal. It was on our list of films to watch in the half town, half city but somehow time and tide meant it passed us by.
No worries, that’s what the local village cinema is for. A two minute trot across the road, and then I pinged a fiver over on my phone, and sat down in a not quite a multiplex chair to enjoy the film.
The not quite a multiplex chair needed a bit of manoeuvring first. I was sitting behind an extremely tall person. Thankfully a village hall chair has the option that allows you to simply stand up and plonk it elsewhere. And so I did. You try doing that in the Sunny Colch Odeon.
The next obstacle to overcome was a ringtone coming from the fella at the front who introduced the film. Don’t forget to turn your phone off mate.
Tuner was a bit of a weird film in terms of style and direction. I didn’t know that Dustin Hoffman was playing one of the lead roles. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t make it to the second half of the film but it was a nice touch.
The basic premise is a piano tuner - as the name suggests - who suffers with some extreme hearing issues. He does have pitch perfect tone and is able to go about his job.
He’s also gifted in that this almost sensory form of hearing allows him to manually open safes by listening, by default, to the clicking mechanism.
Nice work if you can get it, etc.
All this suggests that the film takes a turn midway through, which it does. It goes from being a rather charming and quite quaint New York romantic flick to becoming all of a sudden Pulp Fiction.
The soundtrack was superb. Not so much the use of classical music, which was all part of the plot, but some of the more contemporary songs, such as Nina Simone’s Sinner Man which was played out to great effect.
There was kind of a happy ending but it was also one of those films that left you wondering what exactly the conclusion was.
I managed almost an unobstructed viewing and no ring tones played out throughout the film. None that I could hear of anyway.
