- On Thursday, I had off from work, so I went to the Angelika Film Centre to see Tuesday, a new drama directed by Daina O. Pusić and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It was decent, a drama with a magical realism feel. The story centers on the Angel of Death, or a psychopomp, in the form of a parrot who appears right when someone is about to die, and just waves its wing over their face to let them pass on peacefully. Zora (JL-D)’s 15-year old daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is dying of cancer, and is at hospice at home, and Zora is unemployed but doesn’t let Tuesday know that, and has sold everything on the second floor of their house to pay for her medical bills, with Tuesday living downstairs and using a wheelchair to get around. Zora just goes to the park and kills time and sells items to a pawn shop.
The bird shows up to Tuesday, and she knows what it is, but holds off on dying, stalling the bird with telling it a joke, listening to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” and hanging out. But when Tuesday tries to say goodbye to her mother, Zora just waves her off, not wanting to deal with the inevitable, until the bird shows up, and she does not take it well.
From then on, it becomes more of a drama with fantasy elements, and while I felt it became more of a muddled mess in the last third, I did like watching JL-D, feeling for her trying to keep it together, and the performance by Lola Petticrew, as a funny and likable kid.
- I rewatched Blue Collar on Criterion, not having seen it since I saw it at MoMA many years ago, and really liked it a lot, understanding it a lot better. It’s a 1978 film directed by Paul Schrader, and starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as three workers at a Detroit auto plant who are clashing with their union, all having money problems, and when they pull off a heist to steal from their union, they discover more corruption, mob connections, and get in over their heads.
It’s a great movie about working class guys who get torn apart by the union and capitalism pitting them against each other, and despite that the stars all fought with each other and with Schrader behind the scenes, none of that is apparent on screen, where they all seem like great friends with a warm chemistry. Like a scene where Kotto and Keitel try to do some sort of bro-handshake, mess it up, and just laugh about it in a way that felt candid and natural.
This was one of Pryor’s best screen performances, he really brought a lot of pain and heart to a character trying to bring more equal treatment of Black workers to the union and getting patronizing treatment from the union rep, played by Lane Smith (who, thanks to Son in-Law, I can only see him as the farmer dad from that), and feeling pressured to give him to their demands to ensure financial support for his family. He’s really excellent in this film, playing a complex and flawed character, and I’m glad I checked it out again.
- On Metrograph’s streaming page for members, I watched An Experience to Die For, a 1990 South Korean film by Kim Ki-young, and the film is also known as Be A Wicked Woman and Angel, Become an Evil Woman. The director wasn’t happy with the film, and re-released it years later under a different title in 1995. It was a gender-flipped take on Strangers on a Train, where in this one, two women who are strangers to each other decide to murder each other’s husbands to pull off the “perfect murder,” to get rid of men who have been unfaithful to turn and left them stuck in unhappy marriages. Youn Yuh-jung (who won an Academy Award for her performance in Minari) played Yuh-jung, whose husband refuses to divorce her even if the love is long lost from their marriage, and has organized crime ties. The other character is a young woman whose husband blames her for not bearing his children, beats her in front of his parents and demands a divorce, then it turns out he had kids with another woman, she made him get a vasectomy afterwards, and that woman framed her in public to make her look like a pickpocket. So both Yuh-jung and the woman decide to get revenge on this murder plot.
I thought it was fine for the first half, if feeling very cheap with a bad synth score and overacting, then it became a confusing mess in the second half, and I couldn’t stay interested in the plot, just watching it through the end, feeling it got more ridiculous and a slog to get through. I assumed it would be more fun in a Park Chan-wook kind of way, but it wasn’t that stylish or interesting.
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