Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)

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domino harvey
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Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)

#1 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 02, 2015 10:49 am

domino harvey wrote:As for other film work, Baker's followup, Tangerine, got picked up by Magnolia at this year's Sundance. It was shot using an $8 iPhone app
And here's the red band trailer

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D50
Joined: Sat Sep 04, 2010 2:00 am
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Re: Starlet (Sean Baker, 2012)

#2 Post by D50 » Sat May 02, 2015 12:04 pm

Thanks for mentioning this. I liked waiting for each reveal,
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which starts from the opening shot, pan back, she stands and you see she hasn't unpacked...
having to work to fill in the blanks, even with the title.
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I saw how they found Besedka Johnson at the Hollywood YMCA, and her best scene was when Melissa tries to rat out Jane - her look was perfect!
Just added Tangerine to my saved queue. Wait, 10 July limited US release? I'll go see it.

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D50
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Re: Starlet (Sean Baker, 2012)

#3 Post by D50 » Thu Nov 12, 2015 11:47 am


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domino harvey
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Re: Starlet & Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#4 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 25, 2015 9:00 pm

Despite the critical raves, I found Tangerine to be a disappointment, especially considering how phenomenal Starlet was. That film's greatest strength, its performances, is this film's biggest weakness. Apologies to our two leads, but they cannot act, at all. I was reminded of that moment in Made when Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau decide to improv a scene and just end up saying "fuck" to fill in the spaces (which the duo then marked-up on-screen ala NFL commentators on the DVD) everytime the actress playing Sin-Dee says "bitch." So much effort to work around the obvious and unavoidable limitations of these two hampers the film, which does have some bursts of interest, all as a result of either actual actors or more talented newbies. I definitely found myself wishing the whole film was about the Armenian taxi driver and his assorted pick-ups and dalliances, though perhaps this material wouldn't be as strong when removed from its leveling effect in the film as it stands now. I'm glad Baker has found some cachet in the wake of Tangerine's success, and I look forward to what he does next, but if you liked this and haven't seen Starlet yet, Jesus God are you in for a treat.

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feihong
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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#5 Post by feihong » Thu Nov 26, 2015 4:21 pm

I was dismayed that Tangerine remained on such a superficial level throughout. I never felt as if I was getting any perspective on the lead characters actual lives––instead what we got was a kind of a front, a pretense of what those lives might be like if you took most of the hardship and all of the boredom out of the situation. And the plot details of the film seemed like a collection of stories the lead actors had told the filmmakers, culled from months or years of experience––which in the final film ended up all condensed into the activity of a single day. The day on film felt terribly full of energy and movement, and terrifically light on meaningful dramatic action.

The movie, it seemed, wanted to have it both ways, presenting both a slice of life and the plot compression of a densely-packed comic melodrama, and the melodramatic compression sapped the realism and the depth from the slice of life. The humor was so snatch-and-grab, and painfully set up and delivered a lot of the time––so that it fell heavily onto the movie, never feeling spontaneous or observed from life. Ultimately, I don't think I understand anything more than I did about the life of transgendered prostitutes now that I've seen the movie; what was presented comes across as disingenuous. That's not to say that anyone meant to paper over the real depth of that life, but the schema of the film was poorly chosen. The narrative structure, built off collected stories of wild-and-crazy-times, didn't support the subject matter much at all, and the characters, all of whom we're supposed to identify with, have motivations which are almost always inaccessible to us. The cab driver is very nearly a blank slate, which might be more interesting if his shrill mother-in-law wasn't stepping on his limited screen time. And the depiction of the tricks the girls do was handled with the swagger of a music video, which I have a hard time believing is the way such a transaction really feels.

The arrival of the pimp/boyfriend was disastrous for what energy was sustaining the movie, because the guy is so aimless and chill, and he has the charisma of a professional actor. How was it that meeting up with this dude was so important? The film sets him up as dangerous and volatile––people don't want Sin-dee to tell him that they ratted out his location–and I suppose that at first glance it would be a good joke to make him a goofball, getting high and gabbing about alien landings the government doesn't want us to know about, after such a build-up. But his position as the object of the film's search narrative makes such a read inadequate in the extreme. What was important, really important, about finding this guy? It makes Sin-dee come across as an incredibly flat character, that her object is ultimately just to seek this guy out and get high with him behind the donut shop. And the charm of the pimp character, the very actorly-ness of him, made his character seem all the more preposterous in the way he was ultimately so inconsequential. He comes across as a charming dude, who sees life fairly clearly, at a slight remove from the events swirling around him. It might have been fine if the film had been pitched a couple degrees less shrill; if finding the pimp was presented not as a miniature odyssey, the principle object of the girls' narratives, but as a nagging little element at the back of a story which was a genuine slice of life. The girls would hang out, turn tricks, do things that were part of their day, once in a while asking someone where the pimp was, and then the encounter might be spontaneous at the end of the picture, part of a genuine swirl of incidents, pitched on a small scale. But the film is too dependent for its action upon coordinated "chance encounters" and emotional showdowns for this "slice of life" idea to work. The idea that this story might be one of a typical day is absolutely crushed by the heavy needs of the dramatic showdowns. But the dramatic showdowns themselves never help us understand what is at stake in the film. What happens if the cab driver's mother-in-law freaks out? So what if the pimp is cheating on his girlfriend? Isn't that actually sort of his job? Aren't the police a more particular concern for these people? I've never met a member of the LAPD who just grins at people fighting in the street and says, "hey, it's Christmas Eve. Let's all chill." In spite of the bouncer's assurance, wouldn't the johns in that hotel room where Sin-dee kicked down the door head for the hills immediately afterwards? I doesn't really seem smart to stick around. A lot of this stuff is meant to be jokes, but the tone of the humor stubbornly refuses to take wing. It's goony stuff that gracelessly sidesteps the real consequences the actions of the sequences would produce.

I enjoyed seeing a lot of stretches of L.A. I'm rather familiar with, and I like the iphone footage and the way the street scenes were filmed. But the narrative qualities and the drama itself felt very shrill and very poorly conceived. The use of the treacly Toyland song made not really the massive amount of sense the filmmakers seemed to want it to, either.

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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#6 Post by neal » Fri Jan 15, 2016 3:13 am

feihong wrote:Ultimately, I don't think I understand anything more than I did about the life of transgendered prostitutes now that I've seen the movie; what was presented comes across as disingenuous. That's not to say that anyone meant to paper over the real depth of that life, but the schema of the film was poorly chosen. The narrative structure, built off collected stories of wild-and-crazy-times, didn't support the subject matter much at all...
I've just watched the film, and I clearly enjoyed it more than both you and Domino, though I'm not sure I've mulled the film over enough to write a full assessment of the film. That said, I do think that using the framework you've laid out here to evaluate the film is misguided. The film was not intended to help its audience understand the lived of transgender sex workers. It's a wacky comedy about a woman who loses her shit when she finds out that her fiancee has been cheating on her woven together with the more serious stories of the other two central characters, Alexandra and Razmik, one a sex worker who seems to struggle with being lonely and unfulfilled, the other a taxi driver stepping out on his wife. The latter two seem the most humane and kind in their moments together.

My point is that if you think that Superbad wasn't successful as a film, it's not because it doesn't give you insight into the lives of white, teenaged stoners, and Ride Along isn't awful because it fails to teach you about the lives of black police officers.

You say that the narrative structure of the film doesn't support the "subject matter" at all, but I think that's because you think that the subject matter the film is trying to present is different than what it actually is.
feihong wrote:and the characters, all of whom we're supposed to identify with, have motivations which are almost always inaccessible to us.
Which actions could you not understand?
feihong wrote:if finding the pimp was presented not as a miniature odyssey, the principle object of the girls' narratives, but as a nagging little element at the back of a story which was a genuine slice of life. The girls would hang out, turn tricks, do things that were part of their day, once in a while asking someone where the pimp was, and then the encounter might be spontaneous at the end of the picture, part of a genuine swirl of incidents, pitched on a small scale.
This is asking for a completely different movie with entirely different motivations. One is primarily about an extreme caricature of a woman scorned. The other is, assuming I properly understand what you're saying, concerned with providing a true-to-life voyeuristic experience into the life of transgender prostitutes so that you can better understand how "the other" lives.
feihong wrote:...the film is too dependent for its action upon coordinated "chance encounters" and emotional showdowns for this "slice of life" idea to work
Again, I think that this "'slice of life' idea" as you envision it is something that you're imposing on the film and not what the film set out to achieve. Moreover, I'm not sure that I can think of more than one "chance encounter" in the film as a whole. Nearly every encounter in the film is actively sought out by one of the characters for a very clearly defined reason.

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MaxBercovicz
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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#7 Post by MaxBercovicz » Wed Feb 17, 2016 9:47 pm

What did everyone think about how it was shot? Was the whole film really recorded on an Iphone?

I enjoyed the movie to a degree and thought the culmination scenes at Donut Time were the best part. Good to see old Ziggy in action...

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mfunk9786
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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#8 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:25 am


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Swift
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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#9 Post by Swift » Fri Feb 19, 2016 1:53 am

I thought the final scenes at the donut shop were the weakest of the film. It played out like an episode of The Jerry Springer Show with the continual addition of more and more characters. In the latter, it always felt unrealistic when a previously apologetic character would suddenly burst forth with a further revelation and take great pride in sticking it in their loved one's face, and here the same thing happens with
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Ransome's character making up with his girlfriend, and then almost immediately boasting "That's right! I fucked your best friend too!
I felt those final 15 minutes were a misstep in an otherwise impressive movie. The trashy colours of the LA streets captured by the iPhone were a treat to watch.

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Re: Starlet / Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2012/2015)

#10 Post by jojo » Fri Feb 19, 2016 2:47 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:Yes.
Looks like the Anamorphic Adapter Lens he used was the big part in really making it work.

This part made me laugh, though:
At first, the cast wasn’t convinced shooting with the iPhone would work. "I had some hesitancy about it, more out of pride," says James Ransone, who plays Chester, the pimp at the center of Tangerine’s love triangle. "I’m like, Jesus Christ, man, I was on The Wire. I’ve ended up in iPhone movies!"

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: Sean Baker

#11 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Mon Apr 18, 2016 11:44 am

An appreciative take on Tangerine from a transgender film critic.

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knives
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Re: Sean Baker

#12 Post by knives » Mon Jan 20, 2020 11:09 am

Finally got to Tangerine. I'm a bit mixed on it seeing a lot to praise, but not disagreeing with some of Dom's points. The weakness of the film is largely a part of Baker's overall method that he's developed over the years. He's one of the great landscape artists in film right now and the landscape he's chosen for this fairy tale, the real city part of LA in contra to Starlet's northern suburbs, is really annoying and headache inducing. The iphone cinematography unfortunately perfectly replicates the haze of LA pollution and the caustic editing gets perfectly at the tension of the streets. Unfortunately all of that is annoying to me.

The other part is that the actual fairy tale wasn't ever that interesting to me. Sin-Dee's quixotic knight's tale just wasn't compelling with her performance again a reflection of a caustic land that I don't want to be a part of. Fortunately there are many strands woven throughout and the other main two strike my as genuinely great. Mya Taylor of Alexandra is a total revelation with every moment without her being a crying shame. Her story got at the complexity and wonder the story could provide. Her promotion of her show as she's stuck still playing to useless johns is a compelling show of ambition from a nice person. The complex feelings Baker is best at drawing out of his protagonists is on full display here as he naturally develops audience frustration for how she is stuck in how life, but also admiration for her qualities. I also really enjoyed our adventures with the cab driver who though a smaller part of the picture really helped to breed that sense of complexity to a city that often seems one dimensional.

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