Tangerine

It radiates a candour, immediacy and tongue-scalding sex appeal that a bigger budget would have only smothered.

Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.

Baker once again manages to match underrepresented faces in American cinema with material that lets their personalities shine.

The two working girls at the center of Tangerine are played by engaging newcomers: Kitana Kiki Rodriguez as the freshly out-of-jail Sin-Dee Rella, and Mya Taylor as her best friend Alexandra.

The film is clearly not for everyone; sometimes it wasn’t for me. But it’s steadfastly nonjudgmental and wonderfully tender toward two searchers for new versions of old-fashioned love.

The film bustles along through a series of reveals – a storytelling technique that can lose an audience’s sympathy or suspension of disbelief pretty fast, but which works flawlessly here because the filmmakers and the performers know exactly who their characters are and what kind of world they live in.

Like the rest of the film, it's has its laughs and it has its emotion, just not enough of either.

Two transgender prostitutes tear up Santa Monica Boulevard in the brilliant new film 'Tangerine.' In a week that also sees the releases of Michael Fassbender in 'Steve Jobs' and Dame Maggie Smith in 'Lady in a Van,' Tangerine' is far and above the best film of the three. It is one of the most funny and original films of the year. and stars two transgender actresses in the lead roles, roles that will make them both stars. Mya Taylor is Alexandra, and Kitana Kiki Rodriquez is Sin-Dee (yes, Sin-Dee), it's Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, and Sin-Dee has just got out of jail after spending 28 days for holding drugs for her pimp boyfriend Chester (James Ransom). She finds out, from Alexandra, that Chester has been having sex with Dinah (Mickey O'Hagan), so Sin-Dee goes on a mission to find Dinah and then to confront Chester. And Alexandra is having her own drama - she's performing at a local bar that night and has passed out fliers to everyone she knows. Meanwhile, she's got one of her regular customers, Razmik (Karren Karaguilian), looking for her. Razmik has problems of his own, he's attracted to transgender prostitutes, but he's married with a young daughter at home. He's also got his nosy mother-in-law visiting for the holidays. Sin-Dee finds Dinah in a motel room with several other prostitutes and their naked male customers, so she literally kidnaps her and then heads to confront Chester. Alexandra, meanwhile, scuffles with a customer who doesn't feel like he should pay her because he didn't come. But she does have sex with Razmik in a brilliant uncut sex scene in a car wash. All these characters converge together at the local Donut Shop as they confront each other about infidelity in a very dramatic and hilarious ending. Tangerine is a Christmas tale not of the typical Christmas kind. Shot on three iphone 5s' on a $105,000 budget, Tangerine is not the sort of movie you would expect to be dazzling, funny, dramatic, adventurous and original, but it is. Thanks to the many elements that bring this 88-minute film to fruition which make it so; the guerrilla style filmmaking is excellently created by Director, Editor, Co-Cinematographer and Co-Writer Sean Baker (co-written along with Chris Bergoch). And the actors are fantastic. Baker initially met Taylor at the Los Angeles Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and **** Community Center, and she introduced him to all her friends, including Rodriquez, which is how 'Tangerine' came to be, and these two actresses more than carry the movie, they are the movie, you can't take your eyes off them. The rest of the cast is also brilliant; especially Karaguilian (who is a professional actor) brings sympathy to his role as a man trying to do the right thing but who also harbours a secret, and O'Hagan as the 'other' woman who is literally dragged around Los Angeles by Sin-Dee in the search for Chester. The Los Angeles neighborhood where this film is shot feels like another character in the film; the hued and hazzy skies, cheap motels, strange people and very cheap fast food restaurants litter the area. And the music (and script) is cutting edge; pulsating, loud, sharp, a perfect match for a film with characters who are the same, who spew lines such as 'He just went from half **** to full **** to 'You forget I've got a **** too,' and 'you don't have to Chris Brown the **** with copious amounts of the word **** and '****.' 'Tangerine is a smorgasbord of wit and sarcasm. It's also brilliant and must be seen to be believed.

Really not my cup of tea. I do like indie movies because they experiment, try new things, rather than play it safe like the big studio movies. But this seemed more like an exploitation of street people trying to scratch out a living. Plenty of F-bombs and **** but does that make it new and provocative? or is it following an indie formula, much like the studios follow their formula?

A fair achievement on what is a limited budget and for it being filmed on iphones, but this movie is a bore.

Amateurish: acting, editing, photography. There is no lighting design. The 1st 45 minutes are PUNISHING: stilted dialogue (esp. in street scenes), blown out shots (shooting into sun or bright windows), unintentional jump cuts, omg ... like a highschool film student's first try. Eventually ... w-a-y into the film, bit start to fall together and you feel a bit for the hapless hookers. THEN the lead attacks other street-person, drags her about for a few hours, slapping her and punching her face into bars and walls when she tries to get away (this, I guess is "funny" street justice? Both leads and their john trash another persons life in ending climax ... and all think it's amusing. I lost my smidgeon of empathy about then. Yes, its a side of life we arthouse folk don't often see: blowjobs in carwashes, trans folk dissing each other at every turn (everyone they pass is a "hateful **** BUT I don NOT get the stellar, 'heartfelt' reviews. I'm pro LGBT. But this movie is just hokey craftwise and MEAN character wise and uneven storywise. It's LESS than mediocre, with a few bright moments.

BAD EXECUTION of good intentions. I nearly walked out after 15 minutes (it was like sitting in Film Prod.1 again, with every mistake demo'ed (let's cross the 180, forget to white balance, use jarring random 20 seconds cuts of disparate music cause we can't afford to pay for a consistent track.) Really AWFUL. The trannie-actors are winning enough once they warm up ... but character's are one note 90% of the time. I too don't get why it's a critical darling ... it's more sleazy than gritty, ugly-amateurish than avant garde and the characters are more petty-cruel to each other than deep-loyal (though there are a few moments.) It's a B-movie: overacted, badly crafted slice-of-life melodrama. Save you time and aesthetics!