Tangerine

So it was all filmed on my favourite iPhone - the 5S. I had one until only recently when the failing battery finally forced me onto the 12 mini. Aside from that impressive technical feat, though, this really isn't anything special. "Sin-Dee" (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) gets out of jail after a 28 day stint for possession, only to find that the guy she took the fall for - her boyfriend "Chester" (James Ransone) has been fooling around with "Dinah" (Mickey O'Hagan). Livid, she sets off with her best friend "Alexandra" (Mya Taylor) to find this woman and to confront her beau with his treachery. Meantime, cabbie "Razmik" (Karren Karagulian) breaks up that narrative with some quite entertaining vignettes with his passengers. "Mia", a man named after a bird, a couple who have been over-indulging in pre-Christmas booze - and leave him a smelly, unwanted gift - all whilst he cruises for some transvestite action in an alleyway. The stories gradually merge together as it turns out the married Armenian driver has the hots for "Sin-Dee" and it all comes to an head in a donut shop with his wife, child, mother-in-law as well! The handheld photography is intimate, presenting us with a fly on the wall style documentary around half a dozen not especially nice or interesting people going about their lives. It is made largely on the move, there is rarely a let up as the story fluidly moves along - but that story is frankly pretty lame. "Sin-Dee" drags "Dinah" around downtown LA in her bare feet at will; nobody intervenes - even when she drags her onto a bus! The dialogue is weak and angry, the characters selfish and I found that after about half an hour I just couldn't really care less about any of them. Is it supposed to be about friendship? They all appear to be as ready to betray each other as to get up in the morning. Sean Baker does create a film here that is intense, but there is nothing to hook the audience. If this were documentary on transvestite hookers in LA, then it would show nobody in anything like a sympathetic light and adding dialogue to that doesn't change that basic sentiment. As an example of how film-making is going to change profoundly with the advent of small, hand-held, filming technologies this is a great example of a flexible and portable technique. As a story about people, it is pretty miserable.

Filming on consistently overpriced hardware that is a manifest of chokepoint capitalism (term coined by Cory Doctorow) is not enough make great cinema.