Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker)

Sin-Dee is back on the L.A. streets after a month in jail, finds out some new girl has been fucking her man/pimp James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire s2) and goes on a rampage looking for either of them, enlisting her friend Alexandra for help.

The color and lighting in this movie is unusual – I guess it was shot on consumer equipment and tweaked in post. But the motion is different too, and I couldn’t figure out why until I looked through the screenshots I grabbed while watching… there’s almost no motion blur. Even when people are walking rapidly, which they usually are, every shot is crisp. So it’s an arresting-looking movie that starts out very annoying (every other word is “bitch”) then gets increasingly engaging and wonderful until it finally ends anticlimactically, with one of the lead characters (an Armenian cab driver named Ramzik) shamed in front of his family. Sure, he shouldn’t have been sneaking off from family holidays to have sex with transsexual prostitutes, but given that the movie’s other main characters are all transsexual prostitutes, that’s not the moral lesson I was expecting.

Family crisis at the Donut Time:

Baker made four previous features and a TV series, and has a new one out this year getting great reviews.