When we were in Salt Lake City this past week on a ski vacation, the guys said "We should try and see a Sundance film". Sure, I thought. How are we going to make the time for that?
Amazing the good things you can do on a sick day. Friday, I didn't get out of bed until 9:45 a.m., with a bad case of late/excessive eating, plus a dose of altitude and dehydration. The rest helped but I needed an easy day.
After a long coffee and lunch with Kyle who stuck with me, we found ourselves next to the Broadway theater, looking for the 3:00 showing for Tangerine. Two things we knew: it was shot using an iPhone and the synopsis was "A working girl tears through Tinseltown on Christmas Eve looking for the pimp that broke her heart".
The wait list has evolved from the clipboard days. Here, you have to download the app, register, confirm the email, and put yourself on the electronic list. You then get a number (e.g. 58) and line up according to number. If that sounds like Southwest Airlines, you'll know who the line sponsor for Sundance was.
Kyle downloaded the app, and got a number. But our new friend Sharon said we needed 2 numbers, one for him and one for me. She then offered to give me her number 10 as she was a volunteer. We gladly accepted. She also gave us two vouchers for free tickets. I told Kyle that if one of us didn't get in, the other would just give the ticket to another lucky person. But then, Sharon said we could have places 9 and 10 because she was already in. 15 minutes later, Kyle and I were both in the theater, sitting next to each other. A full house.
The film quality was not noticably different. There were some interesting sweeps and some "hand held camera-ness" but otherwise the iPhone was a nonissue. Talking to the producer Shih-Ching Tsou afterwards, she said the real cost savings was in staff time, and mostly in post-production. The color was saturated orange and hence the Tangerine name.
The working girl was .. ahem... a transgendered person. She was somewhere in the man-to-woman phase. And how you describe the sex work that a prostitute like that does - well, use your imagination. There are actually 2 girls, Mia (Mya Taylor, who we met afterwards also -on the left) and Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, on the right) and both transgendered.
Sin-Dee is told by Mia that Chester cheated on here when she was in County for 28 days. Sin-Dee demands to know who it is, and seeks out Dana who she drags to Donut Time, a hole in the wall shop, to confront Chester. There's a subplot involving an Armenian immigrant cabbie, Raznik, and his family seeking the American Dream. The language they spoke (Russian?) was subtitled.
The director Sean Baker said the movie simply started out as an idea that 2 characters converge at
Donut Time, which he found intriguing. How he expanded the plot and characters to that point shows some real creativity that only fiction can provide.
The film was short (89 minutes) and afterwards, the cast and crew (about 5 of them) did a Q&A. That was cool to see 2 of the people in the film in person. Everyone received an official fan ballot to rank the film on a scale of 1 to 4, 4 being the highest. Both Kyle and I ranked it:
* * * of 4
