Hacker Cinema
Tangerine
2015 · Film · 87 min
Directed by Sean Baker
It's Christmas Eve in Tinseltown and Sin-Dee is back on the block. Upon hearing that her pimp boyfriend hasn't been faithful during the 28 days she was locked up, the working girl and her best friend, Alexandra, embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the scandalous rumor. Their rip-roaring odyssey leads them through various subcultures of Los Angeles, including an Armenian family dealing with their own repercussions of infidelity.
9 positive8 neutralfrom 17 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
19 comments on Hacker News
Believe it or not, but there’s a lot more that goes into filmmaking beyond the premise.
Parasite, The Substance, Uncut Gems, mother!, Krisha, Tangerine, and The Lighthouse are some movies from the last decade that are novel in ways beyond their premises.
No generic prompts to an LLM could create those movies, even if it could spit out a vague 2 sentence premise that matches them.
Note that I’m not saying it could never happen, but LLMs as we have them in 2024 produce regurgitated slop, and require significant creative input from the prompter to make anything artistically interesting.
I've seen at least two movies which were shot with iPhones
Unsane (2018) by Steven Soderbergh - shot with iPhone 7 Plus
Tangerine (2015) by Sean Baker - shot with iPhone 5S
Both seemed to have used Filmic Pro app.
Honestly, you don't notice much - only the lack of steadicam, if they haven't used such stabilizing systems. And if you know before starting the films, you'll forget throughout the movies.
This is something I wish people who blame Disney for the perceived lack of variety in theaters would get. That funky little arthouse flick is not in competition with the latest MCU entry.
I'm not sitting there trying to decide between Avengers: Endgame and some Sundance premiere. And the denigration of people who like MCU/action movies in general that tends to come with these critiques is really not helpful. I like a good indie film and a good blockbuster. My life has room for Tangerine and Black Panther.
> There's going to be a lot of hype around a couple of drama and comedy films shot on a small budget. There is every year...
I'm talking about like $500k and under. Tangerine would be a great example of a drama film that made a splash at Sundance on a $100k budget. But, there are many films made on that kind of budget and few of them turn a profit. Tangerine's from 2015, Clerks is from 1994, Super Troopers was 2001 (also well above the budget level I'm talking about). The plucky microbudget hits are notable exceptions, not the norm.
I wasn't familiar with Jack Frost, I watched a couple of clips on Youtube and yeah, that probably is the sort of thing I mean tbh. It does look entertaining, but my point is if a movie in another genre had comparable production standards, it's much less likely it would've found an audience. The "so bad it's good" market is much more of a thing in horror than elsewhere, to the point people do it deliberately (eg. The Asylum).
This isn't meant to be a dismissal of horror or horror fans at all, lots of great film makers have arrived via low budget horror. It's great there's still a genre where self-funded films aren't entirely a money pit.
FWIW the 2017 film Tangerine was shot on an iPhone 5S and I rewatched it recently and it at least looked okay to my non professional eyes.
And that movie had a lot of night scenes too. I can only imagine how much the situation has improved.
OK but you changed, not Apple. Apple was leaving behind older people when you were young, so I don’t see why everyone is entitled to be part of a product’s target market.
Some of us do still appreciate these improvements. I greatly appreciate a better camera for example. I actually don’t know if the 15 has as an appreciable improvement but the 14’s camera is still a far cry from the quality of a professional camera in every situation but a un-zoomed shot in moderately bright daylight lighting. There is still major work to be done.
Do you need a high quality camera? No. The movie Tangerine was shot on an iPhone for example… but visually, it does not look fantastic. Some people don’t care about image quality but for the people that notice and care, they appreciate it.
There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites:
Tar
Sorry to Bother You
Uncut Gems
Get Out
Tangerine/The Florida Project
Dogtooth
Mad God
> But it's all just perception.
Agree, but "perception" is A LOT. Taking digital media and making it look like film in an artistically skillful way is hard. Shooting in film and making it look good is hard too, in a different way, requiring different skills.
Two films come to mind. Both of them beautifully shot.
Tangerine (https://youtu.be/ALSwWTb88ZU) Was shot with an iPhone 5s-- and yes, there was a lot of work involved in post-production, but it was a deliberate decision. The directory, Sean Baker, later went on to shoot Red Rocket (https://youtu.be/Wfndmy-6e28) this time in 16mm film. Both films are amazing in terms of cinematography and visuals.
Licorice Pizza (https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/licorice-pizza/). The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, exclusively works in film. This was a big-budget production with some A-list actors, he could have shot with whatever digital equipment he wanted but he chose 35mm. Whatever the case, the outcome was stunning.
At the end of the day, it comes down to choices the creators make for their workflow and which tools and techniques they've mastered. Is it "possible" for a fully digital A/V workstation to give the operator a level of control that blows away analog media? Of course. But what does that level of control actually mean? Endless mouse-clicks, sliders, drop-down menus, and application "plug-ins" and licenses? Unfortunately, yes. Not everyone is willing to do that.
I was going to say Tangerine! I was excited to know such a random factoid. I didn’t realize it’s the only film from non-famous directors, writers, and actors.
Or don't. This is common advice layman / cloud level famous director advice that is in practice utterly misplaced. There are tonnes of fun little phone film festivals. No influential independent film festivals accept phone films. There are 2 - 3 films shot on phones that have ever been give a major (independent) release / distribution. Only one of those was not from an established director, Sean Baker's 'Tangerine'. They used dozens of phones, a full crew and specialised lenses custom made for the production.
Shooting narrative with a phone is a gimmick - with very few and specific hidden camera doc exceptions. Phones don't teach you anything about the mechanics of camera work or post, from how different lenses change the feeling of a shot to pulling focus ISO, t-stop, color spaces, data rangling etc. They teach bad habits like relying on autofocus and IBIS.
They may be the best camera that isn't a camera, but in terms of starting as a beginner filmmaker - you'd be much better off learning with even very outdated DSLR.
> Eventually teenage kids will be making Star Wars at home.
Perhaps, but the same was promised when camera and editing equipment became commodities. There are a few examples like the Blair Witch Project, or Tangerine, a great movie which was filmed with two iPhones. But in general successful movies are still expensively made by professional teams.
The problem is: Even if the technical equipment is cheap, successful movies still require time and talent and lots of hard work.
"Tangerine" got pretty close. Made it to Sundance and that was in 2014/2015 with an iPhone 5S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(film)
The threat to the industry definitely appears to be the bigger hurdle, but don't discount workflow. Offloading from an iPhone is non-trivial, especially when all big-budget movies employ at least one DIT (if not an entire team) to manage this process.
What is the purpose of this document, i.e. who does it apply to? Does it mean that a movie like Tangerine[1] (filmed on an iPhone) would never come to Netflix?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(film)
The "movie business" is far from dead, there's an insane amount of production now and the breadth of those productions is far wider. The only death is the exclusivity of the industry, stories like the movie Tangerine (shot on iphones) or the recent release Zola (based on a twitter feed) are reaching audiences along with a ton of others that never would have seen them. Contrary to that, the highest grossing films of all time are mostly within this century and past decade now. There is more representation and choice in video content now than ever before, even if the movie theater industry might not ever go back to it's heyday. I personally am fine with more tailored content, tv or film, beamed into my home on demand over going to a theater
Yeah, I mean "taking a photograph" is literally something a macaque can do (and claim copyright for), so on that basis it would probably not be worth establishing a complicated rights infrastructure for photography alone. Photos are going to get taken, including great ones, without the state creating artificial incentives / punishments.
At the other end of the spectrum, look at films. A tentpole superhero film costs maybe $200m or so, but maybe those would be no great loss. The sensible minimum for a low budget indie film is maybe $1m, and there's the occasional outlier like Tangerine that's made on a shoestring budget of $100k. Pretty much nobody is going to invest those amounts unless there's a possibility of getting paid. The only possible exceptions being advertisers, state propagandists and maybe the odd eccentric that might sell their house to make a terrible indie film. Maybe that would be OK (it might at least help with the Harvey Weinstein problem) but I quite like films, and most of the ones I like cost like $10m+.
> Is it possible [...] that the next hollywood blockbuster is filmed on an iphone?
Yes.
"How one of the best films at Sundance was shot using an iPhone 5S" https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/7925023/sundance-film-festival-2015-tangerine-iphone-5s
Or if you want something a bit more Hollywood, Gondry is experimenting with it.
"Michel Gondry debuts film shot entirely on Apple's iPhone 7" http://mashable.com/2017/07/01/michel-gondry-iphone-7-film/#9bgz2lJPokqu
The film Tangerine was shot entirely on the iPhone with a budget of $100k. It earned $794k at the box office.
It's still possible to produce commercially successful low budget films with lower production values. The trick is to tell an interesting and engaging story.
See my comment above - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13336068
You can make a feature on your smartphone. Time is more of an issue, but you really, really don't need much cash. And you can make a short film in a weekend on a zero budget, comfortably.
See this article on "Layover" - made for $6k - and remember that you could shoot for much less.
http://www.thewrap.com/redefining-micro-budget-filmmaking-the-6000-layover-guest-blog/
Hell, Sundance sensation "Tangerine" was shot on an iPhone.
Turning that into a full-time profession is a different animal, though. If you really want to do that as a career, I'd advise learning a lot about the realities of the indie filmmaking life before jumping. It's not a great time for that move.
very true, as a matter of fact you do not need to spend millions to make a great movie - "Tangerine" is a good example. However, the less amount of money you want to spend the more actual work you need to by yourself and unfortunately one can't know everything about everything.