thread for Sean Baker since he allegedly doesn't belong in "ten greatest living American filmmakers" thread

lol Morbs

Our Gang of Assholes

Not far from Victor Morton's take tbh: https://letterboxd.com/vjmorton/film/the-florida-project/

If I was forced to reduce my response down to what I thought about the characters as people, the only one I had no real sympathies for on the whole was whore mom.

LOL, I already linked Vic's review upthread, I see. It seemed to be the one review that said what evidently I thought needed to be said. At the same time as being comfortingly voiced by someone who is on the record as being a reactionary.

My one totally unfair hot take of the year: the little girl doesn't have the chops to pull off the extended pre-code crying jag at her friend's door.

i agree with that but not the over-the-top judgment making the rounds, lol

Baker owes his career to the leads in Tangerine

he should be barred from future filmmaking for the last sequence in this one

Watched this a week after Happy End and thought Haneke would get the mom to go on a killing spree at the nicer hotel - I suppose that would follow Morbs' they were just a bunch of shits hot take. Me and the friend I was with thought it would be a better ending.

Heh, when I was watching Happy End I realised that Haneke is a great writer and director of young people.

my "bunch of shits" comment had nothing to do with morality, those kids were just winners of irritation pageants.

the little girl doesn't have the chops to pull off the extended pre-code crying jag at her friend's door.

She's not an actress and should be taken away from the parents who let her do this film.

Lol, the ending is great!

would you have said so pre-lobotomy, tho

I kept thinking how Haneke, in Hidden, simply packed a young Majid off. Doesn't flinch.

There isn't any point pretending the girl's life is going to be any better.

That's not at all what the film does, though

That's like saying the final reunion between the girl and her father in Pans Labyrinth seemed phony

Of course the other arg is to say we all know it's going to be awful for her so why not pretend. The film never solved the story in any satisfying way.

Xp Fred it had some good things in it. the ending didn't work.

"Of course the other arg is to say we all know it's going to be awful for her so why not pretend."

Well, bingo. Sorry for the snark earlier, then :)

Pan's Labyrinth was in a much more fantastical vein. Only saw it when it came out and I can't say I liked it.

I still haven'tavrnt recovered from what this film has done to my already tenuous liking of children.

Even ppl who are better disposed to this film than some of the ILX film snob krew (ie myself) think the ending is a major mis-step (and doesn't really make sense in the context of the proceeding narrative, where even the children are only really interested in Disneyland as a omnipresent source of income and opportunity).

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I mean, come on! 'Doesn't really make sense'? It comes out of knowhere, the camera changes to an iphone, there's a string cover of Celebrate. It's supposed to be incongruous.

an alt interp of the ending i've seen -- from Victor Morton, above -- is IT'S DISNEY/SOCIETY'S FAULT

"it's a supposed to be incongrous" is cover for how Baker didn't know how to end it.

xpost

Yeah, can't really get behind a review which ends with the author wanting to physically assault the main female character.

Fred you're being a dick, but just for argument's sake - what purpose does the incongruity of the ending serve? What does it add to the film?

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I have yet to see anyone who has issues with this one’s ending frame it in an argument defending doing things the same old way.

When people talk about the ending here do they mean the whole section from social services coming to take her away, or just the bit in Disneyland?

I love this film and I think the ending is """audacious""" and completely unsuccessful. Don't really give a fuck tho, it's 15 seconds of the film

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I have yet to see anyone who has issues with this one’s ending frame it in an argument defending doing things the same old way.

― Fred Klinkenberg (Eric H.), 7. december 2017 14:13 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, because every reactionary film critic always writes 'This should be done the same old way.'

Fred you're being a dick, but just for argument's sake - what purpose does the incongruity of the ending serve? What does it add to the film?

― Akdov Telmig (Ward Fowler), 7. december 2017 14:03 (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That it's jarring is the point. You have to make an active choice whether or not you believe in it, instead of being carried along. And that's a real tightrope to walk, because it's so easy to succumb to sub-Brechtian bullshit. But it walks the line perfectly!

it's at least 45-60 seconds btw

The movie undeniably feeds into at least a portion of the audience's desire to see something/anything change the girl's living situation. And then it denies us of that closure by first making the arrival of protective services a sad little bureaucratic clown show, and then jettisoning the denouement into a wildly speculative fantasy. I'm not saying that it's not audacious. If anything, it's the moment the movie morphs into its both middle fingers up mother-daughter team.

The Bird Flipping Project

Or, if I'm being particularly charitable, it's the movie arguing there actually is no solution.

(I'd rather enter a debate on this movie any day over Three Billboards.)

There is no children!

The alternative of fantasy to the 'same old way' wasn't new either. It was a poor choice.

Alba - it's the Disneyland bit.

I don't see it as a middle finger to the mother-daughter team at all. Social services allowed the daughter to escape..

Perhaps if protective services arrived and exited via helicopter?

Now that would be audacious!

Maybe if Donald Trump had nuked Kissimmee?

I'm going to see this later. I bet I will love it.

My ending was a man a few rows away shouting "what utter rubbish" as the credits started rolling.

good. i should've broken into "Kids!" Paul Lynde-style

Hated most of Tangerine. This was better, but you get the point in the first, what, three minutes, and after that, it just didn't have the strangeness that made American Honey so memorable to me. There were lines people laughed at that I couldn't quite hear.

I loved the ending, though. At first I thought "I've never seen anything quite like this," then quickly realized it's very much in the tradition of The 400 Blows and The Squid and the Whale.

Belatedly caught up with this today. Loved it.

i liked it quite a lot, was unexpectedly deeply affected at the final scene (but not the final minute). started out not at all enchanted by the kids and clearly something changed in two hours where i was weeping. caught myself remembering some aspects of my childhood i haven't thought about in years and years, like a particular blue plastic pitcher that my mom used to rinse my hair in the bathtub. i liked how the things-getting-worse progression was folded into the movie in a way that didn't require "we've arrived at the development that signals Act III" dramatization; the rhythm of the kids' lives is, initially, seemingly unaffected, and then in hindsight you realize that most of the other kids have sort of fallen out of the picture because mooney is out with halley running the perfume hustle, etc. would make a fascinating double feature with paper moon. dafoe was incredible.

my one big gripe was that either halley's script or vinaite's performance is failing to give her much interiority. she only talks to other adults when she's pissed off or conning them, so we mostly see stuff that plays into the "bad mom" stereotyping that the movie is otherwise trying to see around. it's not egregiously awful a lot of the time, but it was kind of weird in that the film seems to want to keep us focused on the humanity of these people in a very precarious situation not often seen on film.

good point about the mother & the pacing

also i was probably just dense but it was only in hindsight on the way home that i remembered the photo shoot with the mom striking sexy poses (and taking down the pictures of the kid) and it was obviously the photo shoot for her sex-work profile, but at the time it just felt like another bonding (but maybe also not-such-great-parenting) scene. thought that was neat.

clearly at some level the movie is suggesting that given the economic constraints on the characters' spatial lives, a conventional interior life is impossible for halley. she cannot have, as it were, a room of one's own. the closest she has is sharing the pool with ashley near the beginning and when that bond is cut her world shrinks down to just her and moonee versus everyone else. whereas bobby (whose room we don't see, but clearly his situation's not that much better off since he also lives here and has this exhausting thankless job) at least has his crappy little back office as some kind of sanctum. i dunno this is kind of an architecty take on the movie but given how much time we spend in this hotel and running along its access galleries and up and down its stairs, and then going up and down this crappy strip of nearby retail, i do think space is important here.

yeah i didn't put two and two together about any of the sex worker stuff until it all came to a head, and only after reading thoughts on here did i realize how much stuff (like the photo shoot) i missed. otm about the motel... idk though this movie just didn't stick with me

there are some sex workers, but it’s basically an open air drug market. mostly people doing heroin, crack, meth, opioids. baker executive produced a documentary about it that came out in 2022, that i haven’t seen yet, called ‘love in time of fentanyl’

cool little article about brighton beach:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/04/anora-oscars-brighton-beach

I watched the Oscars at one of Vancouver's last remaining independent movie theatres, and I hadn't realized how beloved Baker was for doing events at local theatres and video stores. His wife and co-producer is also from here. The crowd really enjoyed his speech about keeping movie theatres alive.

not that anyone needs to care, but the twitter discourse on baker and anora is truly wretched. like the worst of post-tumblr spillover twitter in the mid-2010s but featuring exponentially less literate actors (zoomers)

xp- he watches stuff at tinseltown international village cinema all the time

Yeah, the Music Box in Chicago shared this tribute that Baker had given them:

Immense congratulations to the wonderful Sean Baker, who once honored the Music Box with a profile in Sight & Sound🥰🥰🥰 pic.twitter.com/GOS2stkURi

— Music Box Theatre (@musicboxtheatre) March 3, 2025

Where does baker go from here?

His subjects and style remind me of Gus Van Sant, and I could see Baker continuing with the stories he tells, doing a larger-scale film akin to Milk, or a full-on studio picture like Good Will Hunting.

I'd never seen this before, so maybe it has been posted, but as someone that liked but didn't love the movie I found it to be a thoughtful and mildly provocative essay about "Anora" written by a sex worker:

https://angelfoodmag.com/romance-labor

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, March 3, 2025 11:00 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i didn't mind this essay, but it underestimated the amount of irony and ambiguity in the film and overestimated how much class consciousness would've improved the veracity of the main character

in case you needed to know retweets dont = endorsements, he telegraphs pretty clearly in his letterbox hes not a libsoftiktok stan

ok maybe sean baker really is following those fucked up social media accounts for research lol pic.twitter.com/mo9WyPmf7h

— 𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓷 (@shereeny) March 4, 2025

After premiering Anora at Cannes and getting a ten minute standing ovation and incredible reviews, Sean Baker then went to see the new restoration of Lino Brocka's 'Bona': https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/lifestyle/artandculture/907794/sean-baker-rave-over-restored-bona-film-in-cannes/story/ The guy is a real cinephile. He also seems like a standup guy, but on the other hand he has been open about being a former heroin addict, his former collaborators threw him off the tv project that was supposed to be his breakthrough, and his debut Four Letter Words is an awful and hateful film. I think he changed a lot after getting clean.

So this was pretty good, huh.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would

Watched it last night and I thought it would be a bit better tbh.

just got around to Anora. certainly not that category of unworthy movies to win the best picture oscar. it felt like the sexier, more audience-friendly remake of Uncut Gems.

Yeah reminded me a lot of the Safdie brothers movies but lower stakes. This one got a little repetitive sometimes, though stayed enjoyable throughout. Baker is good at endings

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/sean-baker-michelle-yeoh-sandiwara-movie-1236599991/

anyone seen LEFT HANDED GIRL? saw it last night and liked it a lot. I think it was the first role for the actress who played I-Ann and she brought a real steeliness that worked well

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/sean-baker-and-michelle-yeoh-went-to-malaysia-with-an-iphone-and-made-a-movie

BARNA: You’ve announced your next feature is a love letter to 1960s/70s Italian sex comedies. What draws you to that specific genre right now?

BAKER: I think it might be time to bring sex back to the screen in a way that’s playful and a little irreverent. Those Italian comedies had a sense of humor about sex that felt very human and very honest. They weren’t afraid to be silly or awkward about it, and that’s something I find appealing. There’s a lot of comedy in sexuality, and I think sometimes we forget that.