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List Price: $19.95 | | Label: Ifc
Salesrank: 81864
Released: August 8, 2006 |
| Our Price: $3.21 |
| Used Price: $1.93 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A story of anger & revenge so timely it could be true. It begins when ashade a muslim cab driver picks up phoebe a well-heeled professional woman. When phoebe wants to exonerate ashades imprisoned brother a series of events are set in motion resulting in the revelation of a devastating hidden truth. Studio: Genius Products Inc Release Date: 05/08/2007 Starring: Robin Wright Sandra Oh Run time: 87 minutes
Sorry, Haters Reviews:
Robin Wright Penn is pretty good as one of the most unpleasant characters in fiction - the rest not so much 
2009-11-03 - All the verbiage about muslims and Americans and the whole decadent American culture vs. Good Muslims is really secondary which is actually quite surprising. You get the feeling that the movie was banking on the Muslim/American cultural clash in order to sell itself to a post-9/11 world but the heart of the story is classic femme fatale noir and it pretty much rises and falls on that basic story.
A cab driver picks up a really mean looking woman played by Robin Wright Penn. From the outset, you can tell that's something is wrong with her. She isn't smiling. She's making the cab driver go to New Jersey. She's giving the classic line about "I'll pay you the total of whatever you made last night" which Tom Cruise used in Collateral (Two-Disc Special Edition). Meanwhile the cab driver is presented as a good guy who prays regularly and works hard for his extended family.
The political stuff comes pretty hard when Robin Wright Penn invades the cab driver's home to drink wine and complain about how she's working for an MTV Reality Show called "Sorry, Haters" which features a lot of rich people being ugly rich. She wants him to pull a terrorist attack. He wants to get his brother out of jail and immigrate. She's all full of hatred for America and he's a goodhearted muslim who might have problems but he's basically patriotic even when the cops haul his sister-in-law away and impound his cab based on an anonymous tip from Penn.
However, the political material cannot sustain the story. The meat of the story is Robin Wright Penn trying to use the muslim cab driver to carry out her agenda and manipulating him all along the way. And here's where things start to go south. Robin Wright Penn is pretty good as the perpetually frowning crabby woman who seems to hate everything but she's too good at playing this unpleasant creep. So good that you wonder how ANYONE could be roped in by her stories and lies. All noir movies with femme fatales tend to have stupid men who get messed up by evil women, but the cab driver character is so stupid that you just can't really sympathize.
At first, you can give him the benefit of the doubt. Sure, when she has him drive her all the way to New Jersey to vandalize a car and then drive off, he might be innocent. Hell, when she yells at him for claiming that he made $160 the previous night and that it's clearly a lie, he might be that desperate for a fare that he will let a horrible creep bully him. Of course, I paid a cab driver $30 to take me from Midtown to Washington Heights and that trip took him 20 minutes tops so I don't see why a cabbie can't make 160.
And then it gets even lamer. She keeps claiming that she's calling her lawyer even though it's obvious that it's after midnight and he's never going to pick up. When he stops at his house and leaves her in the cab, she comes in and starts drinking and complaining. He goes back to her office with her and listens to her complain even more. Even when she steals all of his money and gets caught lying about her entire identity he's still willing to believe her. By the end, he's gone from an innocent muslim to the stupidest man in the world. You kind of think that he's going to turn the tables on her and he almost looks like he's going to do that for a second, but then he goes back and trusts that she's really changed now.
Noir movies have their same beats but they work because we believe that we can be in this situation; but no one can be as stupid as this cab driver. And that kills the movie.
Mrs. Penn is magnificent 
2009-07-15 - This is one of the most frustrating films I'd seen in a long time. Poor Ashade (a wonderful Abdel Kechiche) is a cab driver who knows that the fare he'd picked up (Penn's Phoebe) has issues. Without giving anything away, it's Phoebe who takes HIM on a ride. This is a frustrating film, and brilliant in its final scene. The beautiful Mrs. Penn has been less than gorgeous in films like "She's So Lovely" and "Forrest Gump", but here, she's gorgeous on the outside and ever so ugly inside. Aside from the brilliantly conceived characters, it's important to know that there are some Muslims in America that are moral and good; unlike other crazies who think they have all the answers. It centers on 9/11 and shows that anyone with a crazy agenda can cause havoc. Amazing film. Definitely worth viewing; nominated for some Indie Spirit Awards, including Mrs. Penn. Thought provoking and disturbing; I'm glad I rented it.
Far fetched.
2008-12-25 - The premise is brilliant, but poor executed.
Anyways, good acting by Robin Wright(Phoebe) as the crazy white lady. Can people be that evil? I'm sure they can be- but it is very,very rare. My advice to cabbies: Its OK to talk to your customers, especially crazy young women-They probably wont be out to kill you.
I couldn't take the movie in a single sitting-which is a bad sign for any movie.
sorry 2 stars. Great acting by all actors, though!
Sorry, indeed...
2008-04-03 - Inconsistant, but it does keep you riveted to your seat. Robin Wright Penn has her moments in this film, and those moments are pretty creepy. However, this film was entirely unfocused and awkward at times, and while it attempted to be unique and original, this subject matter has been explored before in other films...and with much better results, I might add. The ending is one BIG cliche. See only for Robin Wright Penn's performance.
A Sorry Mess 
2007-10-27 - Phoebe (Robin Wright Penn), a divorced and detached staffer for a New York based, MTV style music video network, longs for the mood and feeling of 9/11--most especially for the way her self-absorbed boss Phyllis (Sandra Oh) had relied on her for emotional support back then. Trouble begins when Syrian-born cabdriver Ashade (actor/director Abdellatif Kechiche) picks up Phoebe and he tells her about his family's problems. Phoebe starts deceiving Ashade, letting him think she can help get his innocent brother released from detention in Guantanamo. After Ashade realizes Phoebe's mental instability and consequently distances himself from her, Phoebe turns ugly and plots revenge upon the Middle Easterner, and his French-Canadian sister-in-law (Eloise Bouchez), who is illegally resident in this country, as well.
SORRY, HATERS actually could have been a good psychodrama if it wasn't such an arty and self-indulgent mess. Being shot within in little over two weeks with a DV recorder, it stylistically has the feel of an amateur film posted on YouTube. Robin Wright Penn seems very uncomfortable in her role, looking in several scenes as if she's saying "What am I doing here?" to herself. Kechiche's lines are simply incomprehensible, mumbling in broken English and yelling in Arabic (while subtitles are provided for the Arabic dialogue, I suggest you activate your close captioning for whenever this guy speaks). Moreover, Kechiche, a Tunisian, is seriously miscast; Syrians, like the Lebanese, have much Greek, Roman, and Armenian blood flowing through their veins, and are generally more fair-skinned than this actor (think of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad). For some reason Americans--regardless of whichever end of the political spectrum they congregate--feel this need to stress the notion of color difference into our dealings with Muslims, despite those differences being slight and, for the most part, illusory.
What is most disturbing, however, is the attempt SORRY, HATERS makes to force upon sane and rational viewers its message that we Americans are really the nihilistic predators and terrorizers. As with many nowadays who are socially and politcally left-of-center, it wants for us to acknowledge our society's consumerist ambitions, in combination with increased emotional alienation and self-loathing, as something as hateful and destructive as any extreme Islamist ideology.
Speaking of self-loathing, this movie's writer and director, Jeff Stanzler, is overwhelmed by it. There is some major--albeit confused--contempt for the trendy and the 'progressive,' who, assumedly, inhabit Stanzler's personal and professional life. Naturally, a man as devout as Ashade (who keeps to his ablutions and prayers under even the most stressful situations) doesn't merely enter into some sort of relationship with a strange middle-aged American woman, he also handles dogs, allows alcohol in his home and, better yet, recognizes and supports his brother's kafir wife. Yes, of course, we do have the gratuitous scene of thuggish Homeland Security agents copping cheap feels (naturally) off of Ashade's homely sister-in-law after she passes out from interrogation. But it's those characters and types, otherwise often favorably portrayed in independent films such as this, which are the real targets of Stanzler's disdain: Phoebe's boss, Phyllis MacIntyre, the head of a major cable music channel, is married to a slight and diminutive house husband, complete with downy beard and a moptop of hair. Stanzler shows Phyllis to be mercenary and a narcissist, producing violent, expletive-ridden rap videos, but whose top rated program, "Sorry, Haters," a CRIBS-style reality show that glorifies the ghetto fabulous and all things crass and materialistic. Most poignant of all, however, is the type of woman that is Phoebe herself. While Phoebe is portrayed as a successful middle-aged professional, she is also emotionally stunted; a woman who compensates for her ex-husband having full custody of their daughter by doting over her little lapdog and yearning to recapture that moment when Phyllis (who Phoebe despises otherwise) was afraid that the terrorists were coming to get her next and looked to her for security and comfort. Such women once represented the feminist ideal, but Stanzler reduces them to parodies, making it seem as if they are symptomatic of the West's decadence and dysfunction that is polluting the rest of the world. He also seems to be saying that it is from women such as these that men such as Ashade or even the 9/11 hijackers must struggle against with their pious purity. Such sentiments are a disgrace and are as spit in the face of every New Yorker who suffered through that day, regardless of whatever their lifestyles or politics. Others may wonder what it would take to make a Jeff Stanzler understand the trauma and loss of that day. Unfortunately, the Jeff Stanzlers of this country do understand, and they just don't care.
Now about the little dog...Stanzler makes a really cheap shot at the very end with that little pooch. While it is quite unlikely, if I ever come across the man he's got a slap to the back of his head coming from me over the sick finale to this sorry mess of a movie, which stinks worse than a well used port-a-potty on a summer's hottest day.
