bob_meg Jeff Stanzler's second feature-length film is a lacerating gem of such unhinged chaotic force that it's hard to believe it got made in the first place. It's one of those movies that, especially if you know nothing going into it, consistently shocks and amazes you. It has a plot that makes a sick sort of cosmic sense but that couldn't possibly come from the mind of anyone but an independent film geek --- it's anti-derivative, if anything, and all the better for it.Robin Wright Penn gives what is probably the spookiest, most immediate portrait of a woman unhinged since Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. No...strike that. At least Alex seemed to have moments of genuine emotional regret. Penn's character is a hate-o-tronic machine, seething with disgust for the MTV-like cable station she slaves away at during the day, biding her time until she can trash luxury status symbols on off-hours, many of which belong to her former best friend, (Sandra Oh in another of her effortlessly breezy portrayals) whom she blames for wrecking her life.But Penn's character isn't just some random sociopath, she's a woman with a plan, and at the center of that plan is an innocent Muslim cab driver. After shanghai'ing him for a late evening-early morning cab ride out to Jersey from NYC, she lures him in with promises of legal help for his unjustly detained brother. It is gradually revealed that her motives are far more sinister and twisted, however, than just procuring an admirer for her over-active imagination.What's really incendiary about this film is the writing and Penn's performance. The script lets us know in a million little twists and slips-of-the-tongue just how bonko Penn's character is. She's like a human grenade on screen...her psychosis is ingrained so deep we never know just when the pin will fall out. It's a riveting performance.Much has been made of the finale, which, while shocking, is just about perfect in its style and execution. It's a great finish for a film that eloquently turns the tables on the myth that all hate, in America, comes from the outside. "Why? Why?" the cabbie beseeches Penn, after she has done much more damage than good for his brother's case. This is a question we often seem to be asking the terrorists...and the answer is no more comforting here than in real life. Sometimes hate isn't a grandiose statement...many times it's just cheap and ugly.

robert-temple-1 It is ironical that Sean Penn portrayed a violent psychopath so brilliantly in THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON only the year before (2004, see my review), and that his ex-wife Robert Wright Penn has here portrayed a female equivalent character equally brilliantly. Surely they should have stayed married if they can both psychose so well. Why not do it together rather than in separate films? Oh well, more people would probably get blown up that way. This film has an unfortunate title which is bound to have put everyone off and diminished the audience. After all, how is the public supposed to know that 'Sorry, Haters' is the title of a TV series about rich celebrities made by the company Robin Penn's character works for? OK, so it relates ultimately to this film as well, but that is really carrying subtlety too far, and was certainly counterproductive. This film was written and directed by Jeff Stanzler. Unlike many script writers, he can direct his own work very well indeed. And as for the script and the plot, they are so fantastically ingenious that this ranks as one of the most unexpected thrillers I have ever seen. It is a truly innovative film noir. It is very rare for any one to be clever enough to get such new angles and come up with a story this original in such a well-ploughed genre. There is nothing listed for Stanzler professionally in the five years since he did this. Is he getting his strength back after this harrowing and utterly brilliant shocker? The film twists our preconceptions about current events concerning terrorist atrocities into unrecognisable and novel shapes. The setup of a stooge in this film is just as ingenious as the one portrayed in ARLINGTON ROAD. Robin Penn begins the film as a highly strung and neurotic independent TV producer who takes a taxi. The driver is a devout Muslim who wears a little white hat but speaks fluent English and French. He is a refugee from Syria, and as he takes Penn on an extremely long drive costing about $200, he and she become acquainted. He stops off to see his sister-in-law (played by French actress Elodie Bouchez, see my review of her in PACT OF SILENCE, i.e. LE PACTE DU SILENCE, 2003) and baby niece. He is trying to get his brother released from confinement as a terrorist suspect and Penn offers to get a lawyer to draft an official letter for him about this to the authorities. But countless bizarre events happen, one after another, in bewildering succession, and it turns out that Penn is not a TV producer after all, but merely a lower-level employee of the company, and the office she had appeared to use was that of her old friend Phyllis, brilliantly played by Sandra Oh (who is of Korean extraction). Phyllis's husband and child turn out to be the ones which Penn had told the taxi driver were her own ex-husband and her own child, and this is revealed to be untrue. But that's only the beginning of the surprises. Things get stranger and stranger. It turns out that Penn, who is treated by Phyllis as her best friend, is really a sociopath and psychotic who secretly hates her and wants to harm her (she scratches the paint off her car covertly, for instance). But her moment of truth is when she revels in the fact that the only time Phyllis ever called her and 'was weak' and needed comforting was on the day of 9/11. She says: 'That was the only time I felt I was not just a nobody. I want that day back.' However, I do not want to ruin the surprises by telling any more. Suffice it to say that if you want to stage a terror attack in New York, and you are clever enough to blame it on an innocent Muslim whom you pick up in a taxi, well you might appear in this film. Abdel Kechiche, a Tunisian actor, does a superb job of playing the difficult and complex role of Ashade, the taxi driver. He fully matches the intensity of Robin Penn's performance with his own.

Robin Cook As usual, I rented this movie last night to watch and my habit is I knew nothing about it before viewing it. I have not watched the special features on the DVD yet and may not.This movie was intriguing and then something shifted gears and I started to lose interest .. can't put my finger on it exactly. I fell asleep and finished watching it this morning. After watching the movie, I went back through it to maybe catch a few things I might have missed when sleep was overtaking me and one detail I thought was somewhat ironic (and probably intentionally symbolic though very subtle and ambiguous). In the scene where Penn (Phoebe) is gluing Trump's magazine cutout photo onto her collage, the camera swings over to her dog in front of the television that is on, and the television has an actress with a bag and a different dog than Penn's and she drops the bag into the sidewalk trash bin just as was done by Penn at the end of the movie (a prophetic parallel). It was just a short blip, but an interesting detail, which I suspect I probably missed many other details in this movie that were just as sublime.I notice that Abdel Kediche's photo is not shown on this website's movie page, which I think is sad. Both Penn and Kechiche did very fine acting and Kechiche is a very nice face to watch. I hope we see more of him in other film(s).I was unsure of what rating to give this movie since it was not an easy one to get through to the end, plus the nature of the subject content was difficult for me to stomach or believe or fathom. But, I could believe that something like this could happen and how Arabs or Muslims could be easily victimized due to the impact that 9-11 had on our society. This movie gave me pause to wonder if in reality some have been set up to receive blame for a bombing such as Abdel's character would obviously have been after the ... uh ... pieces were put together.Penn's character (Phoebe) was difficult to personally accept. I wanted to like her, but just couldn't, no matter what attempts were made to humanize her or to explain away her horrid behavior. Yes, she was mentally deranged, but I simply could not lean over the fence to even like her. Phoebe's dog had a symbolic placement, but was more of a pivotal connective tissue to thread things together, which frankly was not as strong a thread as it could/should have been. The short video blocs on the television of Sorry, Haters show that blipped now and then throughout the movie did not convey as much to me as I suspect was intended, which made the title of the movie weak.So, with the video blips and the one detail I mentioned about the actress and dog in a scene on Penn's television, I'm sure there were many other blip details through the movie that I didn't catch. As a result this movie had a great many details that simply get overlooked in a one-time viewing. Perhaps if some of the detailed blips were a little longer for the viewer's mind to register them, then this movie would have perhaps been more cohesive. This could be why I had started to lose interest .. perhaps too many visual details clustered for my brain to have time to register them with any significance ... or perhaps should have been left on the cutting room floor. Whatever it was, something just went missing for me at some point.Considering I had just finished watching Hard Candy movie earlier yesterday, which was outstanding ... this made Sorry, Haters more difficult for me to get into insofar as quality, intensity and content.All in all, I waffled between a 6 and 7 vote here for this movie. Something is definitely lacking in this movie. If you can get past the stage of where you start to lose interest like I did, then you may find you like this movie. I'd recommend it for at least one viewing since it does have merit in the content, and the casting, acting and script were good.

sunshinebright1111 The reason to watch this movie is Robin Wright Penn. I won't bother giving you a summary of the plot, as others have already given sufficient plot summaries. But I will speak on the absolute brilliance of Robin Wright Penn.Penn plays a woman who, in post-9/11 New York, longs to reproduce the feeling she felt on that great day. I'm trying not to come even close to a spoiler here, but let's just say that she has fears, insecurities, and all kinds of issues that make her long for the safety and comfort she experienced on September 11, 2001. This movie does a great job of illustrating how that great and tragic day meant different things to different people. And as crazy as it may sound to some of us, there were actually people (non-terrorists/non "haters of America and the freedom that she stands for") who took some degree of comfort in the chaos and terror of that day. Penn's character is one of those people. And as we come to understand who she is (and who she isn't) we find ourselves feeling a combination of absolute disgust and quiet pity that could only be produced by an actress as talented as Robin Wright Penn. "Sorry Haters" makes you think about September 11, in a way you might never have otherwise considered. It makes you think about American culture and how isolating and lonely it can be. And it also makes you rethink personal responsibility and the culture of victimhood that is so pervasive in our culture today. It accomplishes all of these things through Robin Wright Penn. And I can think of few other American actresses who could have pulled this off.