Sorry, Haters

This is a film about Ashade, a Syrian chemist who drives a cab in New York, and a woman who works for a TV station, and 9/11. I hesitate to say more about the characters or plot, because all of them are complex and tricky, and saying any more would lessen your experience.

What I can tell you is that the plot has a fascinating Hitchcockian twist in the middle, and an ending just about no one sees coming.

On the other hand, watching a film about Moslems, terrorism, and one truly nasty white girl left me immensely depressed. I wasn't seeing any light at the end of the tunnel, no shining sanity anywhere. Maybe that was the point.

The screening I saw featured the director/writer afterwards for Q&A, but I was so bummed, I just fled the theatre. Not a bad film per se, but disturbing and dark.

This moving is very polarizing. I didn't like it, because I am an Arab and a Muslim and I felt the injustice of the taxi driver more personally the most of the audience, but my friend loved it, and thought it was thought provoking. Which it is. I will not ruin the ending for the reader, but it will shock you, so be prepared. Additionally, it isn't one of those movies that is very well balanced. In a sense, I didn't really care what Philly's motivations where in the movie, and the director's efforts at showing her as unstable were a bit heavy handed and clichéd. Other than that, the movie was fine, but not exceptional and NOT about Guantanamo.

Sorry, Haters (2005)

An emotionally intense but cinematically thin movie. I'm not sure where that leaves a viewer--I think it depends on what you want from a movie. The theme is ripe. An immigrant (a Muslim) with immigration problems meets a troubled woman (played by Robin Wright Penn) who abuses his situation. At it's most intense and personal it's moving and disturbing, and sad, if such terrible drama can just be plain old sad.

But there are improbabilities (including the way their first meeting in a cab becomes very personal, with another woman and her child, in the blink of an eye). And there is a kind of plainness to it all, the writing, the filming, the story itself, that is linear and not quite enough to keep it going. It's true, I think, that being low budget was not an issue, but even within the style it was filmed, there might have been a better sense of camera-work and editing. The one thing that pushes forward best is the acting, often conspicuous for exceeding the writing. Director and writer Jeff Stanzer deserves a nod for trying, but he's only taken this half way, was a movie.

Do I recommend this? I think only if you like Penn, like indie films about serious contemporary issues regardless of quality, or if you are interested in the theme of Muslim integration and devotion to not being integrated. It might surprise some people with its honesty and tenderness, between the long lulls. But others will sense, in the first twenty minutes, the tone of the whole movie, and might back out. For those latter, the ending is an intense surprise, and disturbing to the point of demented, so there is a need, perhaps, to stick it out, just for that five minutes. But then again, maybe not.

In New York, the Muslin taxi driver Ashade (Abdellatif Kechiche) drives a woman (Robin Wright Penn) to New Jersey and back and witness she scratching a car with a stone. She tells that her name is Philly and she is the powerful producer of the show "Sorry, Haters", and the owner of the car is the woman that "stole" her husband and daughter. Philly snoops in Ashade's life and he tells that he has doctorate in chemistry in Syria but is supporting his sister-in-law Eloise (Élodie Bouchez) and his nephew working as taxi driver since his brother, who is also a Canadian citizen, was arrested in JFK while in transit and deported back to Syria. Philly promises to help the family using a lawyer that is a friend of her. However, sooner his and Eloise's lives and hope are affected by the actions of Philly, whose name is indeed Phoebe.

"Sorry, Haters" is an impressive and disturbing movie about the prejudice and lack of respect with immigrants (and tourists) in the United States of America after the tragic September 11th by a minority of the American citizens and authorities. The treatment spent to Ashade by the security guard and the policewoman in the very beginning discloses the prejudice and indifference to the Muslin taxi driver. Robin Wright Penn has a top-notch performance in the role of an insane masochistic schizophrenic sociopath lonely woman and her complex character deserves to be studied by psychologists. The destructive behavior of the authorities based on an anonymous denounce, treating the innocent Eloise without the minimum respect, is very sad. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Esperança e Preconceito" ("Hope and Prejudice")

This is one very riveting psychological drama that just continues to evolve it's statement of purpose throughout the well plotted piece. Working on a tiny budget, this film was shot on less expensive equipment in merely 15 days, but the movie still manages to be about as relevant and fresh as is possible in a post 9/11 context. The hopefully soon-to-be-known Jeff Stanzler weaves into his tiny project about a mysterious, bitter divorcée and a humble Arabic cab driver, the psychological micro and macro-cosmos revolving around the current political climate viewed through an emotionally unstable context. Truly tough to describe the profound themes examined and revealed in this movie without taking away from the wonderful grace which with those plot devices are announced, but we can definitely assume that the two lead performers do an extraordinary job at keeping the material grounded and relative, however irrational the final result may be- it is nonetheless strikingly potent, and an all too rare refresher into the darkness and secrets one mind may be able to harbor while always looking the other way in front of a population.