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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Sorry, Haters (2006)

Rating: 2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Arabian Plights

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Posters at AllPosters.com

Jeff Stanzler (Jumpin' at the Boneyard) directed this ambitious but seriously confused social commentary stemming from 9/11. A white, female TV executive, Phoebe (Robin Wright Penn) gets into a cab driven by Ashade (Abdellatif Kechiche). Phoebe makes the cabbie drive her out to a house in New Jersey so she can cry over her ex-husband and his new lover (Sandra Oh). After her trip, she learns that Ashade is taking care of his beautiful sister-in-law (Elodie Bouchez) while trying to get her husband, his brother, out of Guantanamo. Sorry, Haters makes a point of noting that both brothers are educated and responsible, but at the same time paints Ashade as sexless, unable to make advances either toward the sister-in-law or toward Phoebe. Meanwhile, this screwed-up woman offers to help Ashade, but Stanzler decides he wants to make a puzzle-box movie in addition to a social commentary, and he lets one element slide while he concentrates on the other. He gives us a long, "nothing is as it seems" sequence that negates the entire first half, and finishes it all off with a ludicrous, mystifying finale. "It makes you think," is an appropriate description, but about what? And why?

Starring: Robin Wright Penn, Abdellatif Kechiche, Elodie Bouchez, Sandra Oh
Written by: Jeff Stanzler
Directed by: Jeff Stanzler
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 83 minutes
Date: March 24, 2006