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.
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.