User Reviews

This movie seems like it was made by film students whose lives are like this and they got a kick out of putting it on film. The actors/characters just seemed like people they liked, thought were cool, and wanted to put them in a movie. The photography was competent enough but the direction and editing left it in the realm of many independent films that have a lot of non essential scenes that do not push the story forward. There were enough scenes of devoid of both verbal and non-verbal acting. An attempt to carry a "moral' character that was to straighten the hero out and get him to get his s**t together but that never really seemed to take hold. The antihero protagonist character was just annoying but I can see how the filmmakers who like that kind of character feel great about seeing him in a movie. He's cool to them. But just not to most people.

"Sorry, Thanks" is an independent film that takes place in San Francisco. The story focuses on two main characters, Max, a loser with a dead-end job and no plans, and Kira, an artist who, according to her friends, settles for less than what she's worth. Kira is in a period of transition, having just gotten out of a long relationship and her old job. She is looking for the next step in her life when she decides on a crap job and has a couple of romantic encounters with the incredibly unappealing Max despite his having a girlfriend who loves him dearly and treats him well.

The film is a series of scenes which were, for the most part, completely unnecessary to the plot, or repetitive, driving in the point that Max is a lazy bum with no morals and no motivation, such as the scene at the beginning in which his bearded friend gives him a ride and tells him how lazy his, or when he and a group of friends are eating and they tell him that he has no morals. I felt that the first half of the film could have been removed and the plot would have been more concrete and the characters just as understood.

This film was not emotionally appealing in any way, it does not come off as comedic as the director seemed to think, and the acting and cinematography were uncomfortable to watch. The idea, from what director Dia Sokol said in a Q and A, was to put together a film displaying a very normal, everyday existence. The characters based on people that she and others involved on the project knew personally in San Francisco and the title is meant to be something so common that one would normally never think about it. To achieve her goal of creating a nondescript environment, she wanted to keep the movie fairly devoid of chemistry or romance, which she certainly achieved, to negative results. The lack of passion from characters and of a conclusion to the abrupt ending leave this film without any particular intrigue. The viewer isn't made to care much about any of the characters and there is no apparent moral. It simply falls flat.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, and call me crazy for feeling this way, but I sort of think movies need to have a point. They need to be entertaining, and if they're not, they need to have some redeeming value that makes their very existence worthwhile.

Watching boring people live their boring lives just doesn't cut it with me. Especially when those boring people happen to be either idiotic, amoral, or a little of both. In, Sorry Thanks, I wouldn't even want to be friends with half of these people, let alone be involved in their lives in any manner whatsoever, so why would I care to watch them for 90 minutes?

Main character, Max is an idiot twenty-something who has a dead end job he doesn't even try at...when not at said job, he's with his adorable girlfriend whom he pretty much treats like garbage or friends who seem to think he is a douche bag lacking in morals (in fact, there are two scenes where they tell him he is immoral and an ass). Oh, and on the side, he's having sex with Kira behind his adorable and loving girlfriend's back. Kira is. Well, how do you even describe Kira? First off, she's odd. She makes odd faces, she makes odd jokes, and she just acts odd. Max is somehow attracted to this, so why not destroy another person by sleeping with odd girl? Kira has a new job as a copy editor and a string of random boyfriends who aren't boyfriends. Like Max, she seems to be down with messing with people- her friends seem to do the same thing Max's friends do- sort of push the idea that she's kind of a jerk. Kira is, admittedly, slightly less of a douche bag than Max.

Now that I've explained the two main characters, people whom you'd probably want to get AS far away from in real life, I'll explain the plot. Oh wait, I can't, as there is no plot. It's basically 90 mins of watching two assholes who think they're clever and cool do whatever the hell they want.

There are small flashes of likability among the two main characters, and we keep getting scenes of Max being semi-charming in a "I'm 20 something but I act like I'm 6" way. But, in the end, little tidbits of charm don't change the fact that these are just unlikeable characters that serve little purpose other than to exist on video. None of them drive any story forward (as there really is no story), none of them add anything to the overall mood of the movie, and none of them really matter at all. If I wanted to watch morons be boring and violating all sorts of trust with other people, I'd turn on reality TV. Like I said- movies need to fulfill a purpose. God only knows what purpose writers, Dia Sokol and Lauren Veloski, thought their movie served. I can only assume they were bored one day.

Sadly, it's films like Sorry, Thanks that will continue to give indie films a bad name. People will watch this and say, "see, this is why I never watch independent cinema! The writing sucks, the characters suck, and the acting is, in some parts, miserable." (the cat lady comes to mind immediately).

It's a shame, because there are some really great indie films out there. This just isn't one of them.

I agree with most of the other reviewers that this is the most pointless movie ever made. I have never reviewed a movie before, but this one just got my goat, and I had to tell somebody.

The acting is lack-lustre, the direction is non-existent, and the script is pathetic. I feel sorry for the poor actors, but I guess it's a way of getting your face on the screen, at least.

The ending, or lack thereof, is the most annoying part. Why oh why do people insist on making movies like this, under the guise of being "artsy" ?

If you have nothing better to do, and you feel like being bored out of your mind, then I suppose you could watch this movie(?), but I wouldn't advise it.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this film, as I kinda liked it, but also felt it was sort of a waste of time to watch.

The story is about a group of post-teens, who doesn't really seem to know what they want with their lives, and go around living just for the sake of living. The protagonist is Max, played by perhaps the only well-known actor in the film at this point, Wiley Wiggins (from "Waking Life" and "Dazed and Confused"-fame). Max unambitiously works as a sort of telephone operator, not really putting much thought nor effort into his job, and frequently comes in late, as a result of him not having a car, and refusing to use public transportation. He has just had a one-night stand with Kira (Kenya Miles), who had just broken up with her boyfriend, and Max can't seem to stop thinking about her, even though he is already in a steady relationship with his long-term girlfriend Sara. Max doesn't seem to be regretting his affair, but at the same time doesn't want to break up with his girlfriend either, so he is going through some emotional issues (or rather, lack thereof) throughout the film, and we follow him around, essentially doing nothing, and then doing more of nothing later. We also follow some of the other characters around, also doing basically nothing too.

Even though most of the characters are very shallow, they still belong to this interesting group of goal-less youths, which probably take up more and more of the modern western society today, and because many of us (including myself) belong to this group, the film becomes strangely relevant, despite apparently not really having a goal of its own.

So, overall I rate this a 6/10, purely because of the likability-effect that these post-teens have, and because I can identify with many of the issues they face during their everyday lives. But it is probably not a movie I'd consider viewing multiple times, as it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere, with a character-development of basically zero.

I feel bad giving this film a star because it was honestly the most mundane film I've ever seen. I kept waiting for it to get interesting but it didn't. Every scene was equally as boring, the storyline was loose at best and the "drama" that surrounded consisted mainly of boring dialogue.

I felt that most of the characters lacked any depth and there was no on screen chemistry to speak of. There was little emotion attached to any of the actions of the characters and the really simplistic storyline could be summed up in less than 20 minutes as all the other scenes added very little to the main plot, in fact they added very little to anything. For a romantic comedy, it was neither particularly romantic nor particularly funny. I really felt this film lacked anything worth mentioning.

If you're an Andrew Bujalski fan, this is not to be missed. Bujalski's in top-form here (and he gets a bigger acting part than usual), playing a friend who has zero patience for his lamer by the day man-child BFF, but all the patience in the world for his beard.

Remember Wiley Wiggins (from "Dazed and Confused")? He's no longer the scrawny freshman, but he's still a man-child here. He plays pathetic like a real pro, and it's truly funny stuff. To its credit, this movie doesn't use the man-child character the way most bromances do. It just sets him up to implode. And we watch. Made me cringe, but it was also a welcome relief.

All around, I'd say "Sorry, Thanks" takes the best impulses of a "buddy comedy" and a "relationship movie" combined, but without all the Hollywood fluff tricks. This movie is just something much more interesting.

Highly recommend.

I don't usually waste my time commenting on below-average (i.e., rated under five on a scale of ten) films, but I do so here – "Sorry, Thanks" is rated as I write at 4.2, with 93 votes on this forum – only to contrast it to a twice-better film that I watched yesterday, also on the Sundance Channel.

"Man in the Chair" (2007) is a professional film about the making of a film for a student movie competition. It's professional in the sense that it employed more than half a dozen well-known, established actors, used interesting and semi-innovative film techniques, relied on a large network of outside sources in its production, and so on.

"Sorry, Thanks," on the other hand, simply looks like an actual student production, with its sub-par acting, ordinary but competent photography, minimal plot line, and the apparent sketchiest of scripts.

This movie is classified as a "comedy," with a tag line of "An unromantic comedy." It seems to me that there ought to be a sub-classification for "unfunny comedies," since there are so many of them on the market. Whether this movie is a comedy or a drama (or a dramedy, in popular parlance), to this viewer is debatable.

The following line from the movie seems to sum up this entire amateurish effort: "You make a great grade school student."

This is a delightful and all-too-real portrayal of several 20-somethings stumbling through their lives and doing the best they can, but not really getting anywhere and not understanding why. Wiley Wiggins does a great job as Max whose life is as aimless as his work.

It combines the Hollywood buddy and relationship movies without being either exactly, but rather becomes more of a comment on how something isn't quite there.

It's very well directed, acted and beautifully written with an absolutely perfect ending. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even with all of my cringing. Yes, I will see it again.