Sorry, Thanks

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.