Ella me odia

The reviews of the new Spike Lee joint went from bad to worse (Entertainment Weekly gave it an F, for whatever that's worth), so I purchased my ticket to "She Hate Me" with more than a little bit of trepidation. Admittedly, what allowed my curiosity to get the better of me and coerce me in to shelling out the AMC 25 Times Square's ridiculous $10.50 ticket price was an inner desire to witness the gruesome end to the train wreck that has ravaged Spike Lee for the past five year or so (before you stop me, I didn't see 25th Hour, which I heard from credible sources was pretty decent; leave me alone).

And for the first half hour of "She Hate Me," that's exactly what I got. The overwhelming hubris; the transparent messaging; the muddled, almost blunted inside joke that leaves you on the outside. The underdeveloped crack baby conceived in a one night stand between (1) half-baked racial politics and (2) a convoluted cultural agenda that manages to reinforce the same norms that it calls into question.

But somehow, Lee saves this one, making it provocative rather than tired. In this mess of a film, campy vignettes sprout up as tangential arguments surrounding a main thesis. Structuring the movie as such derails the thesis, transforming it from a coordinate plane to a topographic map with very queer landmarks. And while at first glance it might seem that Lee is playing the same role he does courtside at a Knicks game -- shouting his arse off at action of which he has marginal influence at best -- Lee's multiple divergent jeremiads are far less prescriptive than they are descriptive. The description, furthermore, is characterized by omission. We learn a lot more by what Lee chooses not to include than from what he includes.

Case in point: In a film that is so mired in present-day political discourse and broaches the subject homosexuality for a great deal of its duration, not once is the issues of gay marriage touched upon. The choice not to mention this subject, which has (unnecessarily?) asserted hegemony over a queer rights agenda, leaves way for Lee to touch on topics that receive far less mainstream attention, such as alternative understandings of the family, or how the (literal) commodification of the black male body resonates across a number of frameworks. Anthony Mackie is somewhat of an acquired taste in the lead role. His acting is tight enough to be convincing, but imperfect enough to purvey the affected sense that runs rampant throughout the film. His character, Jack Armstrong, works at a pharmaceutical development company whose aim is to develop an AIDS vaccine. Once this is established, a sequence of scenes reveal to us that the vaccine has been rejected by the FDA, that one of the main scientists has committed suicide, and that higher-ups in his company are guilty of blatant insider trading.

When Jack blows the whistle to the SEC, the shit deflects off of the fan and hits him in the face. He is fired and his bank account is frozen. In order to maintain the upper-class Manhattanite lifestyle he's been living, he grudgingly agrees to impregnate his ex girlfriend Fatima (Kerry Washington) and her new girlfriend Alex (Dania Ramirez). Receiving $10,000 for impregnating the two of them, Fatima convinces Jack to pony up his one trick to eighteen of her thirtysomething lesbian friends at 10G's a nut. Aronofsky-esque drug ingestion shots abound as Jack pops Viagra and Redbull to maintain stamina at these pregnancy parties, where five women each get a turn with Jack.

A few critics have taken issue with the film's portrait of lesbianism, claiming that it suggests that lesbianism is essentially heterosexuality-without-the-dudes. Reinforcing this viewpoint are "She Hate Me's" leading ladies, two bougie "lipstick" lesbians of color -- a light-skinned black woman and a Dominican mami -- with totally hellacious bodies, dude. But the lesbian representation isn't homogenous; rather, it runs the gamut and transcends racial borders. It's concurrently totally Hollywood and anti-Hollywood.

"She Hate Me" wraps itself up in so many questions that it's completely unable to resolve, and that's part of what makes it succeed. It diagnoses a politics that is weighted down by its anfractuous periphery and conflicted center. But in its articulation of these questions, it forces us to laugh at what makes us uncomfortable. It belies an almost tangible confusion in any attempt at reconciling its own identity, and unexpectedly brings us to a denouement that's ordo ab chao phrased through a deus ex machina. And like the XFL player from whom the film takes its name, what reads like a grammatical disaster conceals witty commentary on problematics that compromise identity.

Fired from his executive position within a medical research company for reporting unethical behaviour, John Henry Armstrong finds himself hung out to dry, blaming by the CEO for the drop in share value and with his assets frozen. When his ex-girlfriend and her lesbian lover come to him asking for his sperm to get them pregnant in return for $5,000 a time – an offer he eventually accepts. Once the deed is done, Fatima starts bringing him other professional lesbian couples who have failed to have children by any of the more conventional routes. As this becomes his new profession, the corporate witch-hunt for a fall guy continues with him in the spotlight.

I will always try and see a Spike Lee film. Not because he is the world's best director (he is not) nor because his films are always fantastic (they most definitely are not) but because even his poor films provide interest and brain food in a way that so many Hollywood films do not. It is easy to just dismiss him but to do so misses so much of what he does that is good and worth seeing. I certainly cannot defend this film on the grounds of narrative because it is all over the place – Enron, sexual ethics, the failures of the corporate world and political system to "ordinary" people, all this while still having sex scenes and animated sperm and eggs. If you let it, the fragmentation of the narrative will annoy you – it bothered me a little bit and I wished that the film had been shorter with a tighter focus. However, it is still interesting and it engaged my brain; you can imagine the "man gets lesbians pregnant" concept being the next cheap and nasty "comedy" at number one in the box office charts and, although he seems to enjoy the sexual humour of the material, Lee deserves credit for not forgetting that I (and many audiences) like to have my brain stimulated before anything else.

If the opening credits ($3 bill) doesn't give you a clue what it is about, then the film helps with the corporate world setting. The themes are business, money and ethics and the film preaches a lot at points but generally is interesting. There is a lot of slack in the film that should have been removed and for some of it the point was totally lost on me but I was thinking all the time and that is a good thing. Lee's direction is as good as ever and the cinematography is slick. With so much focus on theme instead of story, it is no surprise that the actors aren't that great, but they do all do enough to keep the film working. Mackie is not a great actor but he is effective enough here and it isn't his fault if his character isn't developed that well. Likewise Washington, Barkin, Bellucci, Harrelson etc are all OK but they are more parts within a point rather than characters. Q-Tip is a non-character but is a nice presence in the sort of role that Lee would often play. Although it didn't bother me too much, I did wonder how much damage the portrayal of lesbians did the film – or how fair it was? To my eye they seemed to be either lipstick lesbians that were very sexy, or larger women played for comic effect – only one or two seemed like "normal" people; but with so many other things to niggle me, this was right at the bottom of my list.

Overall, the negative reviews are partly correct because this is a messy film with a narrative that is all over the place. Happily, Spike Lee is always worth watching because the film has interesting themes through it and Lee's anger may be overdone at times but mainly it has the desired effect of being very watchable. Worth seeing for what it does well even if it does a lot wrong.

This movie made me think of how its premise was created. Suppose a man wanted to push the fantasy about being sexually desired by women to the extreme. How would he proceed? 1) Must be pursued sexually by many women. Certainly more than 2. Better make it 18. 2) If the women are not normally attracted to men, their attraction to him is theoretically more impressive (by some rationalizations). So make them lesbians. Better make them cute too, there is no prestige in ugly women. 3) To emphasize the premise, have the women actually pay him to have sex with him. Make it be it a lot of money. $10,000. The problem is that this premise seems obvious and silly by itself. To make it less obvious, state that the women are motivated by the desire to get pregnant. You can still slip in the implication that they want sex with him because they didn't choose artificial insemination. I got the impression that this is how the premise for "She Hate Me" was developed. It has many other subplots of interest, but I think it is based on a somewhat obvious and adolescent fantasy.

The worst film Spike Lee has ever made(at least that I've sat through), it was so pretentious at points(I normally never use the word, and I mean it here in the worst way possible), he tried to take on Enron, Bush, Gay relationships, Diabetis, the XFL, and the Watergate Scandal, and as always racism, in one film, and he did it all in the worst most childish, ways, not to mention the unbelievable ending in which the guy gets both the girls( I see what he was going for with that, alternative families and all, but it comes out of nowhere and just ends up looking like every mans wet-dream). Include an awful and pointless Watergate flashback, Animated Sperm with heads of the main character entering eggs of whatever female character he just slept with(who also have the female characters face),and you have got one huge piece of unfocused scatterbrain mush, and normally I like Spike Lee's films, but really, this was pretty awful.

I really have never commented on a forum pertaining to a movie in my entire life, but after watching this film, I was compelled to write something about what I watched. spike has done the worst film I have ever seen in my life. Coming from someone that I thought was a good writer, he just lost all direction,what a waste of time and art. I think that it needed so much work, and the premise is horrible, and unrealistic. Spike please try again, and don't assume or think for us the next time. Its just something that I would never see again! Also bad acting, and a waste of a handsome guy on film. I found the main character intriguing, smart,even comical, but he had nothing to work with. I left my television and VCR with sadness on the state of the world, and the mindset of Spike Lee.