She Hate Me

It's safe to say that most people don't like Spike Lee. He's a radical, he's racist, and a lot of people don't like his movies. That would explain the 3.3/10 rating for She Hate Me on IMDb, considering most of them haven't seen the film. Either that, or they couldn't handle everything that Lee (and co-screenwriter Michael Genet) put onto the plate. However, Lee could barely handle all of it, and it shows. There's so much for Lee to rant on and make fun of that the movie occasionally lags and feels too heavy for having way too much to talk about. At 138 minutes, it does go on for a little too long, but that's the only way Lee can fit everything he wants to talk about into his movie. Surprisingly, it all has a place, and for the most part works pretty well.

John Henry Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), aka Jack, works for a prestigious drug company whose drug for curing AIDS has just been rejected by the FDA. However, CEO Leland Powell (Woody Harrelson) performs some illegal transactions, causing Jack to blow the whistle and subsequently get fired. Not being able to get a job anywhere else, Jack's broke until his ex-fiancée Fatima (Kerry Washington) comes to him with a plan. For $10,000, he will impregnate her and her partner Alex (Dania Ramirez). He's initially reluctant, but he decides to go ahead. Soon, Fatima brings a bunch of lesbians to his place, all for $10,000 each. Jack has morality issues to deal with, but also, his former company frame him for the corrupt business practices.

From the opening credits, where dollar bills float, ending with a $3 with George W. Bush on it, you know that this movie isn't going to be easy. Lee throws in another attack on Bush later, and he tackles the subjects of corporate corruption, homosexuality, the stereotypes of black men (and women), and the importance of whistleblowing. That definitely is too much material to work with, and it shows. In the film, there's about 45 minutes with no talk of the framing of Jack that's being planned. And there's some funny comedy thrown in, that is quite funny, but makes the film disjointed. One serious scene connects directly to a funny one. It wasn't very balanced. And I could have done without the subplot of Jack's parents. It didn't really lead anywhere. And then everything boils down to a courtroom climax.

However, the film is always fascinating when Lee exposes these things. It's too much for him to handle, as I've said, but what he can throw in coherently is interesting and entertaining. The movie is one of the most entertaining of the year, and during the aforementioned courtroom climax, you're rooting for Jack, because you've been through what he's been through. You recognized the cruelty of the company, so you feel with Jack, and because he's such a normal character, you can go along with what he's feeling and everything unfair that happens to him (which is a lot). Although it's comedic, you understand what he's going through when you see animated sperm with Jack's face on it, when he's too tired to continue with the impregnation.

Mackie does a great job. He does some emotional work, and although in one place or two, it seemed like he was going by the book, he puts in a sympathetic acting job. Washington does a more realistic acting performance, but both are great. They both add to She Hate Me, a somewhat muddled but entertaining, funny (if in the wrong places), and criticizing drama. You'll either love it or be offended by it. I think the chance is worth taking. By the way, that flashback with Nixon, et al., might be the funniest moment of the year.

My rating: 7/10

Rated R for strong graphic sexuality/nudity, language and a scene of violence.

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.

This movie is about a man who takes a moral choice for his work but forgets values in his private life. I can't relate to such upside down philosophy. So, "hate" is surely a word too harsh but I don't care about his life.

Nevertheless, the story raises good questions:

For one time, you see a man becoming a "sex-object" and it's great to achieve this sort of equality with women in charge. From my point of view, it's not a revolution: I always thought, that in relationships, men court but women decide! But I am not the Di Caprio / Pitt / Clooney mold, too! Thus, the truth would be that it's the sexiest who runs the relation whatever the gender! It's a tyranny of beauty then!

And as depicted in the movie, nowadays, when beauty is there, money is not far away. What can we do for money? Is everything for sell? Money leads to freedom or alienation? When you see the beautiful opening credits, you wonder..

For sure, Lee is a talented director and knows how to tell a story, even disturbing for your beliefs.

PS: and don't forget FRANK WILLS, a man who stayed true to his principles instead of money!

So the anti-Bush campaign that makes up the first 45 minutes or so of the movie are pretty clear. Even the attack on Bush's anti-gay tendencies are pretty clear. What's not clear is what the movie's trying to do. Jack is a corporate employee with serious potential who finds himself unemployed because of his refusal to ignore the massive corporate corruption with which he suddenly finds himself surrounded. So then he goes home to his fancy apartment, which he can no longer afford to maintain, and then has to deal with the torturous proposal of impregnating lesbians at $10,000 a piece.

The most difficult endeavor that the movie takes on is in trying to make us believe that Jack was actually conflicted about all of this, and it fails miserably. There a nonsensical subplot about him still being upset about his ex-girlfriend, the lesbian who is bringing all of her lesbian friends to be impregnated by Jack, but only after her.

Keep in mind that their breakup happened FOUR YEARS EARLIER, and not only was he belligerently furious to come home and find his sexy girlfriend having sex with another sexy woman, but he hasn't gotten over it four years later. They actually get into screaming arguments in the movie about this ancient history between themselves.

I'm reminded of one of Julia Roberts' many great lines from Closer – "What are you, 12?"

So while he's not busy acting like a junior high school kid who's heartbroken about some girl who cheated on him, he's having sex with whole lines of lesbians and trying to act like it's just hell to him. Please. At the risk of sounding like some typical jerk, for such a thing to be torturous to a man we need to have a real, real good reason for him to hate doing it, and still being upset about a relationship that ended nearly half a decade earlier isn't even close to reason enough.

I can accept that the movie wants to suggest that this guy genuinely loved his girlfriend and truly feels like he has lost the love of his life, but let me tell you one thing. Showing a guy suffer through Every Man's Fantasy is not the way to do it. At all. Unless, of course, you have some ulterior political motive, but that's just not Spike Lee's style, right? Right?

I won't spend much time talking about the ludicrous premise about the lesbians. Whether you've seen the movie or not, you probably already know all about it. The problem is that you also come into the movie already knowing what a socially and politically conscious filmmaker Spike Lee is. We know that he is going to be making political statements in the film, and some of them are clear while others are not, unless Spike has completely lost all sense of balance. There are scenes where it is increasingly obvious what social ills are being dealt with, such as the terrible scene where Jack has some wooden and massively unrealistic conversation with his friend, who is trying to make money donating sperm. It's a god-awful scene, but it's relatively clear what is being said.

I could, of course, come up with some pretty solid theories about what is being said about the homosexual content of the film, how Jack the black man is forced to descend to that level, but it is such a gigantic portion of the film that it even overshadows that picture of Bush on the $3 bill at the end of the opening credits, and that's a difficult image to overshadow. Lee puts so much stock into the lesbians in this movie that it borders on low- grade soft porn.

At one point in the movie, while bike riding together, Jack's brother gives him a bright, sparkling gem of advice – get a vasectomy and call it a day. Now, there are two things that could lead a man to give such advice to his brother. First, it could be because he's been having too much sex, or second, it could be because he's making ten thousand dollars at a time doing it. Either way, it's a good reason never to take advice from your brother again. Jack, of course, reacts by throwing a temper tantrum like an 8 year old kid, resulting in one of the great many scenes that made me want to put a pot over my head and start beating on it with a serving ladle.

One of the biggest problems with the movie is that not only does it bore and irritate but it deliberately insults the audience. Granted, I didn't know a lot of the details about some of the homages that are made in the film, such as the XFL player that inspired the title of the film and the security guard who exposed the Watergate break-in and ruined his own life in the process. I can understand if Lee wants us to be aware of what he's talking about, but he literally stops his movie to put these stories up on billboards and then hits us over the head with them.

By the end of the movie I was literally standing up, pacing back and forth I was so irritated and desperate for it to end. There are times when I wish I didn't have this determination to finish watching movies, even the abysmally terrible ones.

The really sad thing about She Hate Me is that it isn't even not very good for a Spike Lee film, this is just a bad movie overall. It's almost weird to think that it was directed by the same man that directed true classics like Do The Right Thing, one of my all time favorite films. She Hate Me is Spike Lee's version of Spielberg's 1941, but worse.

Much worse.

I'm sure somewhere in "She Hate Me" lies a good story that would make for an entertaining movie. What we have, however, is a convoluted mess that tries too hard to be a social satire.

The premise: Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), a hotshot VP at a pharmaceutical company, suddenly finds himself unemployed and in need of money. When his ex-fiancée-turned-lesbian Fatima Goodrich (Kerry Washington) offers him $10,000 to impregnate her and her lover Alex (the sexy Dania Ramirez), Jack realizes he could be a sexual cash cow. Next thing he knows, he's in high demand from wealthy lesbians who want children.

The problem is that Lee doesn't know what he wants his film to be. Or, what the story should be. He tackles way too many issues and never tackles any of them very well.

The film opens with a novel title sequence that ends with a broadside against President George W. Bush. Fair enough. Lee's bit actually works. The story then turns into some sort of diatribe against corporate greed, against the blatant excesses of the Enrons and WorldComs of corporate America. OK. Then there's also all this stuff about lesbians and impregnating them. And Jack's conscience about whether he's doing the right thing.

But the film then suddenly turns into a defense of Frank Wills, the black security guard who uncovered the Watergate burglary. Lee makes a valid point that while all the players involved in the burglary and subsequent cover-up went on to have lucrative careers as statesmen, authors, speakers and radio personalities, Wills died in obscurity. A tribute to Wills is long overdue. The man was a hero. But what the heck's his story doing in this film? And in a moment that seems completely arbitrary, Lee also throws in Oliver North into the mix of Watergate figures.

For a satire to work, it needs to satirize something. Frankly, I didn't know what exactly Lee was trying to send up. And, after a while, I didn't care. His movie's neither a sex comedy nor stinging social commentary. In fact, at times "She Hates Me" plays more like some sort of unbridled male fantasy. Not only are all the lesbians attractive, but also they want to get impregnated the old-fashioned way. The one lesbian who chooses artificial insemination fails and so has to plead with Jack to have sex with her.

Subtlety has never been Lee's forte. But in films such as "Do the Right Thing" (1989) and "Jungle Fever" (1991), he somehow found a good balance between satire and social comment. Here, he does no such thing. In "She Hate Me," Lee's about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

What's ultimately disappointing about "She Hate Me" is the often-inane writing. When Fatima tells Jack she always was a lesbian, even when she was dating him, and was merely in denial, she adds, "And I don't mean a river in Egypt." That's how lame the dialogue is. It gets even worse, when Lee and co-writer Michael Genet give Brian Dennehy positively laughable dialogue later.

The corrupt business practices of Enron and its ties to the Bush administration deserve to be told. As does a satire, if you must, of white collar crooks who get off relatively easy and wind up having hugely successful lives as a result of their crimes. But this isn't the film that does it.

Lee's clever, talented and certainly socially conscious, but just seems to be tossing in every idea he had into "She Hate Me." Instead of being bitingly satirical about society's lopsided values, this is a mishmash of a film that is never as funny as it wants to be or as provocative as it should be.