She Hate Me

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.

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 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.

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!

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.