hyped garbage

Absolutely the worst movie.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

She Hate Me almost makes me think of a very talented student rushing through in one night to write and present a sloppy thesis on the state of corporate America and male/female relations, and you do feel the spirit and ferocity at times of the same man who made Do the Right Thing. BUT the fact that the man DID make Do the Right Thing makes this all the more of a quagmire of a shmorgesbord. I wanted to give it a chance, despite all of the lambasting from critics, but they are not really that unwarranted. There are a few small things involving the sex scenes (no pun intended, I think) that are noteworthy, but for the most part this is a fiasco that only someone with the temerity, skill, and daring to go as far as this can pull off. There's a flip-side to the coin of ultra talent with auteurs Lee and De Palma and Herzog and Coppola and others, which is that the same life that goes all through an original work can sometimes be crippling if wielded the wrong way. This film just simply tackles way too many ideas into one way too long package, and it's all the more frustrating for the bits that could, in a whole other context, maybe be pulled off with a little more insight and skewering.The two major sides, aside from the side-bars involving familial ties with John Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) and his friend (who has one of the worst plot-strands involving a bad sperm test), are the corporate drudgery and the lesbian impregnations. Guess which one is less credible? Not that Lee and his collaborator really tackle the former side with a lot of gusto or much of anything; Armstrong, the vice president at a pharmaceutical company who doesn't seem to know that there is corruption involving stocks and prices involving a vaccine for AIDS (that, by the way, has a 75% success rate, as if that's a bad thing!), sees a former scientist friend jump to his suicide, and has on a disc all of the juicy details, thus leading to whistle blowing, and being fired from his job. This is when Lee and his collaborator get into the biggest pickle that they can never squirm out of, as up to now they have material that isn't terrific, but has some promise to be developed. But then comes the latter plot-line, involving Armstrong's ex girlfriend (Kerri Washington, who between her character and Dania Ramirez's character are the most infuriatingly simplistic lesbians I've seen depicted recently on film), who will pay to get impregnated by John.This is where the "fun" begins. By fun I mean just pure illogical hijinks meant to be exaggerations, but Lee never makes it really believable about what kind of exaggeration, not once. It might be one thing if only a few of the nearly twenty lesbians Mackie knocks up enjoyed the sex, but ALL of them do. Furthermore, the character is having sex over and over and over again, time and time again on each night. The biggest problem of all, encompassing this big chunk of the picture, aside from it being there to give Armstrong more 'dimension' and to add the whole aspect of the title to it all, is that Lee doesn't know how to balance the satire with the more dramatic points, and worst of all for a satirist the material falls flat and isn't funny. They do try, the women do, to rake up the laughs with their cheesy bed exploits, but it's meshed together into a premise that is so ridiculous to accept that it loses its energy very, very quick. If not for the awesomely bad cartoon sequences involving Armstrong sperm and lesbian eggs, it would be even more excruciating. At the least, for a few moments, there is pure absurdity in the midst of chaos.Throwing into the pot are the usual bits of black/white commentary (the mother of Armstrong being mixed, which wouldn't be an issue except that it is Spike Lee making it one), the Turturro scenes (was this just a favor to put him in another movie?), and a comparison of Armstrong to the man who blew the whistle on the Watergate break-in, not to mention montages involving births and more undercooked slices of Enron-style semantics. And alongside the thematic sloppiness Lee falters stylistically as well, if not as frequently and befuddling as with the substance; some of this looks like it was shot for CBS prime-time mixed with a few touches of the usual color schemes that are Lee trademarks, as well as the oddly up-beat and muzak-like musical score. By the time She Hate Me finishes up, one is privy to so many questions about what just happened that it could fill a small notepad.Maybe it's best to think of it as something the director had to get out of his system, like a mis-begotten Viagra fueled ejaculation ala Armstrong, and could move on to greener creative pastures. All I can say is that if you do proceed, do so with caution, as it's the biggest blunder I've come across so far from his career.

As I've mentioned before here, I love Spike Lee, but it's still taken me over a year to get around to seeing She Hate Me, partly because I've heard such bad reviews. After seeing the movie, I could understand those bashing commentaries, but I also had new and more complete appreciation for Roger Ebert's review, where he bucks the conventional wisdom to cast a vote in favor of this troubled flick. Now, I'm as sick as the next American of seeing Ebert's thumb going up (oe even WAY up, whatever the heck that means) for seemingly every crappy movie that comes down the pike, but I think he just about nails She Hate Me, as much as it's possible to nail such an elusive movie. I'm going to quote an excerpt from his review in a second, but you can get the rest via IMDb's site:"But this is the work of a man who wants to dare us to deal with it (my comment: i.e., the movie itself, in all its messiness). Who is confronting generic expectations, conventional wisdom and political correctness. Whose film may be an attack on the sins it seems to commit. Who is impatient with the tired rote role of the heroic African-American corporate whistle-blower (he could phone that one in). Who confronts the pious liberal horror about such concepts as the inexhaustible black stud, and lesbians who respond on cue to a sex with a man -- and instead of skewering them, which would be the easy thing to do, flaunts them."His movie seems to celebrate those forbidden ideas. Why does he do this? Perhaps because to attack those concepts would be simplistic, platitudinous and predictable. But to work without the safety net, to deliberately be offensive, to refuse to satisfy our generic expectations, to dangle the conventional formula in front of us and then yank it away, to explode the structure of the movie, to allow it to contain anger and sarcasm, impatience and wild, imprudent excess, to find room for both unapologetic, melodramatic romance and satire -- well, that's audacious. To go where this film goes and still to have the nerve to end the way he does (with a reconciliation worthy of soap opera, and the black hero making a noble speech at a congressional hearing) is a form of daring beyond all reason."My guess is that Lee is attacking African-American male and gay/lesbian stereotypes not by conventionally preaching against them, but by boldly dramatizing them." What makes me so happy about Ebert's review is that he explicitly acknowledges that Lee is a master director who knows what he's doing. Sometimes, I think it's really important for critics to approach some art with the assumption that the artist knows his/her business. This doesn't mean that critics slavishly admire an artist's every move or abdicate their responsibility to analyze it as they see it. It just means that sometimes it may be good to assume innocence before assigning guilt.She Hate Me is a mess. It really is about 5 movies in one, most of which don't survive the whole 2 hour running time. But, like Lee's Bamboozled (which I like quite a bit better than She Hate Me--I disagree with Ebert on Bamboozled, seeing it as a much more successful movie than She Hate Me) what doesn't necessarily add up to a complete, coherent whole is thoroughly engaging and often shockingly powerful in its parts. In fact, maybe it's safe to say of these two movies that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts really do add up--or maybe they multiply--into something spectacular, thought-provoking, and entertaining.Nevertheless, I was a little offended by She Hate Me at times. The moment that leaps out at me the most is when Jack decides that he will be a husband (of sorts) to two lesbian women who have borne his children. No one is surprised to see his bisexual ex-fiancée Fatima except his offer with a passionate kiss, but when her more-or-less man-hating, jealous partner goes along with it as well, even signaling her agreement with an equally sexually super-charged kiss, that seemed absurd and insulting to me. Spike Lee often uses various stylistic elements in the film to announce clearly when he's being ridiculous, satirical, and downright rudely comical, whether it's animated sequences of sperms bearing Jack's face or low-budget DV sequences featuring bad impressions of Watergate conspirators. But this scene with Jack wooing the lesbian is filmed straight up and could easily be read as a misguidedly optimistic (misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary...) vision of how the plot's bizarre love (insert many-sided geometrical shape name here) might be resolved positively. I didn't like it.Even so, I found the movie enjoyable, if not as good as several of Lee's other films.By way of comparison (and this falls into the apples and oranges category, I have to admit), Get on the Bus is a movie that surprised me when I first saw it, and surprised me again--the same way!--this week when I saw it again. It took me years to get around to seeing it for the first time. I guess I was convinced that the pseudo-documentary style would give way to preaching (which some might say that it does). Whatever! Get on the Bus is a moving and passionate exploration of the state(s) of black masculinity in the U.S. today, and, in typical Spike Lee fashion, it pulls no punches while also refusing to give any easy answers. Go see it!

Most Spike Lee joints are rated in the 6-7 range, with the three top-rated films being Malcolm X at 7.5 and Do the Right Thing tied with 25th Hour at a 7.8 rating. So while i feel it is an accurate depiction of what his better films are, it seems strange that a man "voted the 48th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly" has no movie rated at least a 9 (and I'd hope at least a 10). I think it says more about IMDb users than it does about the actual films. For instance, I think history will show that Return of the King does not belong in any all-time top-ten list (and that it's not even the best Lord of the Rings movie), but it's currently listed at number 4 on IMDb, above Casablanca. Casablanca is often cited as the greatest film of all time, but i think it's losing its grip in the IMDb polls because (1) its not recent and (2) its not violent.My general commentary aside, it disappoints me that She Hate Me has not attained even the 6-7 vote range on IMDb. Again, I think it says less about the film and more about the people watching it and voting on it. The premise of the film is indeed a bit fantastical and its portrayal is biased towards the male-gaze as most films are, but its nuanced performances give it a sensitivity and an intensity I think few films possess in this or any age. My hat is off to Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington for their impeccable leads, but i feel that every supporting performance was on the mark down to the mere door man (played by Jamel Debbouze, whom you may recognize from the role of Lucien in Amelie).The subject matter and its handling are probably the real reasons this film is only rated at a disappointing 5.0. Spike's intelligent and and yet down-to-earth approach probably alienated both sides of the movie-going spectrum: *possible spoiler* (1) The only unabashed violence in this film is the suicide of Dr. Schiller and the incurred deaths of the people below him. Not exactly popcorn fare. (2) Think about the context of the title of the film... Spike Lee does not cater to the stock intelligentsia. He picks a controversial subject and approaches it from a challenging angle, but he uses the language of everyday life to present it.In short, I think a person's reasons for not liking the film do more to betray their ignorance or their prejudice than to actually say anything about the quality of it. Then again, what do i know? I only gave Return of the King a 7.0 rating. I must be an idiot.

I just loved Spike Lee's 25th Hour with Edward Norton so I thought why not watch some more movies by Lee. However, I must admit that She Hate Me was a disappointment - yeah, the topics are very hot and relevant, the execution is beautiful, but the film somehow lacks a coherent overall line, perhaps its due to the fact that the film tries to connect and mix too many things (whistleblowers, lesbians, love, African Americans), the bottom line is just not clear and none of the topics are dealt with in detail in this film.Moreover, some actions by the actors don't make sense at all (to me - a major flaw), some actors were totally unnecessary (ex. Monica Belucci didn't add anything other than to extend the length of this already lengthy movie). The drama looks fake to me, but I liked the ending, though. Thus the 4/10.