Lei mi odia

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.

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.

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 thought this one one of Spike Lee's better movies. It had a message, it had humor, it related to the topics of today's society...acceptance, forgiveness, love, unconditional love, hypocrisy, shame... all that under one movie. And then it gave a little history lesson about the forgotten hero's (whistleblowers) man I can't rave about this movie enough. Forget what critics say ....Passions of Christ... anyway I would suggest everyone see this movie. The ending is a little weird but it's forgivable. I can't wait til it comes out on DVD this is one of those watch over and over again movies. * Side note, the acting is not the greatest but the whole movie somehow supports it. Plus come on it's all done in Spike Lee (camera angles fashion.