She Hate Me (2004)

Pretty Good

hyped garbage

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

So stupid movie. There could be 3 different movies from this story. Bad script, bad solutions, bad plots, bad seks scenes. Why, Monica, Why? Why you did this? I have to fill 10 lines of comments for this stupid movie, what can I do? Spike tried to solve all the problems of the world with a single movie. But, being socially responsible, doesn't mean you are making a good movie. The whole lesbian pregnancy theme is so fake, comprising the final with the 2 lesbians kissing each other and the father of their children. The trial was treated in such a naive script, as if reading a school play written by the math teacher. I guess I did 10 lines. Fine. Why Monica, Why? Why you?

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!

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.

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!