Waste of Money.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Spike Lee's comedy has been reviled by people who don't seem to understand comedy. This is a really funny movie about people who make a great many moral decisions in their lives because of money. Jane Austen could have written it, if she'd been living in the 21st century. What I especially appreciated about it is that it starts out like a gripping crime drama in order to get the comedic setup established. That shift in tone is wonderful, because it keeps you off balance for the rest of the movie. There are no easy answers here. You may not like the choices the characters make, but so what? You might learn something from the way they behave and they way they face the consequences for what they do. The cast is uniformly excellent, right down to the weird doorman and the some of women who seek out the main character as a sperm donor.It's not a perfect movie by any means. It could lose about 10-15 minutes without losing any of its punch. But I had stayed away from this for 12 years because of the incomprehensible reviews it had received when it opened. Don't fall victim to the same. Spike Lee is one of American cinema's most gifted and unique directors, and this fits easily in near the top of his work. Think of it alongside Girl 6, another funny movie that left you off balance for much of the picture.

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.

I guess the first thing you should know is that this is a Spike Lee film. The very name wards off a number of people; I'm not one of them. I don't get warded off of a film just because of the director (unless it's Uwe Boll).The second thing you should know is that this is a good movie. You should know this up front because everything else I'm going to say is going to make it sound bad. But that's because of what the movie is.Most movies have a single point. An underlying purpose that the writer/director/etc is trying to get across to the audience. Large films may have 2 points.There's enough raw material in this film to be 3 separate 2-hour movies. The primary premise, a man being paid to impregnate a number of lesbians, is just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to see everything from racism to shadows of Enron; to Mafiosos; to prostitution (seen from a very strange angle); to a truly unexpected, extended homage to the security guard who caught the guys in the Watergate hotel. Subplots disappear for extended lengths in the film, only to be resurrected and dramatically change where the film is going.It shouldn't hold up, and as a regular movie it doesn't. But this isn't a movie; what it is is about a year's worth of a man's life. Now, life doesn't work like a movie. People don't deal with just one singular issue inside a year. A year is filled with numerous issues, some that disappear for months only to return and really screw you over. And, for John 'Jack' Armstrong, this was a very unique year indeed.If you look at it as one year's worth of interesting clippings from the incredible life of Jack Armstrong, it's a different film. This man is thrust into a whole bunch of crap that he has to deal with. Issues from his past come out, and he has to deal with them. It does still have a solid, overarching story arc that does get resolved in the end.The main problem is that cinema really can't effectively do what Spike Lee is trying to do. Not in its 138 minute running time.However, I think this film works best as a conversation starter. As a way to bring up numerous issues and sort of lay them all out there for people to start talking about. In some ways, it's effective in the direction that Se7en is (though not in nearly as strong a way), in showing you how apathetic society has become about various inequities, corruption, and so forth. With the exception of environmentalism, this film touches just about every societal issue to some degree.

I have never really been a fan of Spike Lee and his techniques as a director (especially the way his scenes appear as though a human being is holding the camera in a not-so-still fashion- ugh!!!). But I am absolutely disappointed with this movie ('saw it for the first time last night), and Spike Lee totally lost any vote I had for him all together. What the hell was he thinking? 'Just a flick containing scattered thoughts of a man confused about life all together, it seems. I am especially disappointed in Kerry Washington. She does "Ray", and then she does this crap? I would think that film would've opened up doors for her. What had me the most upset was the fact that you had these "Lesbians" who want to have sex with this man because they want to get pregnant, but then you also see these "Lesbians" lusting after his body, and enjoying sex with him, being affectionate, orgasms- ??? The last time I checked, Lesbians were women who were into women, and did not lust after men. There are Lesbian women in my family- I know the drill. It is every pig's fantasy to "break" a Lesbian, and be the one to "turn her back" to men, and this film depicts that. And then at the end, Kerry Washington decided that she is Bisexual and not Lesbian after all, and then she and her girlfriend decide to have a three-way relationship with this guy, who has a child with each of them, along with having children with umpteen other women that they set him up to have sex with? And the worst thing of all, is the fact that after all the corporate scandal that this guy is wrapped up in, the only thing that gets him off is the fact that the judge feels a father of 17 children should be out working, and not in prison. What's the message here? The solution for a Black man to beat a Surpreme Court case in which he is being racially targeted is for him to have babies everywhere? I find this film sickening. I can only wonder how Lesbians feel, how Black men feel, how heterosexual Black women like me feel, how anybody feels after watching this crap. Spike Lee has run out of bright ideas, and needs to retire...