Director:
Spike Lee
Starring:
Anthony Mackie
Kerry Washington
Lonette McKee
Q-Tip
Ellen Barkin
Monica Bellucci
Jim Brown
Woddy Harrelson
Release: 30 Jul. 04
IMDb
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She Hate Me
BY: DAVID L. BLAYLOCK
In what could be the most headstrong bad film in some time,
Spike Lee’s She Hate Me can’t be described as a particularly unentertaining
work -- on the contrary, it’s amazingly entertaining -- just one that makes
little sense and says nothing over the course of Lee’s trademark 2-hours-plus
length. As is often the case, this is more a Spike Lee Rant than Joint, but
this jeremiad is especially incomprehensible. Targeting the corporate greed and
backstabbing morality that he believes is responsible for a nation
destroying the everyman, Lee devises a story that is the very embodiment of
corporal greed and immorality to contradictorily counter the corporations.
Considering that Lee is usually on his top game when adapting (25th Hour,
Clockers, Malcolm X) or completely provoked to action (Do the Right Thing,
Get on the Bus, Bamboozled), this latest provocation should be
en route to his best efforts. But She Hate Me remains in the cluttered list of
Lee mediocrities ranging from She’s Gotta Have It to Jungle Fever to
Summer
of Sam, films in which the director has allowed himself to
torturously improvise, making his interesting stories boring or too ridiculous to care about. No matter how much he may
intend to say with She Hate Me, its ineffective Lee posits are too numerous and
too glaring to not derail the picture. This is, after all, a film in which
he’s trying to castigate U.S. business practices by telling the story of man
(Mackie; in one of the year’s most annoying performances) who’s paid to
impregnate lesbian businesswomen.
But Lee desperately wants to say something with this film, which makes it
all the more uneven in the long run. Amid the commotion of the central
story are long asides in which Lee tries to introduce past injustices by
corporate and political leaders against the black man, most notably in a
recreation of the Watergate break in when Frank Wills (Ejiofor) caught the
CREEP staffers before the U.S. government ruined his life. Played all around
the map, this is a film that is never completely sure of itself because the
director hasn’t the patience to think anything through. Otherwise, he
would have devised a way to intelligently and judiciously argue against the
current administration without merely dropping the ball by including such
idiocies as fake currency with George W. Bush on it.
Worse yet, the film’s treatment of women and the traditional portrayal of
lesbians is near offensive. Although some of the world’s finest actresses
are tapped to play the lesbians waiting to be pregnant (including Monica
Bellucci and Kerry Washington), they are mostly treated as comic toys for
Lee and his star to show off their own masculine superiority. The animated
sequences of Mackie-faced sperm fighting to get to the eggs are especially
odious. Forced to take the easier route by neglecting the politics, Lee has
only succeeded in setting himself backwards by years.
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