johngriffin0928
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.
nikki-248
Spike Lee is brilliant!!! I love the thought of doing this myself. Good idea. I love the scene where his ex is getting her cut, with her confident self, she played in Ray with Jamie Foxx as his wife. She is an excellent actress. Spike knows how to pick a good cast. I wish I would've done the same as those women, what a deal!!! Men are nothing but sex objects too and should be treated as such, well for procreation and women wouldn't be so crazy over them, crying if he cheats. Before I saw this movie last night I watched Spikes Shes Gotta Have It! Excellent cinematography! I wish I saw She Hates Me when it came out!!! Of course the lesbians were self assured, loving the fact that they know what they want, and not betraying themselves with being with a man, which happens so often today. I also liked how the main character Jack was getting all emotional about it, just like a woman, lol he felt used but paid like a Whore at the same time. The sex scenes looked great, Spike got some freakiness in him, lol, but the plot about his job could've been cut out to me, and should have had more scenes with his ex and her girlfriend getting it on, it looked sooo real. I was wondering why Queen Latifah, Missy and Eve weren't in this movie, but that's just me.
Kevin Maness
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!
bigbrutha2da5th
I loved the movie. It reminded me of days gone by when I actually stood for something. In my opinion it follows typical Spike Lee style of story telling and cinematography. Spike is still a great story teller--even if you don't like the stories he chooses to tell. The story starts out with a young African American executive faced with a moral decision of whistle-blowing on his company. He apparently makes a decent salary and it will cost him loose this job. He makes his decision and has to live with the consequences. We follow the path of his decision which goes in a whole new direction--which could be its own movie, "She's Gotta Have It Part 2." As with many Spike Lee films, it is designed to make you think. There are several key issues: Lesbians' rights to have children, corporate corruption, health-care, and parental responsibility. I did not find it as preachy as some of Spike's other works but I haven't been to church in some time so I just may not remember what "preachy" is.
