She Hate Me Review
Following Mo'_Better_Blues and He_Got_Game in Spike_Lee's string of Ebonics-themed titles, She Hate Me is an unwieldy mess of a movie that, at the time of its release, was the director's worst-received film. It starts out promisingly enough. The bracing opening 20 minutes include a violent suicide, corporate malfeasance, and the beginnings of an ethical quandary about whistle-blowing. What a red herring. From this point, the film shifts abruptly into a broad and uncomfortable comedy, in which a blackballed executive begins impregnating New York's entire lesbian community, represented through a rainbow of ugly stereotypes. Mashed in with all this is a jumbled criticism of Republicans, namely Nixon circa the Watergate scandal, and what Lee thinks are illuminating dialogues about homosexuality and surrogate parenting, which actually feature some of his most ham-fisted writing. The over-stretching may be trademark Lee, but the total lack of perceptiveness is not. Nor are the miniature faces of star Anthony_Mackie affixed to the heads of sperm swimming through these lesbians' Fallopian tubes, a visual gag better fitting a film like Look_Who's_Talking than one directed by a giant of his generation. As bizarre as it sometimes is, She Hate Me is also dispiritingly conventional -- it closes with a hackneyed courtroom scene complete with 11th hour vindicating evidence and a righteous speech. But the film's worst blunders are reserved for its casting, and not just Woody_Harrelson playing the Saturday_Night_Live version of a crooked CEO. Lee indulges his nearly pathological need to cast John_Turturro, but offers no better fit than the Mafia boss father of the character played by Monica_Bellucci -- an actress only seven years his junior. Derek Armstrong, Rovi
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