trout8783 I really enjoyed this film, and I wish it were my life. Here is this guy who is wanted for his good genes and brain power by like twenty lesbian couples. He is tracked down by an ex-girlfriend who is bisexual and is in a relationship with a woman now, but she wants to have children and she chooses the main character. She knows of a bunch of other lesbian couples, of all races, who want children and so she helps the main character start a business. He basically is a high class male prostitute throughout the movie and gets to have intercourse with a bunch of fine lesbians. He starts to realize that he is going to have a bunch of kids but none he actually gets to father, and it seems as though his fatherly instincts kick in and he goes back to the ex-girlfriend who convinces her female lover to let the three of them have a love triangle and he can be the father of his two children with them. I think that this is the ultimate male fantasy but most women would say this film is stupid but all the guys who would want no strings attached sex with beautiful lesbians and get paid thousands of dollars for would love this film.

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!

Nicoletn11 This movie really surprised me. I mean, I was raised watching Spike Lee movies simply because he was doing things other young directors weren't doing. He was the voice for voiceless masses of us blacks folks. He gave a platform to situations in the hood that most other people could case less about. However, as I aged and developed an eye for critiquing Spike's movies, I realized that he has this same formula for his movies which he rarely veered from and he always had to beat you over the head with the message. She Hate Me breaks that mold, just a pinch because he still follows his model, but this movie was surprisingly good. While I do feel he did bit off way more than he could have possibly chewed in 2 hours, he did address most of the issues he brought up quite well in the time alloted. Okay, from the previews, you know there's his guy whose lesbian "friend" approaches him to impregnate him, which in and of itself is a bit weird, but the movie is so much more deeper than that simply plot. Spike tackled tons of issues, mostly current issues that we all deal with now, but ultimately, the movie tackles, what would you do and how far would you go for money? This is a good movie worth spending 2 hours of time dissecting. I'm always recommending buying it so you can watch time and time again and discuss.

ShuhDiamond 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...