She Hate Me

She Hate Me may not be Spike Lee's worst film--I haven't seen them all--but it is surely his most ludicrous. A movie that starts out being about a whistleblower and then morphs into a strage, unsettling story about a sperm donor, it rarely seems authentic and, despite it's attempts to be fair to women (specifically, lesbians) it's an extended misogynistic fantasy.

Anthony Mackie is the whistleblower, a young VP at a pharmaceutical company. When his friend, a doctor who is working on a vaccine for AIDS, jumps out a window, he realizes there is serious ethical lapses at the company. He drops a dime, gets fired, and finds his bank account frozen (it's never explained how a corporation could monkey with someone's private bank account). Hard up for cash, he reluctantly takes up his ex's offer--impregnate her and her girlfriend.

Here is where the film gets goofy. The women offer him ten grand for his semen. There are attempts to explain why they don't go to sperm banks, but they are lame. Later, the ex (Kerry Washington) brings more lesbians for him to knock up, but it's six or seven women at a time. Even at my most virile, I don't think I could manage that many pops in one night. It's dumb.

Anyway, this parallels the story of his struggles with the SEC. He gets arrested, and his sperm donating becomes a cause celebre. One of the women he impregnates is Monica Bellucci, who turns out to be the daughter of a Mafia don (John Turturro, who is only seven years older than Bellucci). This makes no sense, except for a chance for Lee to once again explore his strange fascination with Italians.

There are more strange scenes, such as one in which Frank Wills discovers the Watergate break-in, and is accosted by Nixon and his henchmen. The script, by Lee and Michael Genet, connects Mackie to Wills, I guess because they think Wills was mistreated because he was black. I don't know about that, I also don't see Wills as a hero or anything. He found a door with duct tape on it and called it in.

The film is not well acted and miscast (Woody Harrelson is not convincing as the CEO of a major corporation). The doctor who does a header looked very familiar to me, and then I saw that he was David Tennent, who played the boy Oskar in The Tin Drum. There are also many ladies of all colors playing the many lesbians who pass through Mackie's door.