Product Description

A whistleblower now unemployed and desperate for cash accepts an offer to be a sperm donor for his ex-girlfriend, now a lesbian. He is soon inundated with offers from other lesbians while his former employer questions his ethics.
Genre: Feature Film Urban Comedy
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-JUN-2006
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27048 in DVD
• Brand: MACKIE,ANTHONY
• Released on: 2005-02-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French, Portuguese, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 138 minutes

Amazon.com
In a long and varied career, She Hate Me is easily one of Spike Lee's most unusual films. On the one hand, it's a drama. On the other, it's a comedy. Then there's the structure: a crazy quilt made up out of several different stories. Even the style is a patchwork incorporating animation and pseudo-documentary--in the vein of Lee's 1986 hit She's Gotta Have It. It all revolves around one John Henry "Jack" Armstrong (8 Mile's Anthony Mackie), a successful executive at a biotech company much like ImClone (the one that brought Martha Stewart down). When Jack blows the whistle and loses his job, ex-fiancée Fatima (Ray's Kerry Washington), who left him for another woman, offers the now-penniless Jack $10,000 to impregnate her. All goes well, so they set up business together, and he proceeds to impregnate countless gay women, including mafia princess Simona (Monica Bellucci). If there's one thing that keeps it all together, it's Mackie, who handles the many changes Lee puts him through with admirable aplomb. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

From The New Yorker
The frenzied new film from Spike Lee, who is appalled and aroused to a new and bewildering degree. We start amid financial scandal, as Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) gets fired from a pharmaceutical company for leaking details of its mismanagement. That promising topic is, however, speedily left behind, as Jack turns, without warning, to the lucrative trade of sperm donation; to be specific, he impregnates professional lesbians for at least five thousand bucks a pop. The movie unstintingly applauds such heavy industry, even morphing into animation for the depiction of our hero's eager sperm; add the spurious departure into Mafia land (complete with a miscast John Turturro), plus a maladroit flashback to the Watergate break-in, and what we wind up with is explicable only as collage-a bright, multifarious jamming together of racial wrath and horny celebration, better known as a complete mess. Perhaps, in an election year, you need to make this much noise to be heard. With Monica Bellucci, Woody Harrelson, Brian Dennehy, and a dirty-mouthed Ellen Barkin. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

What could Spike Lee have been thinking?
She Hate Me is pretty much a thematic mess. Poorly executed, overly long, with a narrative that is all over the place, the movie is probably one of the worst films to be released in recent years. Viewers will be severely mistaken if they start watching this movie thinking that it's going to be some smart, savvy corporate espionage thriller, because it's certainly not. Instead, She Hate Me is a strange and outlandish mixture of three odd movies in one: It's about a whistleblower, an Italian crime syndicate, and most bizarrely, it's a story about a man who makes money through impregnating lesbians.

A really good Anthony Mackie plays Jack Armstrong. Jack is an extremely ambitious corporate wiz kid, who works for a biotech corporation that is on the verge of releasing an AIDS vaccine. However, the FDA has summarily rejected the vaccine. Jack soon learns from a peculiar German scientist (David Bennett), who later suicides that some kind of shady Enron-like financial transactions have taken place, concerning a senior executive (Ellen Barkin) and the company C.E.O. (Woody Harrelson). Jack decides to blow the whistle, and consequently loses his job, and has his financial accounts frozen.

Determined to keep the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed, Jack receives a visit from his gorgeous ex-fiancée (Kerry Washington) and her lesbian lover (Dania Ramirez), who offer him ten thousand dollars to get them pregnant. His talents as a lover and baby-maker begin to catch on, and soon women including the daughter of a mafia don, played by Monica Bellucci, are lining up to sample his talents. Strangely, although they're all lesbians, they seem to be enjoying the whole process, which when you think about it, is kind of insulting.

Interspersed with this sorry story is a tale of Watergate remembrances, some digs at George W. Bush, an attempt at showing procreation through animation, and a nonsensical subplot involving Jack's best friend as a sperm donor. There's a terrible monologue between Jack and his ex-fiancé as they talk about why they split up and question her sexual identity. There's also another dreadful scene where Jack visits and is lectured to by the mafia don (John Turturro), whose pretending he's in the Godfather movie.

It's hard to figure out what Spike Lee is trying to say in this movie. Maybe he feels that lesbianism is a myth, African-American men have too many children, and prostitution should be legal. Perhaps he is also saying that racism is institutionalized in the corporate world, and that business fraud is commonplace. There are lots of inane tirades that go on forever about white white-collar crime, racial double standards and parental responsibility. As She Hate Me slowly and endlessly unravels, it doesn't take long for the viewer to figure out that this is a terrible, disastrous hodgepodge of a film - view it at your own risk. Mike Leonard February 05.

The Sperminator!
This movie is like 2 and a half hours long!!!
WHY?!?!?
It can't decide if it wanted to be a movie about a young black
professional male blowing the whistle on an "Enron like"
organization and himself caught in the middle of it,
or just being about a brother who was down on his luck
and due to frozen assets,etc FORCED into being
the "Sperminator" to a whole bunch of "biological-clockticking"
lesbians.

I kinda liked the second story better.
But at the same time this movie is a bit too unrealistic.
I am trying to understand why they think that
every other lesbian couple or individual WANTS
to have a child...let alone the "old fashioned way"
(by way of the male species that is)
They need to get those statistics right before putting
it out there like that.
Then to top it these lesbians are acting more like they
are Bi-sexual and enjoying themselves in the process,
no complaints or anything..it's like they WANTED to be
"turned out" by this guy.
And worse...they pay $10,000 for this when all they had
to do was get someone from around the way, buy him
2 chicken wings and a blue soda and boom! They would have
saved all the drama and trouble..and money.

There are a few celebrity appearances such as:
John Turturro,Q-Tip,Brian Dennehey,Spike Lee's sister,
Lonetta McKey,Jim BRown,Woody Harrelson,but they don't do
much for the script other than to make this movie seem
like it's not just another "hood" movie about a guy
skeezin' on woman.
It's like this was unncessarily long to accomodate the
"Enron-like" scandal plot and the "baby making machine"
plot..they should have made it one plot and save the time
and money.

HIghly Akward
To begin, I am relieved that neither Spike nor Joie are in front of the camera like usual. I will give him one star for his creativity. He always brings that to the movie. I will give him the other star for tackling such strong content. Another character in his favor. However, he loses me with the whole flow of the movie. It seemed to be "cut and pasted" . It doesn't settle down into a story line. The editing is chaotic, the thought pattern is muddled. So there's no chance to really indentify with or connect with the character as with the other movies. As a result, it made the film hard to follow and just a screen full of Spike Lee going wild. This was far below of that he is capable of. This seemed to be a rushed project with issues that could have made two good projects versus one confusing one.The only redeeming quality comes from the alluding in my opening statement, the fact that Spike himself wasn't in front of the camera.