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He Hate Women

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It would be difficult to imagine a movie from a major filmmaker sounding worse that Spike Lee’s latest joint, She Hate Me. The centerpiece of the film apparently involves a fired whistleblower who impregnates a series of lipstick lesbians, all of whom end up really digging it. Evidently, just to summarize this is to condemn it. (Put it this way: can you imagine Lee making a film involving pimping a het guy out to a bunch of gay men, and finding out that it’s what he really likes? Me neither.) As one critic says:

Spike Lee’s “She Hate Me” begins as an indictment of corporate greed, morphs into a lesbian sex farce, takes a left turn and becomes a “Godfather” spoof, then returns to its populist beginnings with an ending that Frank Capra might have filmed, had Capra been into miniskirt-wearing lesbians who had a secret hankering for some good, old- fashioned heterosexual love.

Lee’s misogyny and homophobia aren’t exactly news, but I think it’s worth specifying what makes them doubly problematic. There is no necessary relationship between good gender politics and good art; I mean, give me Phillip Roth over Barbara Kingsolver any day. The additional problem is that Lee’s sexism also ruins many of his movies aesthetically. He Got Game might have been a very fine movie, despite the ridiculous premise, had he not stopped the movie dead in its tracks to have his characters interminably mouth inanities about how white women are all sluts but at least black women are whores. Summer of Sam wasn’t helped by being more obsessed with ass-fucking than Wonkette, and (unlike Wonkette) Lee doesn’t mean to be funny. Lee doesn’t just have many bad ideas about sex and gender, but he’s so convinced that they’re brilliant that he’s insufferably didactic about them.

The secret to Lee is that he’s an extremely gifted director who is a mediocre-to-poor (and always uneven) writer. It’s not a coincidence that his two best movies of the past 10 years–Clockers and the superb 25th Hour–were based on other people’s novels.

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