She Hate Me



"When I think of Enron, I don't think of Ellen."

- Anonymous IMDB poster

All Lesbians Want Kids, the movie.

She Hate Me is a 2004 comedy-drama film directed by Spike Lee. John Henry "Jack" Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) is a Harvard graduate and a financially successful, upwardly mobile executive at a biotechnology firm. After a colleague commits suicide, Armstrong uncovers corrupt business practices and attempts to blow the whistle. He's promptly fired on false grounds of security fraud, and his assets are frozen. Things are looking bleak, when all of a sudden his ex-fiancée Fatima Goodrich (Kerry Washington), who came out as a lesbian and broke up with him 4 years ago, turns up at his door. She and her girlfriend Alex Guerrero (Dania Ramirez) offer him a proposition; they want babies, and they're willing to offer him $10,000 dollars to impregnate them both. After he reluctantly (oh come on) agrees, Fatima brings him friends of hers, all of whom likewise want kids and are willing to pay him $10,000 to impregnate them. He acts as though it's hell (give us a break...) Meanwhile, he pushes for his whisteblowing to be taken seriously.

...Yeah, as you can imagine, many felt it was hypocritical for Spike Lee, a well-known advocate of African American rights, to make a film that set gay rights back about a million years. Whatsmore, as the page quote demonstrates, many people didn't think a plot involving a man impregnating lesbians for money and a plot involving the same man trying to expose corrupt business practices, with reference to Enron and Watergate, fit together all that well.

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This film provides examples of:

 * All Lesbians Want Kids: Enforced beyond description.
 * Butch Lesbian: One batch of Armstrong's customers consists of these.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive
 * Girl On Girl Is Hot: Milked for all its worth to mixed results from the audience.
 * Lipstick Lesbian: Fatima, Alex and most of the others are this.
 * Nixon Mask: A guy wearing one appears in a dream sequence.
 * Take That: What many Real Life lesbians took the whole film as.
 * Roger Ebert took an alternative interpretation and saw the entire film as a Take That to every plot device used in the film. Or, as he admitted, he hoped it was and not that all the preposterous plot elements were supposed to be played straight.