She Hate Me (2004) or, Champion of the Lesbians

♥♥♥♥

+ Worst Dollar Return of the Year: 0.18 Times the Cost

Star Anthony Mackie has a deer-in-the-headlights kind of vacant look on his face on this brightly colored poster for Spike Lee's She Hate Me

Jack Armstrong works for a medical company, which manipulates the value of its new HIV-drug. He decides to blow the whistle on the scam, is consequently fired and instead begins impregnating lesbians for money. - Which ends him up in court.

She Hate Me is written by Michael Genet (Talk to Me (2007)) and great Georgian co-writer/co-producer/director Spike Lee (She's Gotta Have It (1986)). 
There's runs a tongue-in-cheek line from Lee's great theatrical debut She's Gotta Have It to She Hate Me almost 20 years later, - possibly implicitly saying something about the filmmaker's own private experiences with women? The latter film is way less youthful, fresh and vibrant than Lee's early work. Implicitly, again, She Hate Me is in favor of gay families, which are at the film's center, but it soaks its pro-LGBT politics in a heavy bath of vinegar, which seems always to be aware of these family constructions as being 'wrong' in some unexpressed way, which is weak and uncool of Lee.
She Hate Me still works as an off-center late-night watch with plenty of New York aroma to it. It has a sex idea at its core, - call it smart or fun, - that forces Armstrong to have actual sex with the lesbians, although this also comes off possibly male-chauvinist, as the lesbians are wildly excited about both the male body and sex with a man. (The very thing lesbians by definition are not traditionally interested in...)
What lifts this flawed conception, in the end, and gets it flying enjoyably still, are the performances: Anthony Mackie (We Are Marshall (2006)), Kerry Washington (Sin (2003)), Woody Harrelson (Wildcats (1986)) and John Turturro (Margot at the Wedding (2007)) are all good, the latter in a mafia part that has him as the father of Monica Bellucci (The Apartment (1996)), who is 7½ years younger than him in real life, a bit of a stretch. Despite all these problems, I still liked She Hate Me.

Related posts:
 
Spike Lee:  The day after the day after ... the 2019 Oscars

2004 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 
Top 10: Best crime movies reviewed by Film Excess to date
25th Hour (2002) or, Taking a Second Chance

Listen to 4 minutes of the film's soundtrack here

Cost: 8 mil. $
Box office: 1.5 mil. $
= Box office disaster (returned 0.18 times its cost)
[She Hate Me premiered 20 July (New York) and runs 138 minutes. Shooting took place in all of New York's 5 boroughs and in New Jersey from March - May 2004. The film opened #55 to a 55k $ first weekend in 11 theaters in North America, where it never achieved a higher rank, although it spread out to 28 theaters, grossing 366k $ (24.4 % of the total gross). The film's biggest market was France with 653k $ (43.5 %). North America was the 2nd biggest, and 3rd biggest was Italy with 226k $ (17.7 %). The film is the 2nd lowest-grossing of Lee's career, behind Red Hook Summer (2012). Roger Ebert gave the film a 3/4 star review, equal in rating to this one. Lee returned with a TV movie, 2 episodes of a miniseries, a short and a movie segment before hitting cinemas with a proper work of his own again with Inside Man (2006). Mackie returned in Haven (2004); Washington in Ray (2004). She Hate Me is rotten at 19 % with a 3.93/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of She Hate Me?

Django Unchained (2012) - Tarantino's gutsy, colorful 'Southern'

♥♥♥♥♥

+ Best Western of the Year

The potent, black-white-and-red poster for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Django is a slave, who has been sold away from his wife Broomhilda. He is now bought free from a strange, German bounty hunter; together they are to kill wanted men and find and rescue Broomhilda!

Django Unchained is not quite like any other film. It is like a modern piece of blaxploitation, but in epic length (165 minutes), which is justified by the film having a mission which the majority of the old spaghetti westerns it pays homage to didn't: Unchained entertains while exposing slavery as the epitome of depravity that it was.
The film is technically astute, with unusual musical choices and first-class performances from several cast members: Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz (Carnage (2011)), who, however, is perhaps just being himself, more or less; Kerry Washington (Scandal (2012-15)) is stunning; Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wold of Wall Street (2013)) is formidable; Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction (1994)) has probably never been better than he is here as the ultra-low slave handler Stephen; and Jamie Foxx (Ray (2004)) just is Django!
The film also has fun cameos and overly bloody shoot-outs, which may appeal more to some than master writer-director Quentin Tarantino's (Reservoir Dogs (1992)) beautiful dialogs that also elevate the film. He won the Best Screenplay Oscar for his work here.
Django Unchained is a filthy, undeniably still a bit overlong raised middle finger to racism and slavery.

Related posts:

Quentin Tarantino: 2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V] 

2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III] 
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
Death Proof (2007) - Tarantino's awesome, rubber-burning Grindhouse homage 
Desperado (1995) - Rodriguez' second Mexico actioner is a sexy, latino fireball (actor)

Watch the trailer for the film here

Cost: 100 mil. $
Box office: 425.4 mil. $
= Big hit
[Unchained is Tarantino's highest-grossing film to date. It was shot in 130 days in California, Wyoming and Louisiana. Its premiere was moved a couple of weeks due to the Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting, so Unchained came out on Christmas Day. It was criticized for its violence, handling of slavery and use of the f-word, but became a huge crowd-pleaser anyway, grossing 162.8 mil. $ (38 % of the total gross) in North America, following a 30.6 mil. $ first weekend. It is Tarantino's first film that was approved by the Chinese authorities for release in the country. Besides the two Oscars for Tarantino and Waltz, Unchained was also nominated for Best Picture, Cinematography and Sound Editing. Additionally, the sale of DVD and Blurays of the film has accrued more than 62.2 mil. $ in North America alone.]

What do you think of Django Unchained?

The Details (2011) or, Foibles of the Sexless Marriage

♥♥♥♥

+ Best Mega-flop Movie of the Year

Most people wouldn't want to be Tobey Maguire in Jacob Aaron Estes' The Details

QUICK REVIEW:

Our hero in The Details is a sexually neglected doctor/husband/father, whose new lawn gets plagued by raccoons, which begins a downwards-facing spiral for his otherwise comfortable life.

Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man (2002)) lights up in this comical-dramatic showcase, and Dennis Haysbert (Dear White People (2014)), Laura Linney (Mystic River (2003)), Elizabeth Banks (Walk of Shame (2014)), Ray Liotta (Goodfellas (1990)) and red-hot Kerry Washington (Django Unchained (2012)) are also all great. - Haysbert even provides a few touching moments in Details.
This is a VERY untraditional American film that walks far into the realm of dark comedy and the dark crannies of drama. It is funny and surprisingly believable and dramatic until SPOILER the third act, wherein everything in the narrative gets 'solved' in a long car scene, which isn't exactly the solution one had hoped for, plus the scene includes a few lines simply because the writer/director thinks they sound good.
He is Californian Jacob Aaron Estes (Summoning (2001), short), and Details fits well together with his only other feature to date, if one wanted to do an auteur analysis of Estes' works, Mean Creek (2004), which is also SPOILER about an unfortunate murder. A perhaps intended point after watching The Details, (perhaps not), SPOILER could be that grownups seemingly don't have to let such a murder take them down, whereas kids are more helpless.
Details lights a fire under many prejudices, like our stereotypes of the good doctor and the brutal Italian-American. The film isn't for everyone, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Related post:

2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III] 

Laura Linney and Tobey Maguire in Jacob Aaron Estes' The Details

Watch the great trailer for the film here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 63k $ (US only)
= Mega-flop
[The details surrounding The Details are mysterious and hard to come by, but it is clear that something behind the scene went awfully wrong between Estes and distributor The Weinstein Company: The Weinsteins apparently paid a handsome sum for distribution rights and then tried to recut the film and held it under wraps for a long period before finally releasing it on very few screens (less than a hundred) and only in the US! No wonder the film didn't make any money. Estes seems to have been the one who has paid the dearest for this utter failure: He hasn't directed since and has only now gotten a co-writing gig on Rings (2015), the third movie in the Ring horror franchise...]

What do you think of The Details?
Any details on why the fate of this film has been so dismal and/or the inside stories of the making of it are welcomed