She's Gotta Have It (1986)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Best movie of this year hands down!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

In Brooklyn, Nola Darling dislikes commitment and she has three lovers at the same time. Jamie Overstreet is sweet and looking for a lifelong companion. Greer Childs is a self-obsessed model. Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) is a loud-mouth childman. Nola, her friends and family narrate the movie talking directly into the camera. Opal Gilstrap is a lesbian who likes Nola. Her free-love policy runs into trouble when the three men discover each other's relationship with Nola.This is Spike Lee's first full-length feature as a writer/director and he is also a major supporting actor. This announces the arrival of a new American cinematic voice. It's inventive and different. Sure the actors are mostly amateurs but everybody has a good charismatic energy. Spike Lee is bringing a lot of different elements into this movie. Most impressively, he has turned the normal sexual relationship between man and woman upside-down. It is a great debut and an imaginative indie.

It left me with the fair and decent taste of realism and romance, sex and love, forethought and spontaneity, intelligence and some of the dumb situations that all less than people find themselves outside of "Holywood" (Hollywood haha). In places people actually can talk to you in public rather than posing and pretending they are gangsters and what they are not.A production about real people trivialized by any mention of a production budget, a script that which is so much alive and intelligent from the last urban bastions like Brooklyn which the "SluBlubrias" (Suburbia) of America and all the industrial world which sorely miss and find it difficult to compete on such levels.A classic in romance and thought which made me feel like I was there.Stupid white productions with budgets and no soul eat your hearts out.The acting was excellent, sad part is that productions like this are not so often show on TV. A great work on the humanism of the human spirit.TEN STARS

When reviewing all of Spike's work, this is hands down, probably my all-time favorite. This project introduced us to the incomparable Mars Blackman, Spike's oh so charming alter ego. "She's Gotta Have It" is a wonderful treatise on the art of love and war from interesting perspectives. On top of that, it is quite hilarious.It is a refreshing look at a black woman who insists on taking control of her sexuality rather than allowing it to be defined by men. There are general male observations, general female observations, and specific cultural outlooks on the art of love and war from an African-American perspective.Tracy Camilla Johns, beautifully portraying the wonderfully developed character, Nola Darling, is perfectly cast as the independent black woman who, in her quest to be sexually independent, realizes this is an uphill journey when dealing with men who still have traditional ideas about women and their roles. She was actively dating more than one man simply because she had adapted the attitude that no one man can provide everything she wanted/needed and furthermore, it was terribly unfair to label her promiscuous for doing so. Interestingly enough, Nola also found that her own reactions when coming up against the same attitude in men, were amazingly traditional.This was a very well-written statement on the ups and downs of love. It also introduces us to Law & Order's Divine Epatha Merkerson in a short but pivotal role as a sex therapist.Eeeeeeeeeeeeeexcellent movie!!!

"She's Gotta Have It" was the beginning of an illustrious career for filmmaker Spike Lee. It starred Tracy Camilla Johns as the sex driven Nola Darling. Her three men were played by Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell and Spike Lee. All the three men had certain traits that stood out. Jamie Street (Hicks) is cool, calm and caring towards Nola. Greer Childs (Terrell) was the obnoxious, stuck up, rude pseudo black man that thought he was better than anyone else. And last but not least was Mars Blackmon (Lee), he was funny and outgoing. Annoying at times but his wit could win you over. This film is full of memorable one liners like "please baby baby baby please" and much more. This film was heavily criticized for it's depiction of women (like all of Spike's films), lesbians (the character Opal) and the reality of it. But nonetheless, "She's Gotta Have It" opened in 1986 to rave reviews and grossed 7 million dollars (not a lot but it is amazing compared to the thousands it took to make it). What made this film a gem is that you don't find characters like these anymore. They all had something about them that was hard to resist. Mars Blackmon became so famous that he was reprised by Lee in Nike Air Jordan commercials with the great Michael Jordan, airing from 1988 to 1995 (the Nola character also appeared in one Air Jordan commercial with Mars Blackmon, the commercial only aired once). "She's Gotta Have It" is a decent start for a young filmmaker and a must see for those that haven't seen it.She's Gotta Have It- Rated R *** out of ****