From Spike Lee, two movies in one, the first concerned with a whistle-blower who exposes insider trading, among other malpractices, at a major pharmaceutical company (experimenting on an anti-AIDS pill, for added combustibility), and the second concerned with an interactive sperm donor for a virtual Rainbow Coalition of maternalistic lesbians (high quotient of pulchritude among them: Monica Bellucci, Kerry Washington, Dania Ramirez, Bai Ling, Sarita Choudhury, et al.), servicing them at the studly rate of five, six, seven per night, $10,000 a pop, less a ten-percent finder's fee for his formerly heterosexual former girlfriend. The whistle-blower and the sperm donor are of course one and the same man (Anthony Mackie), and he is pressed to reconcile the two roles once the movie has limped, crawled, squirmed to its climax in front of a Capitol Hill investigatory committee. Along the way, Lee makes room for an historical aside on the remotely parallel case of Frank Wills, the black security guard who found the telltale masking tape at the Watergate break-in, plus an elementary re-cap of the entire affair for younger viewers who might be a bit hazy on antiquity. Lee can perhaps count on some automatic support from those on the same side of the political fence; and the opening credits over rippling, billowing dollar bills of various denominations arouse some hope, some sympathy, some genuine enthusiasm, even before we get to the capper: a portrait of George W. Bush on a three-dollar bill, stamped with the Enron corporate logo. Yet the filmmaker proves, not for the first time, to be a surprisingly ineffective provocateur, hampered here by vapid dialogue, intrusive background music (Terence Blanchard's squealing trumpet), and an ineptly grafted plot whose two halves tend to nullify one another: a fish in Air Jordans. With John Turturro, Jim Brown, Ellen Barkin, Woody Harrelson, Q-Tip. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd