This film is the "uncanny valley effect" of romantic-comedies. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori theorized that the more a robot resembles a human being in appearance and action, the more appealing it will be until it become so much like a human that people's perception flips. Instead of seeing a robot that charmingly looks like a person, people will see a person who looks creepily unnatural and will be repulsed by it. That describes the disturbingly inhuman nature of Because I Said So. It's as though it were made by some thing that has never experienced human behavior but has only observed it from a distance.
This repellent tale concerns a mother and her three daughters. Daphne Wilder (Diane Keaton) has managed to marry off her two oldest girls, but is still trying to get her youngest down the aisle. Milly Wilder (Mandy Moore) hasn't had much luck on her own, so Daphne decides to go on an internet dating site and find a guy to go out with her daughter. She doesn't put Milly's profile on the site, however. No, she specifically puts an profile on the site identifying herself as a mother looking for a guy for her daughter, then she proceeds to meet all of the prospective suitors in a restaurant one day. However, the movie treats that behavior as charmingly neurotic and not frighteningly dysfunctional.
After an army of losers, Daphne finally finds a handsome architect named Jason (Tom Everett Scott) and essentially tells him "Go get my daughter!" A musician named Johnny (Gabriel Macht) watched as Daphne went through this whole twisted cattle call and tells Daphne he's interested in meeting Milly. And even though Daphne tells him to forget it, he still decides to try and date the spawn of such a controlling and inappropriate mother.
Milly starts seeing both men and having sex with both of them, as well as meeting Jason's family and paling around with Johnny's young son. Yet, Milly neither tells Jason or Johnny about the other nor even attempts to decide which guy she'd rather be with. So, in addition to Daphne being an absolute horror of a parent, Milly is portrayed as a callow slut stringing along two decent guys without any concern for either of their feelings. And those are the two women the movie wants us to like.
Eventually, both Daphne's and Milly's bad behavior comes to light, though how truly awful they both are is entirely minimized. The story then performs an emotional gymnastics routine worthy of the Olympics to get Milly back together with one of her lovers, despite her not deserving either of them. That leads to one of the guys giving a "Jerry McGuire speech" about how much he needs Milly, even though she's been nothing but a terrible person who's done atrocious things.
This is one of the most bizarrely tone deaf films I've ever watched. Daphne Wilder is controlling, intrusive, undermining and thoughtless. She's the sort of mother people spend years complaining about to their therapist, yet this movie thinks she's endearing. Milly Wilder is selfish, weak, annoying and almost sociopathically uncaring of other's feelings, yet the movie thinks we should be rooting for her happiness. It doesn't help things that Diane Keaton gives one of the most broadly mannered and aggressively quirky performances you'll ever see and Mandy Moore tries to mimic what Lucile Ball would have been like if she had been utterly talentless. This film believes the audience will want to see these characters end up living happily ever after. What you'll really want to see is them ending up dead in a ditch.
The rest of the cast doesn't make out well either. Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo as the other two Wilder daughters aren't as aggravating as Keaton and Moore, but that's largely because their characters are barely more than stage props that exist in the story so Keaton and Moore can talk to someone besides each other. Gabriel Macht and Tom Everett Scott do the best acting in this cinematic sewer but their characters are impossibly clichéd and couldn't be more two dimensional if they were sheets of butcher's paper run over by a steamroller.
Screenwriters Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson came up with dialog that sounds like they've never spoken to each other or any other living soul. Director Michael Lehmann chucks bits of lame and pathetic slapstick arbitrarily into the story and falls back on the lowest common denominator of all romantic-comedies. When something happens that's supposed to be "funny", he repeatedly cuts to a reaction shot from a dog because that's supposed to make it "funnier".
Because I Said So is beyond bad. It's beyond awful. This movie is ASS. I don't ever want to meet anyone who likes this film.
This repellent tale concerns a mother and her three daughters. Daphne Wilder (Diane Keaton) has managed to marry off her two oldest girls, but is still trying to get her youngest down the aisle. Milly Wilder (Mandy Moore) hasn't had much luck on her own, so Daphne decides to go on an internet dating site and find a guy to go out with her daughter. She doesn't put Milly's profile on the site, however. No, she specifically puts an profile on the site identifying herself as a mother looking for a guy for her daughter, then she proceeds to meet all of the prospective suitors in a restaurant one day. However, the movie treats that behavior as charmingly neurotic and not frighteningly dysfunctional.
After an army of losers, Daphne finally finds a handsome architect named Jason (Tom Everett Scott) and essentially tells him "Go get my daughter!" A musician named Johnny (Gabriel Macht) watched as Daphne went through this whole twisted cattle call and tells Daphne he's interested in meeting Milly. And even though Daphne tells him to forget it, he still decides to try and date the spawn of such a controlling and inappropriate mother.
Milly starts seeing both men and having sex with both of them, as well as meeting Jason's family and paling around with Johnny's young son. Yet, Milly neither tells Jason or Johnny about the other nor even attempts to decide which guy she'd rather be with. So, in addition to Daphne being an absolute horror of a parent, Milly is portrayed as a callow slut stringing along two decent guys without any concern for either of their feelings. And those are the two women the movie wants us to like.
Eventually, both Daphne's and Milly's bad behavior comes to light, though how truly awful they both are is entirely minimized. The story then performs an emotional gymnastics routine worthy of the Olympics to get Milly back together with one of her lovers, despite her not deserving either of them. That leads to one of the guys giving a "Jerry McGuire speech" about how much he needs Milly, even though she's been nothing but a terrible person who's done atrocious things.
This is one of the most bizarrely tone deaf films I've ever watched. Daphne Wilder is controlling, intrusive, undermining and thoughtless. She's the sort of mother people spend years complaining about to their therapist, yet this movie thinks she's endearing. Milly Wilder is selfish, weak, annoying and almost sociopathically uncaring of other's feelings, yet the movie thinks we should be rooting for her happiness. It doesn't help things that Diane Keaton gives one of the most broadly mannered and aggressively quirky performances you'll ever see and Mandy Moore tries to mimic what Lucile Ball would have been like if she had been utterly talentless. This film believes the audience will want to see these characters end up living happily ever after. What you'll really want to see is them ending up dead in a ditch.
The rest of the cast doesn't make out well either. Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo as the other two Wilder daughters aren't as aggravating as Keaton and Moore, but that's largely because their characters are barely more than stage props that exist in the story so Keaton and Moore can talk to someone besides each other. Gabriel Macht and Tom Everett Scott do the best acting in this cinematic sewer but their characters are impossibly clichéd and couldn't be more two dimensional if they were sheets of butcher's paper run over by a steamroller.
Screenwriters Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson came up with dialog that sounds like they've never spoken to each other or any other living soul. Director Michael Lehmann chucks bits of lame and pathetic slapstick arbitrarily into the story and falls back on the lowest common denominator of all romantic-comedies. When something happens that's supposed to be "funny", he repeatedly cuts to a reaction shot from a dog because that's supposed to make it "funnier".
Because I Said So is beyond bad. It's beyond awful. This movie is ASS. I don't ever want to meet anyone who likes this film.