Ohne Worte

In the beginning of the movie, when they develop their relationship, they are unaware of any possibility that they might be brother and sister; therefore it is highly misrepresentative to say this is a movie about incest. This movie definitely shows how people can be closed-minded and cruel. This movie is also another rip-off to the extent that it starts nice and sweet but becomes outrageously extreme. I liked the first part but it was very difficult for me to watch the last of it. The ending I think was nice but I was not paying a lot of attention then.

This movie is definitely an example of something that would be more with less; less outrageous would make it much more enjoyable, especially since Heather Graham is so cute.

This movie is typical of the raunchy comedy you can expect from Bobby & Peter Farrelly. Perhaps I haven't seen enough of their movies to make an adequate judgment, but I didn't notice anything "missing vibes" from it. There are a few surprises in it however, that could make you ask questions beginning with "Who Knew?":

Who knew Orlando Jones could be cool? If you saw his 7-Up commercials you wouldn't think he was. For the record, his character was not Jimi Hendrix, or his ghost, or some nut who thought he was Hendrix.

Who knew Sally Field could pass herself off as a villainess, and a comical one at that? Fans who like her best during her Gidget/Flying Nun years will be just as surprised as those who praise her for Sybil, Norma Rae, Places in the Heart, and similar TV-Movies & tear-jerkers.

Who knew the Farrelly Brothers would make a woman suffer so much heartbreak? In There's Something About Mary, we have Ben Stiller sobbing it up over the presumed loss of his object of desire. Here we have Heather Graham doing the same thing over a man she loves, but still believes is her brother.

Who knew an otherwise sugar sweet poem would be used as a weapon on any pets spending their final moments on earth? There's the scene where Chris Kline recites the poem he uses for abandoned animals he's about to exterminate for Heather Graham. I don't care how beautiful she thought it was, if I were any of those animals I'd be as scared of that poem as I would of the idea of being killed on the expiration date.

Anyway, this movie has a lot of sleaze, a lot of heart, and a lot of surprises. If you're not the uptight prim and proper-type, check it out.

The title of Say It Isn't So is a better review of the movie than anything I can write. Just when I thought I had seen the worst 2001 had to offer (Including, among others, Freddy Got Fingered, 3000 Miles to Graceland and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), this movie pops up on late night cable and makes me wish it hadn't. Let's be blunt; this movie stinks.

If there is a God in the universe in which this movie takes place, then Gilbert Noble (Chris Klein) is his favorite person to torture when He's having a bad day. Gillie is an orphan, a lonely guy working at his local animal shelter. He finds the love of his life Jo Wingfield (Heather Graham), but there's a problem. It seems that Jo's parents are also Gillie's. Jo leaves and finds another guy, when Gillie discovers that he isn't really her brother, so he heads after her.

The incest joke could, I suppose, have been good for one laugh in a movie. But as the WHOLE movie, it is a rather thin, and the script (by Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow) feels like a Farrelly Brothers ripoff, not the real thing. Odd since Peter and Bobby Farrelly are actually two of the producers on this movie.

As told in the film, everyone in the entire world except Gillie, Jo and one or two other characters, is cold, heartless, and greedy. Gillie is held to a standard of behavior whereby he would need precognitive telepathic abilities to act properly. Even though he didn't know he was sleeping with his sister, he is ridiculed mercilessly, scorned, and abandoned by his "parents." You feel bad for Gillie, especially since Jo is an awful mate, except that she looks like Heather Graham. They fall for each other as she gives him an awful haircut and cuts off his ear. This, Van Gogh fans, is played for laughs.

The movie is a series of low notes. I thought it couldn't get worse when Sally Field wiped her armpits with a sandwich to give to her stroke-inflicted husband, but that was before the movie shifted locations to Beaver, Oregon, hitting the audience over the head with Beaver joke after Beaver joke. They finally flog that bit to death, but just when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, Gillie sticks his arm in a bull's behind up to his shoulder, then gets dragged through town, then loses something in there he has to retrieve. Chris Klein, so good in Election and American Pie, followed those two fine movies with Say It Isn't So and Rollerball. Say this for him, it's only up from here.

The only reason to watch this movie is the soundtrack, featuring songs by Teenage Fanclub, Third Eye Blind, and others. I'd like to say skip the movie and get the soundtrack, but apparently the movie did so poorly they never even bothered to release it on CD. I know what you're thinking, "No soundtrack? Say it isn't so!"

I found this movie funnier than I expected. Chris Klein and Heather Graham are adequate in the leads, and Klein's character finds himself falling in love with Graham's. When he finds out they might actually be brother and sister, they have to call it off. A while later, Klein learns that it is all a big mistake, but by this time Graham is engaged to marry another man. Klein then sets out to try to break up that wedding, getting into one jam after another, including a mental hospital, prison, and several fights with the redneck townsfolk.

If you can excuse mild raunchiness and an occassional painful-looking moment, you might like this one.

*** out of ****

First of all, I was disappointed that the Farrellys didn't take the director's seat on this one. I hate when previews mislead you like that. Nine times out of ten, when you hear the announcer in a trailer say, "from horror master Wes Craven" or something of that sort, it means the well-known director is a producer or executive producer in the project, like in this case. But it still has that Farrelly vibe, since J.B. Rogers worked as the A.D. in their previous works.

The movie gets off to a slow start. The gags start off pretty lame. And most of the funny parts shown were given away in the previews. We're handed a lot of quirks, but the comedy doesn't quite gel. We have Richard Jenkins as a wheelchair-bound father, who uses excessive profanity through a voice-box. So far, we're pushing the envelope, but the laughs haven't entirely arrived. I have to admit, though, the nipple-piercing scene was very funny. Luckily, that scene wasn't completely given away in the trailers, because quite frankly--it couldn't be shown on network television.

The film speeds up the comedy with the arrival of Orlando Jones as a pilot with artificial legs and a Jimmi Hendrix hairdo. For some reason, the Farrellys have an obsession with handicapped characters. Jones is very funny, and brings in the film's biggest laughs.

I also think we wander into one-joke territory one time too many. OK, the guy banged his sister. It was funny at first. How many times do we have to hear it repeated in the next gag...and the gag after that...and the gag after that? But the gags improve as we go along, and I got more and more laughs. By the last thirty minutes, I was laughing myself silly! So I wouldn't say this comedy is anywhere near as bad as most people said it was.

"Say It Isn't So" isn't the best comedy of the year, but it often delivers. And it's one of the few comedies that gets funnier as it goes along, rather than starting off with a bang and dragging on as it progresses.

My score: 7 (out of 10)