Trop c'est trop

This movie is one that you can watch with friends at that time of the night where anything is funny. Not to say this movie isn't any good, but at that time, you can better appreciate the small, not as funny parts about it. A good movie that my friends and I recite to take away the bore of the day. Such as the group therapy scene, well done, one that keeps you laughing even when the scene is far gone. Farrelly Brothers continue to please in this cheap laugh comedy, that made us love the brothers in the first place.

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!"

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.

It's a world of closets filled with pantsuits that reek of stale flatulation; of unlovely middle-aged guys with Skittle-sized warts and erratically gapped sets of teeth; of post-menopausal ladies in Midwestern pastel parkas who are themselves a symphony of eye-crossing odors; of bandaged banged-up ears and store-bought vocoders for stroke victims and bugeyed cripples who look no better falling down than standing up. It is, to quote Devo, "a beautiful world! For you! For you! Not ME!"

Into this ironic Shriners' Parade of Middle American ugliness--the true warts-and-all U.S. not seen in a cinema that spends most of its time on Manhattan's mean streets and in Beverly Hills High--a tiny flashlight of adolescent sweetness longs to shine. It's the true-blue, high-school-sweetheart brand of love that the Farrelly Brothers interpose as contrast to their fat-guy-in-a-Dacron-shirt cosmos. This is what gives the Farrellys' movies a tender/hysterical tone that recalls the alternations between beachside passivity and horrific violence in the movies of Beat Takeshi. It is their signature structure.

SAY IT ISN'T SO is not one of their own--it's jobbed-out to some writer friends of the brothers, who have done a serviceable impersonation of the grotesqueries of the Farrellys. SAY IT is a programmer--it feels like a B movie, a bottom-half-of-the-double-biller, which is a nice, unusual feeling in this day and age (where genuinely B material is given a Big Movie importance). Chris Klein is the orphan longing to find his mom, and Heather Graham is the hopelessly inept hair stylist who loves him; DNA tests and stamped documents prove it after they have consummated their love--they're brother and sister. But incest is the least of this movie's concerns. The filmmakers strain to crank up the Farrelly Machine--which involves a new variant on "punching a cow," shoving a paralyzed stroke victim's face into the smelly rump of an ugly truck driver, and a gag involving Sally Field's underarms that still makes me gag just thinking about it.

Sweetness rules, though: Graham and Klein are ideal as John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane. And after sitting through the massaging blandnesses of THE MEXICAN and HEARTBREAKERS, this movie's honest movement toward the emetic is refreshing. It shakes the audience up a little bit, rather than puts them to sleep. SAY IT doesn't approximate the high points of SOMETHING ABOUT MARY or KINGPIN, but its evocation of a world you won't see on VH-1 stays with you like the smell of grandma's doilies, mothballs, and brick-hard Brach's Candies.

When I first found out about this title I first observed the reviews, and surprisingly they were unsatisfactory and negative, and along with that the movie had a bad Meta-score with top news outlets speak of bad, lacklustre comedy but if you look past the 25 Meta-score and view the movie as a witty, cheesy comedy made by the all time favourite brothers you'll soon like it. So many people view the movie in a way that isn't, and to say it isn't so, just watch it with the mind set that it's a comedy and nothing else.