Trop c'est trop

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)

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.

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.

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.