Trop c'est trop

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.

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 ****

I can't believe the lame reviews IMDB readers gave this film.

It's an excellent comedy from an excellent film team, and I'd rank it right up there alongside all the other great Farrelly Brothers films... though they didn't actually direct this one... here it's James B. Rogers who appears to have been assistant director on all the rest of Peter and Bobby's major releases except for Shallow Hal.

Along with The Coen Brothers, and Todd Solondz, the Farrelly Brother's are one of the best things going in American film these days. The fact that so many people claim to be offended by "Say It Isn't So" only makes me like the movie more, and want to see it again. (I've seen it twice so far).

Chris Klein deserves a special mention here as the few positive reviews credit the spectacularly funny Orlando Jones, Sally Field and of course, Heather Graham ... who are all fine... but Chris Klein appears to have been overlooked, and he really shines in SAY IT ISN'T SO, which is the first film I saw him in.

Check out "Election" w/ Chris Klein, Matthew Broderick and Drew Barrymore, for more good laughs.

There were brilliant gags well-paced throughout, but just recalling Orlando Jones (Digs) bush pilot business card alone puts a big smile on my face. 9/10

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)

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!"