A la recherche de l'homme parfait

If you can swallow the beautiful and sexy Mandy Moore as an uncoordinated doofus with low self-esteem who can't find a decent guy to go out with her, then you may be able to get into the spirit of "Because I said So." However, you'll also have to put up with Diane Keaton in a truly grating performance as a neurotic control freak of a mother who spends most of her time obsessing over the romantic travails of her youngest daughter, going so far as to post an ad on an internet dating site seeking out prospective husbands for the unsuspecting girl.

The actions of this modern-day Yenta the Matchmaker set into motion a whole host of sitcom-level complications and romantic comedy hijinks that are somehow supposed to be funny but wind up being merely irritating. The screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson comes replete with a bevy of mother/daughter relationship clichés, with some really lame slapstick routines - Keaton getting stuck on an internet porn site, Keaton getting run over by a skater in a park, Keaton getting a cake in her face etc. - thrown in for bad measure.

Beyond Keaton and Moore, Gabriel Macht, Tom Everett Scott and Lauren Graham are just some of the other unfortunate actors trapped inside this "chick flick" fiasco.

Waw! I have not seen such a bad film in a really long time...more like never actually. this is truly appalling. Lets start with the Small tragedy, the actors. Dian Keaton, normally an amazing actress somehow managed to do a really bad job with this one. Her acting was way over the top and more like hysterical really. It was like she was lending her voice to an animated film! Mandy Moore was actually better than her if u can believe it. But still quite bad. And as for the rest of the cast well there were none! we can say they were put there so that Dian Keaton and Mandy Moore can create dialog with someone other than themselves.

Now for the major tragedy, the script. A horror story put together to make the audience quiver with every uttered line! and the lines just keep getting worse and worse until we reach the climactic scene where we cave in and can no longer hold the vomit! Horrible predictable and very illogical plot. Corny is an understatement for the lines of this dialog. No depth or substance to characters. It's such a disappointment.

I love Diane Keaton, but this was mostly painful. I can only point a finger at the writing because as predictable as this movie is, there are some absolute gems of BRILLIANT acting from both Keaton and Moore. I'm not sure why anyone is in this movie other than Mandy Moore and Diane Keaton because no use is made of them. I sat for the first half hour wondering what any of these actors saw in the script, but I will admit to laughing out loud several times at the painful "family" moments I think people will recognize from their own lives. Diane Keaton deserves a better script for her talents. And when TV actors are trying to transition to film, they should raise the level of their work.

Diane Keaton wants her daughters to do things "Because I Said So" in this 2007 movie.

Keaton is a neurotic mother who is constantly poking her nose into her daughters' lives. She is desperate for her youngest (Mandy Moore) to find a man to spend the rest of her life with, so she puts an ad on a dating site and interviews potential men. Yeah, that certainly is a way to find a life partner for your daughter - advertise and then screen them for her.

One of the problems for me in this movie was Diane Keaton's performance. Here is an excellent, wonderful actress, capable of so much, playing the most annoying woman in history. If she were my mother, she'd have been dead long before her "big birthday" - 60. I don't know what the director was thinking having her go so over the top like that.

Not to mention, this film had Lifetime written all over it. How the producers got movie people to participate in this is to their credit, though it's done all the time - a TV script put on the big screen because someone with clout gets a movie star to agree to it. We saw it in "Before and After," "Six Days and Seven Nights," "What Lies Beneath," that movie with Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd that I saw in the theater and blocked out of my mind - all TV fare turned into bad movies and starring big people.

I guess you can tell I didn't like it. I very rarely hate anything. If you've read some of my other reviews and find you agree with me on a lot of films, when you see this one is coming on TV, run; if you are tempted to put it on your Netflix list, don't do it.

The bad thing about this movie is that it's nothing the audience hasn't seen before. Lots of directors choose a generic montage of old-fashioned family pictures set to a mellow thematically-charged song for the opening credits. Lots of romantic comedies include generous dosages of overbearing parents, predictable twists-and-turns, and decor that looks like it came out of the Ikia catalog.

Nonetheless, 'Because I Said So' is, for lack of a better word, cute. It's predictable in a way that one expects the characters in slasher movies to die, corny in a way that only overbearing mothers meddling in the affairs of their offspring can be. And yet, isn't that the reason this genre continues to be popular, BECAUSE of the comfort of knowing what's going to happen rather than in spite of it? Nobody went to see "Bridget Jones' Diary" expecting her NOT to end up with somebody, after all.

Predictability aside, the music was fitting, the scenery was attractive - one wonders if somebody on the set was a gifted cake decorator before the film's inception, or even because of it - and the main/supporting cast were all passable-to-energized. Diane Keaton in all of her poof skirts and unnecessarily large heels, is just enough playful and neurotic to make the role work - I particularly enjoyed her speech about motherhood being the most difficult form of love. I've enjoyed Mandy Moore's rise to indie film infamy since "Saved!", more than I did her semi-generic pop starlet days, and I thought she did a nice job here. And though this is largely considered a "chick flick", I do want to point out that any boyfriends, brothers, husbands, etc. who get roped into seeing it may well enjoy the antics of Keaton's character's dog, who provides slap-sticky yet appreciated comic relief.

All in all, it's not something I'd probably buy on DVD, but as a fun and easy way to spend two hours, 'Because I Said So' is worth wading through the clichés.