TFR Film Review: Because I Said So

What do you get when you combine three cross-sections of female target demographics and pile them into one ninety-minute romantic comedy?

There is no answer to this question because I am at a consummate lack of life experience to describe in words the rigid impalement, the crushing cruciation that was the movie Because I Said So. I realize that this movie has been out for almost a year now and has already contended with the grief given it by Rotten Tomatoes which scored the movie a "5"...that is...on a scale of 1-to-100, but I simply could not let this pass.

Having things like this happen (and I mean just simply watching this movie) is an event that is not a predictable part of anyone's personal narrative or life trajectory. This movie is a tragedy that no person can adequately prepare for. Date rape, car crashes, or the Dolphinarium massacre all seem to be horrors in that one small way a person could think to happen. But this movie was none of those things, I was not at a place where someone could have spiked my drink, or in a moving car or war zone, I was alone on my couch with my door locked, procrastinating through the early morning hours before a grad school final when this experience happened.

Exhausted as I was, I sat down to both justify my monthly fee for HBO as well as numb my mind over with forgettable television. And then forty-five minutes of Mandy Moore and Diane Keaton later, my life was entirely different.

Note: Now I know you are thinking...why didn't you just not watch this, it's a chick flick anyway? My only other late night choice was porn, but with three "inadvertent" instances of Mandy Moore's headlights gleaming through her shirts, I actually got both.

Diane Keaton (60 and allegedly still fabulous), Mandy Moore (the delight of teenage girls and dirty old men alike), and Lauren Graham (icon of cult show Gilmore Girls) basically sit around eating cake, shopping, and discursively talking about sex to conjure punchlines out of things that were sad to begin with and cover all the populist bases for chick flicks without actually redeeming anything about their gender. I would predict that if this movie were played on networks such as USA or TBS that instances of domestic battery against women would increase.

In this "film", Diane Keaton has (without any credible biological explanation) reared three daughters who are likely fifteen years apart in age with the same absentee (go figure) husband who has disappeared from the picture without explanation. Diane Keaton is a mess of a human being, stalking her only single daughter (Mandy Moore and her three total facial expressions) as Moore tries to meet THE guy that she NEEDS to complete her life at all of probably twenty-five years of age. Keaton justifies her inane and wholly unrealistic actions by saying she doesn't want her daughter to make the same mistakes she made (oh god) and follows every rash pronouncement with "BECAUSE I SAID SO"...(I'd say you can't write this, but apparently, you can).

Mandy Moore is, of course, a cliche, the disorganized chef who also happens to seamlessly run a catering company in this film, her position of power here presumably representing the one "up-do" Moore lacked and thereby narrowly avoided completely setting the women's lib movement back a century. In the movie, Moore's life lacks all the ingredients needed to make a perfect heart beat. That may have been in a direct quote.

Diane Keaton's character (who I shall not name because it might revive the world's evil dead) when she is not gesticulating wildly at thin air and swatting away invisible opponents, posts an ad on the internet to find the perfect man for her daughter. After a series of wholly unrealistic male stereotypes parade before her, Keaton finds an actor named Tom Everett Scott whose floundering career was near-comatose (in the movie he is an architect named something else) who smiles a lot, has money, but is too WASPy even to live in California (this movie, by the way, is the death knell for his Schiavoed career). Of course, another man is interested in Mandy Moore and he is an awkwardly clean-cut musician/single-parent with a son and tattoos who doesn't play by his own rules. Naturally, Keaton hates him and we all know all this is going to end, I don't even want to say where the movie goes from here because it might pique your interest, it shouldn't.

What's more is that beyond this plot/dialogue/premise being derivative of well...everything chick flick: girls love food, old movies (when people "really knew how to love"), shoe shopping, going for massages (Keaton LAUGHABLY refuses to take off her shirt [the film's one redeeming moment]), and singing Motown together (here Moore's belchings do little to hide the fact that she is also...lamentably...a recording "artist" when she's not fretting at her own stupidity on screen...also her voice sounding nothing like her own family's voices...agonizing breathy like she is auditioning for American Idol [and drowning and nipping] or American Dreamz, the name of the other Mandy Moore (unintentionally autobiographical) movie that is endlessly in rotation on HBO right now, which is a spoof of American Idol, wow, fucking brilliant), this movie is also derivative of most other Diane Keaton movies.

Beyond the frantic, schizo trappings of her aging and complaining grandmother typecast, there is one special moment in the movie where the musician (far too lazy to look up his name, in real life or in this "movie") says that he can't believe that Diane Keaton is "reducing him to a cultural cliche" of the wild artist who would break her daughter's heart. The above-quoted line actually comes from a moment in Annie Hall where Woody Allen brilliantly dissects a girl he is on a date with before he eventually meets Diane Keaton. If this was unintentional, the writers of this film are either simply not trying or think that people are morons (I suppose MAYBE you can't blame them). But if this little quip happened to be an homage to Annie Hall...a little nod of reverence...well...Woody Allen needs to switch clarinet for lead pipe and smack Diane Keaton in the mouth for disgracing him in this manner. That's the gauntlet thrown, we are staring at the abyss, there is no going back.

I called HBO today after the trauma of this movie had not worn off and asked them to set me up with the HBO package without Mandy Moore films. I was placed on hold while the representative checked and found out that this package doesn't exist. I considered canceling HBO but held out for the next season of Bill Maher to redeem whatever credibility the channel has left. Until then, I will be flipping channels on eggshells.