Just in time for Valentine's Day, here's a romantic comedy that's as fresh and appealing as year-old gift box chocolate. Actually, that's giving Because I Said So too much praise. Here is a movie that not only gives the romantic comedy genre a bad name, but it sets it back 40 or 50 years. I'm being serious when I say that this is the worst example of this type of film I have had to sit through in a very long time. A stunning lesson on just how inept and banal a movie can be, and yet still attract talent, this movie should not be viewed, it should be studied. If you want a textbook example of how not to put together a romantic comedy, Because I Said So should prove to be a treasure trove of helpful hints on what to avoid. All others can and should find something better to do with their time. Like flicking a light switch on and off endlessly for 100 minutes or so (the same amount of time this movie lasts). Or maybe write a good comedy script so that I and many others never need to sit through something like this again.

The movie centers on a scheming mother named Daphne (Diane Keaton), and her three adult daughters. There's the youngest daughter, Milly (Mandy Moore), who runs a catering business and is unlucky in love, there's Maggie (Lauren Graham from TV's Gilmore Girls) who works as a therapist, and finally there's Mae (Piper Perabo) whom the movie forgot to give a job to, or even character traits and a personality. Mother Daphne is not happy about the fact that she's about to turn 60, so she decides to distract herself by finding a suitable boyfriend and potential husband for young Milly. She goes behind her family's back, posts an ad on the Internet looking for suitable men for Milly, and then interviews them one-by-one. Of course, we get a "hilarious" montage as various wacky and uninteresting men are paraded in front of Daphne while music that sounds like it was ripped out of a sitcom from the 1970s blasts on the soundtrack. Finally, Daphne thinks she's found the right man for her daughter when she meets a handsome and charming, yet obviously bland, architect named Jason (Tom Everett Scott). She arranges for Jason to meet Milly during one of her catering jobs, so that her daughter won't know that the mom is behind it, and there seems to be a connection. But wait! There's a handsome young musician named Johnny (Gabriel Macht), who also has his eyes on Milly, and would obviously be the right guy for her. Of course, Daphne will never have her daughter mingle with a "starving artist" like Johnny, and does everything in her power to keep them apart, all the while slowly falling in love with Johnny's lonely father Joe (Stephen Collins) in the process. Lies are told, secrets are discovered and Daphne, along with her pet dog, supposedly both become addicted to Internet S & M porn by the time it's all over. I must ask at this point, who gets paid to write this stuff?

Because I Said So is an excruciating and endless exercise in the Idiot Plot. Here is a movie that forces everyone who walks into the picture frame to either be an idiot, or act like one, because if they showed the slightest thing resembling an adult IQ, the movie would be over in 5 minutes, and we'd all be a heck of a lot happier. But no, of course that would not do. The characters have to constantly lie and keep the truth from one another in order to keep the plot running. They also have to misunderstand, jump to extreme conclusions, and just plain do things that no sane person in their right mind would ever do for the very sake of the movie itself. To say that this movie is an insult to the intelligence of its audience is an understatement. It assumes that we're all just as stupid as the characters in the movie are. Just how stupid does it think we are? It probably thinks we need help getting our clothes on in the morning. Here is a movie where the answers to everyone's problems are so obvious, yet nobody ever sees it, so we end up silently screaming at the characters to wake up. Johnny the musician is obviously the right guy for Milly. He's kind and understanding when Milly accidentally breaks something, while Jason the architect gets pissed off at her when she breaks something of his. (These scenes are literally shown back to back from one another, which leads us to assume that either Milly is an overly clumsy person who breaks a lot of stuff, or the movie thinks we have short attention spans, and wouldn't be able to understand the contrast unless these sequences were less than 10 seconds apart from each other.) Johnny is also fun and free-spirited, while Jason is an up-tight and smarmy schmuck, the movie throwing as many examples as it can in our faces. So, why the heck does it take Milly so long to realize what we figure out the second the characters are introduced? Why does she lead both men on, having sex with both of them, and pretending that she's only interested in one of them? It only makes us hate Milly as a character, since not only is she incredibly oblivious to the obvious, but she's also an unfaithful two-timing twit who probably doesn't deserve a decent guy to begin with.

The entire cast is equally unlikeable. All of the women seem to be scheming sneaks who cannot be trusted, or are completely obsessed with sex and finding a man. The fact that this movie was written by a pair of women is almost stupefying, as the script does not seem very flattering to the female gender in general. The women in this movie lie, cheat, go behind each other's backs, sleep around with various men with little to no consequence, and overall use the men around them as if they were ignorant dupes for them to manipulate. (Of course, in this movie, they are.) When the movie's not offending us with its cast of stupid and manipulative characters, it finds other ways to offend us by falling back on cliches that are just as old as romantic comedies themselves. This movie has not one, but two, scenes where Daphne and her daughters join together to sing an old pop song from the 50s or 60s. There are also two scenes where a character is carrying a large cake, only to have it get smashed in someone's face, or dropped on someone from above. And Diane Keaton's character has been given a dog for the sole purpose that the dog can react to everything it sees, as if it understands what's going on. Heck, the dog can seem to understand phone conversations that are going on at the other side of the room, and can understand what the person on the other line is saying. That is one smart dog. I say screw the whole plot on Milly getting a boyfriend, and concentrate on this miraculous dog who is smart enough to realize that it is watching Internet porn so that it goes running off to hump the furniture. You know a movie's desperate when it throws a "funny" animal into the proceedings to react and give puzzled looks whenever the characters are having sex, or talking to one another. It gets to the point that we begin to identify with the dog more than any of the human characters. He certainly seemed to be smarter than any of the people in the film.

To top it off, Because I Said So has the nerve to subject a large number of talented and likeable actors to this hopeless screenplay. Diane Keaton is usually an asset to a movie, but here, she pretty much is a total hindrance that holds everyone back. She is shrill, she is annoying, and she is possibly insane as evidenced by her decision to duck and hide herself while driving down the freeway in the car so that the people in the other car can't see her. (She does this, obviously, so the film can throw a gag at us to make it look like the car is driving by itself, and that ever-present dog is the only thing inside.) Not once is her character believable, not even as a mother, as I don't think any mother would be so stupid to pull off a stunt such as hiring a total stranger she's met for only three minutes to hit on her daughter. And any woman who would dream up an idea like this and think it could work probably shouldn't have children in the first place. As Milly, Mandy Moore is pretty and certainly has a bright and winning smile, but her character is just so stupid and unlikeable that we really could care less what happens to her. The fact that she never truly confronts her mother when she discovers the scheme, just shuts herself away from the family before deciding to forgive her, makes her come across as all the more flaky. At the very least, we can understand how these two women can be related. They deserve one another, and a much more deserving ending would be for both of them to end up alone and with only each other for company.
Of course, we don't get that. Because I Said So forgets that these two women have spent the entire running time lying and using people, and gives them a storybook happy ending where everything works out, and the women get up on a stage and sing an old song together for a crowd of friends and well wishers. Everyone is forgiven for their past actions, both women end up with men attached to their arms, everyone's happy, and a cake is dropped on the head of a suicidal patient of the therapist sister's as a final sight gag before the end credits. In case anyone's wondering, the last part concerning the credits was my favorite part of the ending. Granted, I would have been even happier if they came a lot sooner. This is a miserable, ugly little film disguised as sweet Valentine's sentiment. If you ever meet someone who tells you that this is a romantic or even an amusing movie, run in the other direction and don't look back. They're probably not the kind of people you want to associate with in the first place.

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