Search - Because I Said So (Full Screen Edition) on DVD

Wayne F. (WWIIpfc) from COLORADO SPGS, CO
Reviewed on 4/26/2014...

I believe in real life the daughters would have left the home of such an overbearing mother. However it's a great movie.

Julie A.
Reviewed on 12/10/2007...

I bought this movie because Diane Keaton is fabulous. I didn't know anything about this movie, but it looked fun, from the cover shot. While I didn't like this movie, Diane Keaton is great. Essentially she is out of control with her meddling and manipulation into her daughter's lives, especially the youngest, Milly. Daphne (the mom), and her daughters are together constantly, despite two of them being married and having careers. They all are so involved in each other's lives, even discussion intimate details of their sex lives. While I'm no prude, and can discuss a number of things with my family, I'm a big fan of keeping some things, between a happily married couple, private.

The dysfunction, and manipulation is meant to be a jumping off point for the movie, but it is actually the entire movie. There's such a huge and constant violation of boundries that it overshadows what could have been a very sweet film. The one daughter, Maggie, is a shrink, but goes along with the secrets and manipulation, which really kills it for me.

However, if you can relate to a helicopter parent, it is a cute and funny love story. So if you want something light and fun that is free from sex and foul language, this is a movie for you.

3 of 3 member(s) found this review helpful.

Now that I think about it, "Weekend at Bernie's" was better!

Julie Neal | Sanibel Island, Fla. | 05/16/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Like the worst Jerry Lewis movie, this Diane Keaton vehicle is stuffed with scenes that are meant to be wacky but come off as just stupid. Each minute brings another kooky Keaton face, another idiotic line, another forced plot point -- all delivered with less finesse than those in "The Nutty Professor." Mandy Moore is wasted, Lauren Graham is embarrassing and Piper Perabo was better in "Rocky and Bullwinkle" (but then again, she had more to work with). As for Keaton, apparently she's never heard that Randy Newman song from a few years back: "I'm dead, but I don't know it": every role that she does is like a role that she's done... just not as good. I'm usually not so harsh in my reviews, I love movies and have known to sit through some real dogs. But this is the worst movie I have seen since "Weekend At Bernie's," and that was 20 years ago! One final point: This is supposed to be a film mothers can watch with their daughters, but what mom wants to sit with her daughter through lines like "he's got a hot dog in a bun"?"

Water torture

Samuel McKewon | Lincoln, NE | 05/28/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

""Because I Said So" inhabits a level of the underworld where the neurotic run wild, calm is a four-letter word and one character is more or less identified as "the sister who set the family record for orgasms." It actually sickened me a little. It couldn't be any worse if each DVD came laced with anthrax.

Ostensibly this is a romantic comedy - though it is the opposite of romantic and funny like a shiv to the belly - about a mother and her three daughters, the youngest of which has either rotten taste in men, or rotten luck. The mother is Diane Keaton, while the youngest daughter is Mandy Moore. It should tell you something that Moore is the best thing about the movie.

Building off her mother-as-a-dictator performance in "The Family Stone" Keaton is Daphne, professional loon. She seems to be a baker; she lives in a million-dollar townhouse, so she must traffic angel dust, too. At any rate, she's the kind of mother who, at some point, talks simply for the sensation of mouthing words, dresses like Julie Andrews met Cruella DeVille, cries in proverbial hiccups, psychosomatically loses her voice, and eventually breaks out into song with her three daughters, who occasionally perform doo-wop numbers in front of small audiences of friends, husbands, and rotten men.

Forty years ago, women like this were either put on valium, or put away.

Daphne is borderline incoherent, a manipulator, and such an unhinged, meddling jack lope that she signs her daughter up for an online dating service, then screens the potential suitors. Unbeknowst to Millie (Moore), Daphne has set her up with an architect (Tom Everett Scott) who might be the blandest creep ever committed to celluloid. There's no reason to like him, and he's not interesting enough to hate.

Vying for Millie's affections is a musician (Gabriel Macht). He's also a single father. Occasionally, he moonlights as a saint, teaching kids and idiots to play the guitar. Of course, Millie, a caterer who moonlights as a saint teaching just plain idiots how to cook, sleeps around on the musician for sake of dramatic tension.

Other than be a showcase for Keaton roaring id, it's hard to figure out what "Because I Said So" wanted to do. It apologizes for any number of Millie and Daphne's morally questionable behaviors by chalking up to them being women in love, or heat, as if this somehow makes their choices look better. Directed by Michael Lehman (a long way from "Heathers" or even "Soapdish") it revels in frank, predictable chats about sex. Eventually, the daughters conclude that mom's meddling traces back to her need to get screwed; she's two éclairs short of a dozen because she hasn't been properly stuck in thirty years.

It trades in a bunch of other irritations, too. The musician's kid seems to be autistic; he's constantly screaming or running around like he's been sprung from the bull pit in Pamplona. The song numbers are so obviously lip-synched that you're not even sure what to imagine, nor is it immediately clear what song Daphne and her daughters are even trying to sing.
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A cute, funny movie!! What in the world do people expect fro

Kharabella | Somewhere in the midwest . . . | 07/15/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I was looking for a Sunday afternoon movie that would make me smile. I found it.

My disclaimer is this: I do not expect chic flicks/romantics comedies to be cohesive art films, to have memorable to stunning dialogue, or even a lot of ingenuity. I do not expect them to be realistic in the romance area. I only expect them to make me smile, to make me feel good, and to have some emotional strain that a viewer can relate to.

BECAUSE I SAID SO did that for me. It made me laugh and smile, and even had me pointing my finger at the characters for "misbehaving." If you like romantic comedies, if you really enjoy a feel good movie, and can let go of any notion that it is supposed to be "realistic" or "artsy," I think you can enjoy this film. No it isn't an Oscar winner. But I miss most of those. They don't tend to make me feel like smiling and singing on a Sunday afternoon.


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