Diane Keaton’s new movie, Because I Said So also starring Mandy Moore has been completely panned by critics, as has Keaton’s performance in the film. The people over at imdb.com give us this:
Many critics are expressing downright sadness over Diane Keaton’s latest turn as an overbearing mother in Because I Said So. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls her performance “a steep drop” from her earlier films. “The beloved actress is scraping below the bottom of the barrel with this desperately unfunny farce,” he writes. The problem, Michael Phillips observes in the Chicago Tribune, lies not so much with Keaton’s performance but with everything else about the film, from script to direction. It amounts, he says, to “formulaic romantic junk.” It’s worse, writes Claudia Puig in USA Today: “It’s so derivative, unfunny and thuddingly bad that it’s one of the more cringe-inducing movies of a genre chock-full of clunkers,” she comments
There was, in fact only one critic who had anything nice to say about Keaton or the movie;
Carrie Rickey staunchly comes to Keaton’s defense in the Philadelphia Inquirer, writing, “Keaton is a national treasure, always worth the visit even when, as is the case of Because I Said So, her movie isn’t.”
This is very surprising news to me, not that the movie was bad but that Keaton was terrible in it. Diane Keaton is pretty much a God to me. I know she is known playing those quirky roles that seem to lack substance but she always has growth in the journey of the story, she’s is consistently real, and seems to channel awkward, neurotic lovable behavior in such a natural way to her characters. And for anyone who says that is all she does obviously hasn’t seen her in Reds with Warren Beatty, or Interiors ( a very subdued Woody Allen movie) because that is quality Keaton.
Do I think these reviewers are right? Probably, there was even more bad things said about Keaton that I did not include, there has to be validity to at least a portion of the reviews.But it sounds like the whole movie is a mess,and her performance probably had a lot to do with other elements. It’s very hard to act when the script is bad, the cast isn’t first rate (sorry Mandy but you’re not yet) and the direction is off.
I’m assuming Keaton did this for the money, it’s something we all have to do from time to time. It’s hard for an older actress in Hollywood, there are fewer options than when they are young, the few actresses that stick it out are usually so good that when they are all competing for the same role the more tried and true ones get the roles. Can you imagine if your main competition was Annette Bening and Meryl Streep?
Keaton will bounce back from this, everyone is entitled to bad day at work once in a while.
