Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore in Because I Said So · 02/03/2007 09:36
In romantic comedy something has to dam up or divert the course of true love. The trouble is that by this time, most of easily persuasive bars to happiness. So give a certain credit to screenwriters Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson for coming up with a fresh new distraction: the meddling Mom.

She’s ferociously, therefore funnily played in Because I Said So by Diane Keaton who is unaccountably concerned with one of her three daughters’ lack of romantic prospects, which is, come to think of it, rather odd. Milly is played by Mandy Moore, who is sensible, pretty, gainfully employed as the owner of a catering service and, aside from an annoying laugh, brought on by tension, as delectable as one of the dishes she purveys at weddings and bar mitzvahs, TIME reports.

Benign neglect on the part of her mother strikes one as excellent option. But Keaton’s Daphne is an up-and-doing sort of person and she’s soon trolling the Internet for suitable mates, coming up with an architect called Jason (Tom Everett Scott), who is a little bit too tightly wound. She conducts her interviews with dating prospects in a restaurant under the amused eye of Johnny, the restaurant’s guitar player (Gabriele Macht). His only visible defect is a tattoo on his hand. Otherwise, he is the modern beau ideal — soft-spoken, tolerant, not too ambitious , with (we soon learn) plenty of time for single-parenting his somewhat noxious child. To Daphne he is, of course, a loser, and she’s appalled when he seeks out her daughter. Most of the movie is devoted to her attempts to fend off his excellent intentions.