The inherent risk of making a movie about an overbearing mother is that the film itself will take on the personality of that overbearing mother. "Because I Said So" does just that. It's manic in a "this person needs professional help" sort of way -- clichéd, annoying and painful. It's also tragically unfunny like witnessing a group of terrified children getting trampled by the goat at a petting zoo is tragically unfunny.

After marrying off two of her daughters (Lauren Graham, Piper Perabo), Daphne Wilder (Diane Keaton) gets the bright idea to put out a personal ad for her third and youngest daughter, Milly (Mandy Moore), without telling her. Two suitors come to the fore: Jason (Tom Everett Scott) and Johnny (Gabriel Macht). Jason answers the ad. Johnny witnesses the interview process in the lounge where he plays guitar. Jason, a successful architect, is Daphne's favorite. Johnny is the guy who doesn't appear good enough for her daughter.

Who do you think is Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong in that scenario? This makes watching the film akin to listening to your grandmother explain the plot of a movie you've seen five times. There are scenes in this thing that wouldn't survive the final cut of some home videos.

Example: You're going out on a date and your mother gives you a jewelry box with a necklace in it that belonged to your grandmother. Milly's reaction is to say "it's so special," which is not a genuine reaction of the character so much as the writer making sure the audience can't possibly miss the inescapable specialness of this especially special exchange -- as if the passing of an ancient family heirloom from mother to daughter doesn't itself scream "SPECIAL!" so loud that it can be heard in adjoining theaters.

This bad premise engenders a whole slew of sequences that look like they were recycled from Satan's video library of bad chick flicks. My faves include the scene where Daphne comes across online porn and then can't turn it off when she gets a phone call, a scene that would have seemed tired in 1997 much less 2007. Then there's the inevitable montage of loser guys who fail to pass the interview, a sequence that seems so requisite that it should be followed by an apology from the cast.

An already-tortured metaphor is strangled even more thoroughly in one of the most inanely explanatory sequences I think I've ever seen in all my years ensuring bad movies: Basically, Milly makes a successful soufflé while she's spending time with Johnny. However, when she's with Jason, her soufflé doesn't rise. Now, I have a cat who frequently watches movies with me who I'm pretty sure on some level understands that the blown soufflé means that Milly should pick Johnny over Jason. The brain-dead simplicity of the scene itself should be enough. It's the kind of thing any self-respecting writer should read and recognize -- at the very least -- as a piece of nastiness that could be considered necessary to drive home the already beaten point that Johnny is better than Jason. However, what flings the fucking thing into the sphere of fucking hall-of-fame badness is the fact that Milly then, word-for-word, explains the significance of the soufflé incident. I just don't know how anyone can live with herself after writing something that strained. Seriously, just shove that pen in one ear and get it over with.

Every moviegoer should understand this too: Movies worth watching and movies with one or more dog reaction shots in them are utterly incompatible. Most aficionados of bad films are familiar with the dog reaction shot: You have a scene that's funny or maybe not funny and, as a director desperate to wring a laugh out of the situation, you cut to a shot of a dog turning its head or looking perplexed. If all the movies in history that ever used that shot suddenly vanished from the planet nobody would even notice.

What's amazing is the stuff I have yet to even mention. Frankly, I don't think there's a sequence in the entire film that rings true. On their first date, Jason suggests that he and Milly go to Tuscany. Ask any woman: Talking about a vacation on a first date screams "loser" louder than pulling out your penis and slapping the table with it. Then there's the scene of Daphne and Milly moving furniture around. Moving fucking furniture back and forth. Fuck me if that isn't boring enough when it happens in real life, but director Michael ("Heathers") Lehmann actually put it in the film for what reason I cannot possibly comprehend. Then there's the affair between Daphne and Johnny's father, Joe (Stephen Collins), that seems to happen only because the universe of the film is so small that he's simply the only man of appropriate age in it. There's no chance Daphne will ever meet any other men because they simply don't exist. It's like watching two pieces of furniture fall in love. Then there's the sequence where Daphne loses her voice. Pretty much at this point I started to surmise that this film might be unscripted. Either that or the filmmakers had grown so tired of Diane Keaton's performance that they threw this in to put the brakes on. It's completely random and pointless and practically stops time.

Forgive me for not coming up with a clever closer, but I am seriously just trying to forget I ever saw this mess.