My Life in Ruins

For the second time in two days, I was back at my favorite strip mall second run theater in West Boylston. I had saved My Life in Ruins, which had come out just after I left for Europe, because I figured it would be a real treat.

I should explain: I really love summer movies about Greece, which is my favorite country in Europe, a place I have visited multiple times. I think it goes back to seeing the ultra campy Summer Lovers (1981) at the long-shuttered Foothills Twin in Fort Collins. Agnes, in an early job incarnation, let me in for free.

I don't care if the movies are silly. I just love the feeling of seeing Greece, especially the Greek isles, on screen when the sun is hot in the sky. Last summer was pretty good on that score, with the release of Mamma Mia and Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2, both which were delightfully light and watchable.

There was a bit of extra irony in My Life in Ruins coming out now, during my return to Europe. The last time I went to Europe as a tourist was exactly 10 years ago, when I went to the Cyclades with my fiancee, where we got married on Santorini. A couple years later, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) came out. It made an instant celebrity out of Nia Vardalos, who wrote and starred in it. Now it's a decade later, and my wife is now my ex-wife, and she has moved on with her life.

So here's Vardalos playing an American tour guide in Greece, awkwardly single. She's lovelorn, and the movie is about her finding a new romance. Nice little irony, I figured.

I should have known this movie was going to be an absolute disaster by the fact that it was pouring rain when I rolled into West Boylston to see it. It felt like a crummy day in November, chilly and damp---a truly bad omen.

Hoo boy...how can encapsulate how crappy this movie is, on just about every levvel. First off, let's take the protagonist Georgia (Vardalos). She is incredibly unlikable. At the beginning of the movie, she has supposedly lost her "kefi" (spirit). In our sex-is-everything culture, this basically translates to "hasn't gotten laid in a long time," a fact to which she actually confesses.

But she's not just very fun at all. She resents being a tour guide in Athens and is applying for jobs as a professor of classic literature back in the United States. The tourists she leads don't like her either. She has a constant frown. Who would like her?

But the thing that really repulsed me about the movie is the rampant anti-intellectualism. Whenever I go to Greece, I delight in learning and exploring the history. But according to this movie, history is just sooooooooo boring. Nobody wants to hear any of that crap. Whenever Georgia opens her mouth to say anything remote historical, we learn that this is the last thing any of the boorish tourists want to hear (mostly voiced by Richard Dreyfuss, who must have been wondering how his agent got him into this piece of crap). They want to be lied to. They want to buy cheap trinkets. But please spare us the facts.

The movie is just downright cynical. There is nothing wrong with cynicism in the right stories, but in a summer movie about Greece, I am just not intested in it.

The worst thing about this movie is it made Greece look like a very unappealing place to visit. We as viewers get to follow the "tour from hell" which finally gets decent at the end when Georgia gets horizontal with the tour guide. But most of the time, the Greece we see is just not fun all. If I were working for the Greek tourism ministry, I would organize a boycott of this movie. Fortunately few are going to see it anyway.

The script is just a disaster. There is really no turning point, or decent plot points to drive the action. Instead, almost every scene from the midpoint onward is a "soft" turning point, the same thing repeated over over. Look Georgia, can't you see you should f@ck the bus driver. Oh yes, I should. Go over there and talk to him. OK, I will. This movie could a very good screenwriting clinic is how NOT to write a screenplay.

And moreover it seems Vardalos is just a terrible actress. Or maybe it's the combination with the director Donald Petrie. Together they are a wretched combination.

The only time in the movie I smiled was at the very end, during the credits, when I learned that much of the movie was not actually shot in Greece! Instead it was shot mostly in Spain, from what I could see. That just says it all.

What a fricking ripoff. Worst. Summer. Greece. Movie. Ever.