MY LIFE IN RUINS
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THE PLOT THUS FAR
The combination of the appealing Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and the breathtaking location shooting in Greece make My Life in Ruins the perfect film escape. The film works as a feather-light romantic comedy, with Vardalos's character, Georgia, facing burnout in her job with a cut-rate tour company in Greece. Georgia knows there's magic in the Greek countryside and history, yet the grind of her job has drained her. Happily for Georgia, her latest group of semi-challenging tourists will help her shed some of her hard-built personal armor, guiding her to cut loose as the tour progresses (a journey mirrored in Vardalos's hairstyle, which starts out prim, and ends up attractively tousled). The strong supporting cast includes Richard Dreyfus--seeming very comfortable playing an old coot--Rachel Dratch, Rita Wilson, and the dreamy Greek actor Alexis Georgoulis, a bus driver with the soul of a poet. And possibly a secret crush on the oblivious Georgia. But the true star of the film is Greece itself, from the coastline to the mountains, from the Acropolis to the Parthenon. That so few American films are shot on location makes this summer treat even more appealing--as sweet as fresh baklava.
WHAT WE THOUGHT
The heroine of the romantic-comedy My Life in Ruins is a tour guide for a cut-rate package tour company in Greece. Georgia (Nia Vardalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding), an American of Greek descent who lives unhappily in Athens, is a classics scholar who has lost her university teaching position and sees her tourism-industry job as slumming. The bad attitude that makes her a lousy guide is on full display in an early scene of Georgia complaining to her boss that all tourists fall into readily identifiable categories, pretty nearly all of them obnoxious. Her diatribe doubles as an introduction of the members of the tour group and company bus driver who are the other main characters.
Mike Reiss, who has extensive credits in writing for television sitcoms, is responsible for the script. Reiss is an equal opportunity stereotyper: nationality, class, profession, marital status, age. Georgia’s verbal introduction of the film’s walking stereotypes may have been intended to disarm criticism, or perhaps I imagine that was one of its purposes only because I found the entire set-up so thoroughly awful. The audience is undoubtedly expected to find the scene funny; tell and show, double the laughs. Georgia’s character arc in which she discovers that tourists are real people too is handily undermined by the script. The characters are nothing more than the empty stereotypes Georgia sneers at; the occasional glimmer of humanity is quickly snuffed out by the weight of tired cliché.
Another principal source of “comedy” in the film is vulgar sexual humor. Viagra jokes, old people having sex jokes, sleazy pick-up lines, mock stripteases, Greek names that sound dirty to English speakers, and getting lucky jokes are the order of the day. Dedicated classicist Georgia getting her groove on (in the film’s Greek parlance, finding her kefi) by discovering that it’s a wonderful thing to titillate ignorant foreign tourists with sex stories about the ancient Athenians is unintentionally depressing. While there are a few funny non-sex jokes scattered through the film, the comedic promise of the witty title is unfulfilled.
The Blu-Ray comes with the same special features as the DVD. But, you get the 1080 transfer and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. The alternate ending is available in HD, for those that want some High-Def boost in their supplementals. But, you have to wonder how badly you need to see Nia Vardalos in the next generation format. Oh well, it's still worth a rental.
RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW!
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