My Life in Ruins
Substitute “career” for “life” in the title of this stillborn travelogue comedy, and you’ll have a succinct verdict on My Big Fat Greek Wedding writer/star Nia Vardalos, whose efforts to prove herself more than a one-megahit wonder have been greeted by audiences with apathy. Here, in the opening salvo of her double-barreled 2009 comeback bid — the Vardalos-scripted and -directed I Hate Valentine’s Day is set to follow in July — the Greek-Canadian comedienne once more tries to parlay her Hellenic pride into box-office gold, starring as an unemployed history professor reduced to working as an Athenian tour guide. The result, written by The Simpsons alum Mike Reiss and directed by Grumpy Old Men‘s Donald Petrie, is a strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos’ tour group as an ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece as a badly plumbed third-world hellhole. The ugly Americans are here, as well as the beer-guzzling Aussies and one wizened, Viagra-popping widower (Richard Dreyfuss, slumming it). But what did you expect from a movie with a couple of characters named Poupi and Doudi Kakas?
