Vardalos is charming.
My Life in Ruins (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:111
Fresh:11
Rotten:100
Average Rating:3.6/10
Consensus: With stereotypical characters and a shopworn plot, My Life in Ruins is a charmless romantic comedy.
Theatrical Release:Jun 5, 2009 Wide
Box Office: $8,474,608
Synopsis: From Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, comes the uplifting comedy My Life in Ruins. Georgia (Nia Vardalos) has lost her kefi (Greek for “mojo”). Discouraged by her lack... From Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, comes the uplifting comedy My Life in Ruins. Georgia (Nia Vardalos) has lost her kefi (Greek for “mojo”). Discouraged by her lack of direction in life, she works as a travel guide, leading a rag-tag group of tourists as she tries to show them the beauty of her native Greece while waiting to land her dream job. Opening their eyes to an exotic foreign land, she too begins to see things in new ways—finding her kefi and possibly love in the process. --© Fox Searchlight [More]
Starring: Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss, Maria Adanez, Sheila Bernette
Starring: Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss, Maria Adanez, Sheila Bernette, Maria Botto, Rachel Dratch, Alexis Georgoulis, Ralph Nossek, Bernice Stegers, Harland Williams, Ian Gomez
Director: Donald Petrie
Director: Donald Petrie
Screenwriter: Mike Reiss
Producer: Michelle Chyzdik Smith, Nathalie Marciano
Composer: David Newman
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
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Reviews for My Life in Ruins
Half the time I wanted everyone to shut up so I could hear the tour guide lecture on the Temple of Hephaestus, or wherever. Then I wanted them to shut up so I could sleep.
Fans of fluff comedies filled with soft smiles and knowing glances will likely welcome the return of Nia Vardalos in My Life in Ruins.
For those craving a baklava-sweet snack, here's your rush of the familiar. It's the rest of us who must worry about a spike in our blood sugar.
A romantic comedy that bathes in clichés before rinsing off with sentimentality and spritzing itself with lame jokes. The result is, alas, a bit whiffy.
Once those gags run out, however, the film slowly drags itself back on track, finding just enough traction in a handful of earnest moments -- all involving Richard Dreyfuss -- to help audiences forget how awful it had been at the start.
If the main character in a movie is going to be a pill, it's wise to cast an actor as engaging as Nia Vardalos.
The simple charms of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the 2002 small movie that thrust Vardalos into the limelight, are nowhere to be found in this formulaic, weak chuckler.
My Life in Ruins plays out more like a thuddingly bad, been-there, seen-that sitcom. Even the sight of breathtaking ancient monuments don't keep it from crumbling.
In fashioning a comeback for Vardalos, writer Mike Reiss has cribbed much from her Greek Wedding playbook.
It's a movie that gets better as it chugs along, depending on your patience level.
Actress Nia Vardalos traipses through the same ethnic minefield that she did in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but with less explosive results.
For a movie filled with cliches, the laughs happen so frequently that you are able to forget about the fact that you have seen this movie a billion times before.
Together, Vardalos and Dreyfuss distract us from how manufactured, forced and reliant on national stereotypes and cultural clichés the film is. Barely.
You watch a movie this painfully flat and you want to start assigning blame...Let's just say that comedy is the victim, not the victor, in this film.
Through it all, Vardalos is a trouper, with a distinctive screen presence and delayed-reaction timing.
This paint-by-numbers romantic comedy is chock-a-block with jokey stereotypes -- Americans are obnoxious, Canadians polite, and the Greeks just dance -- yet lacking in any real drama.
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