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13 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
My Big Fat Stupid Movie, March 5, 2003
I totally agree with another reviewer that the success of this movie has got to be one of the biggest mysteries of the century. I was so excited to see it after all the hype. I wanted to like it! I tried. But I was sorely dissapointed in it. First of all, Nia Vardalos is a mediocre actress. The constant blank look on her face throughout the movie just got on my nerves as did the way she would move her eyes from side to side like Jack Black's character on "Shallow Hal" (cuckoo! cuckoo!). The chemistry between her and John Corbett was non-existant. The windex thing got old. The fact that "Ian" had to alter his complete identity in order to be included in the family was ridiculous. Yes, there were a few laughs . . . but that was it. This movie doesn't hold a candle to Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally, or any other great film that comes to mind. It is an insult to intelligent people!
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
"You'll never go broke underestimating the etcetera...", July 8, 2003
As a purported romantic comedy, this unimaginative slog fails on all counts. There's no "meet-cute", there's no dramatic conflict, there's isn't even a character arc. What there is, however, is 90 minutes of cheap, weak Greek stereotypes recycled from some justifiably forgotten sitcom. The whole exercise is inoffensive and mild to the point of mild offense. Of your two grandmas, the dimwitted one will love it.
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4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Drop Dead Boring, May 22, 2003
This should be called "Two boring [...]hook up". The guy even admits that his life was empty and dull before he met her. Is that the kind of guy you would want to marry? Yech. [...]. This movie had no tension, no climax, a few [...] giggles, no real reason to watch it. Hype.
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6 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Grotesque, April 9, 2006
With all due respect to those who embraced this film, I have to say that I couldn't believe how horrible this film was. The Greeks were all made to look ugly. The one character's description of coughing up what was to be her twin at birth nauseated me for days. The script is worn out and unfunny. The groom's parents are presented as the typical uptight WASPs. If I were Greek, I would be insulted by this film. As an Irish/Italian mix, I would be outraged were either side presented in this manner. For me, this is a disturbingly moronic film.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Go rent "Barefoot In the Park" instead, March 17, 2003
I bought this DVD on the strength of word-of-mouth recommendations. From people I trust, yet. I still don't get it. I invited some women friends over for a night of "great hilarity" but we only laughed mildly a few times. Mostly we were baffled at the formulaic quality of the story - a la 1950s type TV stereotypes. Ms. Vardalos isn't old enough for the dated behaviors of her family. How they manage to remain so unware of changes in American culture since the 1950s vis a vis: hair dos, vegetarianism, women's emancipation, room decor, etc., etc is beyond me. I haven't seen custom plastic covered furniture like that since the 1960s. Even as exaggeration for effect, this was really heavy-handed and clumsy. I wonder that Greek Americans weren't offended, let alone the author's family. First of all, Ms. Vardalos' "epiphany" consists of seeing some handsome guy across the crowded room of her Dad's restaurant. For 30 years she has had no interest in looking or acting like a person other than what her Dad wants. Her sister is a hair stylist (hideous 1950s hair) but still Nia has no interest in a hair cut before Ian. Once she sees him, she just bursts into a frenzy of fixing herself up, losing weight, going to school and getting a job outside the family restaurant - where have we seen this before 100 times already? About which transformation, not a single family member comments. Yeah, right. Only the problem is that once she does all that, blossoms and so forth, she still lies constantly to her parents about her romantic life. In the end she does not express a single independent idea about her own freaking wedding - the supposed culmination of her life's effort. The worst aspect was the demeaning treament of the male characters. Ian came off as some guy on a major valium trip who'd roll over for just about anything Ms. Vardalos or her family asked of him. Her father is pathetic and all the other men are stupid and ineffective. In the end, it's considered a miracle of acceptance when her Dad buys her and Ian a home. Like I'd let anybody home shop for me, let alone a guy with a single conversational topic who lets his alzhemer-suffering mother wander about the neighborhood at will. But this home purchase makes up the postscript joke I won't give away. Suffice it to say, it fits right in there with the rest of the script - stupid and frustrating and unfunny. If this was supposed to be parodic humor, it could have been done much, much better than this. I hope to recoup some money for the DVD at a garage sale.
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3 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A big fat greek dissapointment, October 24, 2003
After reading some ecstatic reviews of this film, I'd expected something a lot more amusing than this rather tedious, sentimental tale. The heroine's family are supposedly keen to get her married off, so why didn't they encourage her to smarten herself up before she reached the age of thirty, I wonder. Also that rather tired cliche of the girl who looks very dowdy, then after five minutes of hairdressing and makeup is transformed into a radiant beauty, hasn't that rather been done to death? And whatever are we to make of herincrediby tiresome father, whining on about the superiority of the Greeks to everyone else all the time? I mean, doesn't everyone in America have guns? Why didn't someone shoot the silly old coot long before the start of the film? The story of uptight WASP family versus warmhearted ethnic family has laready been done in 'Fools Rush in', a much more amusing film. And the film ends, depressingly, with the heroine dragging her own reluctant daughter off to Greek school when the poor child wants to join the Brownies. Whatever happened to America the great melting pot?
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11 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
Boring and banal soap, November 8, 2002
There isn't any original idea in this film, it is too boring for a comedy and too predictable for any other genre. It is amazing that films like this are produced - couldn't they do anything more challenging or at least entertaining for the mind for the money they spent on making the film? It doesn't even have a soothing effect of a good laugh becuase it irritaes after 10 min with its pathetic stereotypes and clich�s. And at the end, the happy end , of course. I felt that Forrest Gump was the director, and indeed it is Tom Hanks's film. Bravo to the extreme banality!
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8 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
movie bad, October 18, 2002
This movie is the reason I couldn't give 1 star to the Royal Tennenbaums. While both are painfully unfunny "comedies" about family life, Tennenbaums at least is a bit imaginitive. This is like watching a long, bad comedy routine by one of those untalented, solipsistic thirty somethings that always seem to end up plugging up the stand-up blocks on the Comedy Channel. How pathetic and childish! This movie would make a bad episode of Doctor Katz. Plus it co-stars the "Ford Guy", the worst corporate spokesman in recent memory, as the great WASP Prince. Ugly! I'd like to say that this movie was insulting and unrealistic, but going by it's popularity, I guess I'm the one being unrealistic because people are really this shallow. Even when they're trying their best to express themselves. Sad.
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9 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
Real Pretty Ya Ya Women Have 3 Big Fat Weddings, November 17, 2003
Shhhh. Listen...Hear that?! It's the sound of air escaping from the heads of those who rate these kind of assembly-line Hollywood wish fulfillment fantasies as "5-star" films.
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2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
My Big Fat Ethnic Stereotype Movie, February 21, 2003
Incredibly dumb. It plays all the same "humor" notes you would expect from a film like this, and almost none of them are actually funny. Not nearly funny enough. An incomplete script. Missing true conflict in favor of feel-good over-the-top camaraderie and tired jokes from twenty other similar films. Way too obvious. It's "My Big Fat [enter particular ethnicity here] Tank Corps Rolls Over All Those Not Lucky Enough To Be Us." The whites are like pieces of windblown paper (they're "toast people" in the picture). The groom, John Corbett, is just a foil for the juggernaut of Greek vitality and the pushy rightness of all swarthy people over the wimpy, culture-challenged unswarthy. It's not just that the Greeks are ridiculous stereotypes, that's how these kinds of movies work. It's the casting of the whites as these cold, dumfounded, inferior people with no "ethnicity." If you really look at this thing clearly, it's creepy and racist.
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