From the original review: Nia Vardalos returns to flash her teeth at us in My Life in Ruins. Considering that the pun of its title — referring to both the main character’s emotional state and her locale in Greece — is probably the cleverest thing about the movie, you may well need to know nothing else. Rarely has such an undisguised compendium of clichés cluttered up the screen. It’s like neither Vardalos, nor director Donald Petrie, nor former Simpsons scribe Mike Reiss can be bothered to dress any of this up to disguise its utterly derivative nature. The truth is they probably weren’t bothered, because they felt they didn’t need to be.
This isn’t a movie; this is a commodity. The whole point is that it’s all so comforting and familiar that you’re supposed to have been programmed to like it for those very reasons. And there’s a chance that you very well might. I can’t say I hated it myself. I was never bored by it, though that may have in part been simple fascination at the way it kept doing exactly what I thought it would at every single turn, which verges on a kind of genius one rarely encounters. Even the most hackneyed screenplay usually manages at least one minor variation, if only by accident. Not so here.
Full review here
The Hendersonville Film Society will show My Life in Ruins Sunday, Feb. 9, at 2 p.m. in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.
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