BEFORE: This is an easy one, Nia Vardalos carries over from "My Life in Ruins", and two other actors do also. (Three in a row for Rita Wilson!) And it's something of a Greek trilogy, since "Mamma Mia!" was set in Greece (an American film with a half-British cast, an Italian title and Swedish songs, set in Greece, of course...) and then so was "My Life in Ruins" took place in Greece, now it's a film all about Greek-Americans. (If only TCM had shown "Zorba the Greek" this week....)
Here's the schedule for tomorrow, March 3, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", and we've reached the last day, the end of the Oscar-themed programming. The final Best Picture nominees and winners are:
5:15 am "Naughty Marietta" (1935)
7:15 am "Captain Blood" (1935)
9:30 am "Ivanhoe" (1952)
11:30 am "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)
2:45 pm "The Music Man" (1962)
5:30 pm "The Yearling" (1946)
8:00 pm "Gandhi" (1982) - winner
11:30 pm "Braveheart" (1995) - winner
2:45 am "Ben-Hur" (1959) - winner
I'm finishing with a final six films seen out of the last batch: "Captain Blood", "Mutiny on the Bounty", "The Music Man", "Gandhi", "Braveheart" and "Ben-Hur", and the final 6 out of 9 brings my total up to 140 seen out of 342. Final Tally, let's round it up to 41%.
THE PLOT: A Portokalos family secret brings the beloved characters back together for an even bigger and Greeker wedding.
AFTER: This is what I was talking about when I said that sometimes, by the time I get around to seeing a movie, the sequel is close to being released. I watched the first "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" film in February 2015, and then this sequel was in theaters just a year later. Now it's two years later (for me) and Toula and her husband now have a teenage daughter applying for college. So forgive me if it feels like she grew up SUPER fast. (I know, the original came out in 2002, so a full 14 years have passed in the real world since the first film, but that still doesn't explain how she aged to 17 or 18. BTW, the actress was 19 at the time of release, but looks only about 14 on the poster.)
More time-passage problems, Toula was said to be 32 at the time of the first movie, and if this is set 18 years later, she would be 50, and she does not look it. Then they go and reveal that her parents were married "fifty years ago", which is fine for Toula, but her sister Athena's supposed to be three years older, so was she born three years before her parents got married? Ha ha, it's a trick question, because it's possible that Toula's parents were never officially married, in one of those "only in the movies" situations where documents weren't processed properly in the old country. So that's one generation that has to fix their relationship, plus Toula and her husband seem to be spending less and less time together, meanwhile Toula's daughter (who's somehow aged at a super-fast rate, like kids on soap operas...) is taking her first steps into the world of dating boys, which involves a lot of rolling her eyes whenever she gets advice from her mother or grandfather.
It's probably hard enough for this teen girl, attending a high school where her own father is the principal. That's social suicide, really, which would probably cut down on not only female friends, but make her un-approachable to any teen boys. So it's no wonder she's considering going to college somewhere - anywhere - further away than a four-hour drive.
I would have liked to see some character development among the Greek family, but no, it's pretty much the same jokes that appeared in the first one. I don't get the 500 uses that they have for Windex, the patriarch even uses it here on his bad hip, instead of going to his physical therapy like he's supposed to. Perhaps it has some kind of placebo effect for him, but I have to call foul on this, because it's not only terrible medical advice to put in a movie, but it's simply not funny. And there was a great opportunity for character growth if he would only be shown realizing that this "medical" solution doesn't work.
It's the same issues from the first film, the big, meddling family can't help but get overly involved with everyone's affairs, and then even when Toula vows to be a different kind of mother, she ends up falling into the same traps, and being over-protective and meddling in the affairs of her daughter. Hey, if she can't make the necessary break from the family members that bother her, then it's her own damn fault if she finds herself repeating their mistakes, or right back where she started, helping out in their restaurant. (which we hardly ever get to see them visit during the course of this film...)
But the main thing that's bothering me is how easy it is to load up a film like this with a lot of ethnic stereotypes, all in the name of humor, but to such an exaggerated degree that I end up wondering if that's really the appropriate thing to do. I touched on this a bit in the review of the first "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" film - does it really do a service to reduce everyone in this Greek family to what is, essentially, a cartoon (or cartoonish) character? I re-ask the question - what if the title had been "My Big Fat African-American Wedding", and the filmmakers fell back on the absolute easiest, most basic stereotypes about black people (they're lazy, they eat fried chicken, etc.) Or what if it were "My Big Fat German Wedding", and all the characters wore lederhosen and those silly hats and talked about how Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, after all? That would be very WRONG, so how is it correct for Greek people to be talking about how Alexander the Great was, umm, great?
I plan to discuss this further when I review "Black Panther". While I completely support the depiction of an African nation and its peoples, because it was mostly very positive, I still noticed that all the American and British actors were instructed to speak in a manner that was meant to be "more African" - and that's a very fine line to walk, because in doing so, they ended up pigeon-holing a whole race of people, just by pointing out that they talk differently. And then there were the tribal tattoos, which I think were a bit over-the-top, and then they had one guy with a plate in his lip, and they made sure that he was in the background of every important crowd shot. To me, it came across as "Hey, we got a real African guy here, let's make sure everyone sees him!" and with too much of that, it starts to feel like cultural exploitation, even if that's not the way they intended it.
Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this, because there are definitely British actors that can do American accents, and American actors that can do British accents, with varying degrees of success. But then when you've got all these non-Africans doing an African accent, it feels a little over-the-line. Same thing for all these Greek accents in tonight's film, it's just a bit too much and when it started to feel more than stereotypical speech, it started to feel derogatory, if that makes any sense. And it doesn't really help that the writer falls back on being Greek herself, as if that makes it OK to portray Greeks as simple, or stupid, or ill-intentioned, because she can just say, "Well, that's the way MY family was..." but in my book, still not OK.
OK, rant over. It's painfully obvious where they're going to take this story next, the easiest thing in the world would be to have Toula's daughter get married - if they wait another 7 or 8 years before making "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3", she'll be 25 or so, and that's a fine age. They really should do something different, though, like have her marry the wrong man first, get divorced and marry the right guy second. Or maybe they should change things up by bringing the whole family over to Greece for a destination wedding, that would at least be different, plus then the audience could meet some new family members descended from Kostas' brother, Panos. And the Greek-Americans would get to see how much their homeland has changed - I know my grandmother always pictured Germany as rural, the way it was when she left. She never thought of it as modern or industrial in any way, because she had no frame of reference for that - so seeing the discrepancy between the way the American Portokaloses imagine the old country vs. the way it really is today could at least be the source for some new jokes.
NITPICK POINT: The teen daughter is seen attending her prom, which just HAPPENS to fall on the same date as the big family wedding mentioned in the title. It's obvious why this was done, so the montage effect can cut between three couples who are all celebrating being together, supposedly at the same time. It's too bad this could never happen - I'm not an expert on proms, since I never went to one, but I believe that 99% of them take place in the evening, and this wedding is clearly shown to be taking place during the day, therefore most likely on a weekend. So, proms take place at night, wedding during the day - I can't see how they could coincide, unless the girl goes to a very weird school, or her prom somehow got moved to a Saturday afternoon for some weird reason.
NITPICK POINT #2: If it really is prom time, then her senior year is almost over. Yet just a few weeks before prom, she's seen waiting for acceptance letters from college and then deciding between several schools, and this is occurring much too late, unless she's planning to take a semester off or something. Most people attend college fairs during their junior year, get their applications in midway through senior year, and by prom-time, they should already know where they'll be attending college in the fall. Whoever wrote this didn't do any research about when most college applications are due.
Also starring John Corbett (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"), Elena Kampouris (last seen in "Labor Day"), Lainie Kazan (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Andrea Martin (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Michael Constantine (also last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"), Louis Mandylor (ditto), Gia Carides (ditto), Gerry Mendicino (ditto), Joey Fatone (ditto), Bess Meisler (ditto), Stavroula Logothettis (ditto), Ian Gomez (also carrying over from "My Life in Ruins"), Rita Wilson (ditto), Jayne Eastwood (ditto), Fiona Reid (ditto), Bruce Gray (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), John Stamos (last seen in "They Came Together"), Mark Margolis (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Kathryn Greenwood (last seen in "The Man"), Ashleigh Rains, Jeff White, with a cameo from Rob Riggle (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2")
RATING: 4 out of 10 shots of ouzo
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