My Life in Ruins (2009)

  Christy had recommended this to me a long time ago, back when she was allowed to pick movies once a month but it was already in my Netflix queue then so I watched I Hate Valentine's Day instead.  I chose poorly.  This is a much better, or at least much less annoying, film.

Georgia (Nia Vardalos) moved to Greece to be a history professor but works as a tour guide instead.  The groups she takes around are more interested in shopping and ice cream than they are in history and culture, a fact that Georgia hates.  Her boss (Bernice Stegers) assigns her the worst equipment, hotels, and tourists in an effort to make her quit, even going so far as to agree to let a fellow tour guide, Nico (Alistair McGowan), have her stake if he can turn her group of tourists against her.  But with the help of a ribald widower (Richard Dreyfuss) and a hirsute bus driver (Alexis Georgoulis), Georgia rediscovers her joie de vivre.

There are no surprises here, but it's not trying to reinvent the genre, just tell a decent enough story with a few laughs.  Vardalos's particular brand of humor works in this setting and it seems age-appropriate.  I would give it a C+ on a grading scale.

There was one thing that stuck out at me after seeing this film and Dodgeball.  You wouldn't think those two movies would have anything to do with each other, but both feature actresses pretending to be disgusted by their real life husbands.  Christine Taylor and Ben Stiller have been married since 2000, and Vardalos has been married to Ian Gomez (Andy from Cougar Town) since 1993.  Gomez has a small part in this as a hotel manager who attempts to extort sex from Georgia in exchange for a stamp.  It's a little thing, but I thought it was a funny coincidence that I would happen to watch them back to back since I can't think of another movie off-hand that features that kind of relationship.