Roll-M - Movie Reviews

by Susan Sackett

 Toula is thirty, and the shame of her Greek-American family…an unmarried woman with no prospects.  That is, until she meets Ian, who sees through her shabby exterior, and, quicker than you can say “ugly duckling morphs into a swan,” Toula and Ian are on the laugh-strewn fast track to wedded bliss.

Storywise, there is really nothing unique about My Big Fat Greek Wedding – but that doesn’t get in the way of making this year’s biggest sleeper one of the funniest films of 2002.  We’ve seen culture-clash movies before – straight-laced country club wasps meet the outrageous future in-laws and are shocked.  Remember The Birdcage scene with Calista Flockhart’s parents meeting Robin Williams?  Ian’s parents are their clones.

Greek Wedding, however, is warm and witty because it is from the heart.  Star/screenwriter Nia Vardalos has taken her one-woman theatrical play, based on her own life, (including a real-life husband named Ian who converted to Greek Orthodox, just like the Ian of the film), and adapted it beautifully for the screen.

Michael Constantine (best remembered as the principal on TV’s “Room 222”) is perfect as the head of the family who must overcome his prejudices and his Windex dependency.  Lainie Kazan, usually seen as everybody’s favorite Jewish mother, easily and convincingly falls into her role as Toula’s good-natured Greek mom.  The characters may be stereotypical, but they never get in the way of the humor. RSVP “Yes” to this wedding. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry “Opa!” and then you’ll laugh some more.

Tuck Everlasting (starring Alexis Bledel, Jonathan Jackson, Sissy Spacek, Sir Ben Kingsley, William Hurt, Amy Irving; screenplay by Jeffrey Lieber and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Natalie Babbitt; directed by Jay Russell; Rated PG).

“If you could choose to live forever, would you?” ask the promos for Walt Disney Productions’ Tuck Everlasting.  Well, gee, why not state the entire theme of the movie right up front?  That way, audiences will be able to skip the first 85 minutes or so and come in at the end when young Winnie Foster (Bledel) must make that decision. Most likely the young girls this film is aimed at will already know the answer, having read the book it’s based upon, an adolescent girls’ classic.  The story: A young rich girl, forbidden to venture beyond the bounds of her own yard, has a quarrel with her parents and heads off into the woods.  Losing her way, she stumbles upon a young man who is drinking from what she later learns is the fountain of youth.  But first, she must learn to be a teen and have some fun with the Tucks, her newly adopted family, and fall in love with the young teenaged boy, and to avoid Ben Kingsley, the mysterious villain who’s on to the Tuck family, and… Oh, I’m spoiling all the surprises.  Not.

This fantasy should have been a recipe for adventure.  But the picture drags, even at 90 minutes.  In the hands of another director, it might have been an intriguing tale for the younger set and perhaps even a few of their nostalgic-for-Disneyesque-films parents.  Instead, it’s just everlasting, and everlacking good spellbinding direction.