My Big Fat Greek Wedding (95 mins, PG) Directed by Joel Zwick; starring Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine
The New Guy (88 mins, 12) Directed by Ed Decter; starring D.J. Qualls, Eliza Dushku
Swimfan (83mins, 12) Directed by John Polson; starring Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen
Minor Mishaps (104 mins, 15) Directed by Annette K. Olesen; starring Jørgen Kiil, Maria Würgler Rich, Jannie Faurschou
The current surprise success in the States, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is based on a one-person show by the Greek-Canadian stand-up comic Nia Vardalos and is co-produced by Tom Hanks, who saw the stage act at the suggestion of his Greek-American wife. Budgeted at $5 million, this sentimental family comedy has already taken more $100m at the box-office, thus proving that there can be gain without pain, pearls without grit.
As a string of jokes conjuring up people we don't see, the show probably worked on the stage through the sheer force of an actress's personality, the way the equally trite Shirley Valentine did. But opened up with a gaggle of flesh-and-blood caricatures around the heroine, it's a poorly drilled parade of clichés familiar from pictures about force-of-life immigrants running ethnic restaurants.
In this case, the excessively chauvinistic Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine) lives in a house modelled on the Parthenon and runs a popular Greek restaurant in Chicago called the Dancing Zorba's, with the help of his daughters, his son and his discreetly dominant wife (Lainie Kazan). Their younger daughter, Toula (Nia Vardalos), is an unmarried, bespectacled frump who wants a life of her own. Suddenly she takes a computer course to manage her aunt's travel bureau, has a makeover that transforms her from an ugly duckling into a Hellenic swan, and before you can say: 'You look lovely without your glasses', a handsome schoolteacher, Ian (John Corbett from Sex and the City), falls in love with her and proposes.
The trouble is that Ian's a middle-class Wasp, but the film will admit no impediment to the marriage of these true minds. He immediately agrees to be baptised in the Greek Orthodox Church and falls in love with her 50-odd relatives who are all frighteningly high-spirited. The only people to emerge mildly scathed are Ian's parents, whose reserve and good taste are compared unfavourably to the life-enhancing vulgarity of the Greeks.
I emerged from this barrage of unsubtle verbal and visual jokes feeling that I'd been battered by chunks of the Elgin Marbles made of baklava or trapped in a Trojan Horse with Melina Mercouri, Arianna Stassinopoulos and Nana Mouskouri for company.
As an impressible young moviegoer, I used to dream of attending an American high school - sharing milkshakes at a drugstore with Judy Garland, necking with cheerleaders in the back seat of convertibles, wearing padded armour to crush rival football teams and attending proms in a white tuxedo. Nowadays, my idea of hell is seeing this sort of high school served up every week as the dumb lead the dumber in Hollywood. This week, there are two such films, both on that theme of newcomers entering a senior class as strangers.
In The New Guy, the geeky Texas teenager Dizzy Gillespie Harrison (DJ Qualls) accidentally breaks his penis at a school where everyone mocks him. So he takes lessons in social deportment from a black criminal and switches schools, becoming the self-confident 'Gil Harris', worshipped by the girls, an inspiration to the jocks and admired by the teachers. He also learns a lesson in humility and helps bring everyone together. It's incoherent and entirely unfunny.
The new pupil in Swimfan is the fetching blonde Madison (Erika Christensen) who enters a New Jersey high school and embarks upon a deadly seduce-and-destroy mission aimed at the swimming champion, Ben (Jesse Bradford), who has a steady girlfriend and the probability of a sports scholarship at Stanford.
A tapestry of loose ends, the movie is, in effect, a teenage reworking of Fatal Attraction with the added frisson that Christensen, the crazed femme fatale , played Michael Douglas's wayward daughter in Traffic.
Minor Mishaps (Små Ulykker) is a minor, mildly enjoyable Danish film about a hospital porter close to retirement reacting, along with his workaholic son, two mixed-up daughters and his unhappily married brother, to the death of his wife of 46 years. Its acknowledged influence isn't the primitive Dogme kennel, but the school of Mike Leigh, the script having been developed by the director, Annette K. Olesen, the writer Kim Fupz Aakeson and the cast. The characters are a little tiresome, but not dislikable, and the events predictable, tending to contradict Tolstoy's dictum about unhappy families.
