The SlackerStalker Review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Racializing white people - the ibuprofen for that nagging race anxiety headache.



I give it one thumbs up.



It met the minimum lesbian film requirement: at least one conversation between two female characters about something other than a man.



But, one thumb down because it informed my life very little. It was a pro-nerd movie, and in that I related to it, but it had a super duper bright shiny happy pretty (nail)polished sheen that leaves out the good girtty underpinnings of the totally problematic religious aspects. They had the groom baptized just to use the church! Without him learning a damn thing about the misogynist and racist history of Orthodoxy! As though Orthodoxy isn't still killing people-- as though it was just a quaint hold-over from a forgotten time. I really wanted someone to die. Would it have killed 'em? Just one little death, that's all I asked.



It also had no animals in it.



The breakdown:


FOUR conversations between women not about a man: one about college, one about business, one about ethnic heritage, and one about a zit.


JESUS FIGURE: the grandmother. I coulda sworn they were going to kill her. I wish they had, not just to give the movie more depth, and the neglected role of women in Orthodox cultures a little more space, but to give more face time to an interesting "nonpretty" (almost third-gendered) character. Death would've helped develop her character beyond the "redemption" scene of her sharing her wedding crown with our heroine. Come to think of it, they had to gender her in that scene, showing her as a young woman, to resolve her place in the movie. Did we ever see her again after that? I didn't.


GAY FIGURE: the brother. Weirdly single, comes and goes mysteriously, likes the company of other young men, "comes out" as an artist. I hope there's a sequel where he marries the groom's best friend, who looked a little lonely and gay.


QUESTIONS: compulsive sexuality, fertility, consumption, but also celebrates those things in the end.


ANXIETIES RELIEVED: professional class/ working class anxiety-- resolved through mysterious vodka-like substance out of tiny fluted glasses; race anxiety among light/white skinned people-- resolved through (surprise!) circle-dancing! The timeless and functional ethnic tension panacea where we can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class Generic Unitarian White People (yes, a little redundant, that) linking arms and heaving into the grape-vine with the Sopranos, Woody Allen, Crocodile Dundee, Juliette Binoche and other valorized and racialized white people in the popular mind.


THE LAST TIME I CIRCLE DANCED: was at a