Who's In It: Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfus, Rachel Dratch, Alexis Georgoulis, Harland Williams
The Basics: A depressed, sexless, career-slumped Greek American woman, leading a tour of her homeland for a bunch of stupid, culturally illiterate jerks, finds herself getting her groove back with a foxy Greek bus driver. His name is Poupi Kakas. This guy has a younger brother named Doudi Kakas. Say them both out loud.
What's The Deal: POUPI KAKAS! DOUDI KAKAS! Did you say them out loud? That's funny stuff, right? Every time I've said them both out loud for the past three days since seeing this movie, I laugh. Sometimes people around me laugh, too. But mostly I laugh. And I laugh because it's the only stuff that's funny in this entire movie and I want to remind myself that life is still worth living even when I have to discard entire 90-minute chunks of it at a time being a comedy-poison taste tester for you guys.
What It's Like: If you go see this film then you're probably old. Just a guess. But you probably are. And that means you also probably remember the live-action Disney comedies of the 1970s, the ones like Super-Dad and The Snowball Express and The Apple Dumpling Gang and The North Avenue Irregulars, films that bore zero resemblance to actual life and were so designed to appeal to seven year-old kids that it was as if seven year-olds actually wrote the scripts. Well that's this movie, except the moral of this film is that you should be getting laid a lot more than you are, a topic never explored in The Cat From Outer Space. POUPI KAKAS!
Impossible To Hate Because Of: Nia Vardalos. I don't quite know how to put my finger on her appeal, but it's there. She's got an almost supernaturally friendly quality that makes you really like her in spite of her surroundings. So I assume she's signed some kind of Satanic pact. DOUDI KAKAS!