Please don't spend money on this.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Georgia (Nia Vardalos) is a Greek-American who comes to Greece to work as a teacher but when they cut down the budget, she loses her job and finds another one as a tour guide. Since the very beginning of the film, we see how much she hates everything and how she can't wait to get a job as a teacher and leave the country. The story focuses on the misfortunes of Georgia during one-week tour with the worst possible group and conditions ever. The group consists of recently divorced women who come to Greece for flirting, drinking Australians whose accents are not understood at all - and this is supposed to be funny-, very old British couple, constantly fighting family with an unhappy daughter, an old man who is travelling alone after his wife dies and telling funny teenager jokes, a bus with no air conditioning and a driver who looks very scary! because he has beard. All these components are supposed to prepare us for misfortunate and funny events, but they don't. This is where the story starts to fail. Other than this, acting is very bad as well. This is a romantic comedy but there is no one else other than Nia Vardalos and most of the time she is just standing around and looking into the camera. At some point, driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis) shaves his beard and Georgia falls in love with him even though she is 12 years older than him. After that, she ignores all the things she believes and decides to stay in Greece refusing a job as a teacher in Michigan University. I have nothing against the age difference, but this, highly affects the non-existing chemistry between the two.Artificially created problems, situations and people fail big time during the film. In the beginning, everything is bad and in the end, everything turns out to be great. How this happens is a mystery to me. In romantic comedies, there is generally a turn of events which makes things better after some point towards the end. But here nothing as such happens. The film is coming to an end, so everyone gives up and starts to act great and happy. I don't get the point of this film or why it was even made. The only good thing is the Greek ruins we see during the tour. The tour guide is crawling for sex and that's why the driver shaves and they fall in love with each other. That's pretty much it. This story could have been written by anyone because there is no story. Mike Reiss is the writer of the film and the story is based on his own travel experiences. After Nia Vardalos is involved in the film, she has re-written the story and that explains why she is in front of the camera and doing nothing. "My Life in Ruins" is directed by Donald Petrie. Its runtime is 95 minutes and it was released on June 5, 2009."My Life in Ruins" is a good commercial of Greece, even though some parts were shot in Spain. The group books the holiday to see those ruins but complains in every possible scene. This kind of irrational behaviors just for the sake of fun are not acceptable and they are not even fun. I was graduated as a tour guide and been on tours a lot of times. When I compare my own experiences with the film, I can honestly say that the situations and the people in the film are overly exaggerated. The story is not real, acting is bad, conversations and the situations are superficial. "My Life in Ruins" is a bad film and a waste of time.Generally, I tend to set aside all the bad thoughts and enjoy the film but this is not applicable for "My Life in Ruins" because it fails in every part. I really tried hard to like it but I couldn't. Normally road trips and touristic stories tend to be happy and share good thoughts. This is certainly the aim of this film as well. I just wish they would have thought a bit more about the story and create more realistic scenes and circumstances. The idea is valid. Everyone likes a holiday film. Gather a group of different people from different backgrounds, put obstacles on the way and let the heroine fight with them through her way to happiness. "My Life in Ruins" wastes its all opportunities to be a good film and misses all the exits. Before finishing my review, I still have one question in my mind, why Tom Hanks got involved in the film as a co-producer? I wonder if his wife Rita Wilson, being an American-Greek, has anything to do with it, like in the sweet romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

The film was really funny. In keeping with Nia's focus on being Greek and single, this movie has an added angle that her other films don't -- here she's an educated woman. WHY she's in Greece isn't clear, but she ends up taking a job as a tour guide for a female business owner who doesn't like her and plots with other agents to get her to quit. How Nia doesn't see this and why she stays are obvious questions, but she's soon thrown off kilter by each of the characters riding the tour bus with her. (No Spoilers!)There's a little love and a little drama. Sometimes Nia herself seems to be trying too hard, but that's actually in keeping with her character. She perhaps needs to stop throwing Ian Gomez into ALL her movies. It was cute in the first My Big Fat Greek Wedding and necessary in the sequel, but he doesn't really add anything special to the other movies.... It's probably nice to have one's husband on payroll, but it's probably healthier to let him get his own acting gigs.

Has anyone seen the 1969 movie "If this is Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium?". " My life in Ruins"-what an excellent if corny title- is much the same theme. The film could have been serialised in Mad magazine. No, it is not a great movie but good light entertainment not to be taken seriously. I dwell in Greece and like Nia I am a Greek Canadian, we both speak Greek fluently enough but with a bad accent. I have never taken a bus tour in Greece but have Canadian friends who did and have told me of similar experiences as those shown in the movie. My one and only experience as a tourist on a bus full of Torontonians and Montrealers was in Mexcio in 1977 and it was pretty much the same. A crazy and life threatening driver called Pedro, a funny guide Pepe who realised we all wanted more humour than education about the Mexican ruins etc "Thees was where the thee pipi room was. You know, when the Aztecs they wanna make pipi". My Life in Ruins spares nobody be they Greek, American, Canadian, Spanish, British or Australian. I think it would be hard to appreciate the comedy for anyone who has never visited Greece or ever been part of a tourist bus group and laugh as much as I did. That's the thing about comedies, probably the most difficult of all movie genres; one has to relate to the situation and to the characters. I would put My Life in Ruins on a par with My Big Fat Greek Wedding (though not the later TV show which was a disaster).

I watched this film the first time when I was in my classroom. My teacher showed I and my classmates a lot of discs and asked which one we preferred. We were quite selective, I guess, to choose because we didn't know a film before. Luckily, we picked this film and I'm so glad that we did that. Well, how to say... This film which talks about a story of a tour guide named Georgia and her so-called last tour (but actually it turns out to be very different) is solemnly romantic, extremely funny and downright touching with some scenes of kind of "magic" from Greece God and Goddess.Though it doesn't have much meaning like the Oscar films or stuff like that, but this is a really helpful film for those (1) who wanna become tour guide or wanna go on a trip and (2) who wanna laugh.