It’s actually pretty hard to catch lightening in a bottle, but to Hollywood’s mind, more often than not, the answer to the question “can you” is a resounding, and self-confident yes. Now, I found myself on the Huffington Post website the other day, and one of the featured bloggers was none other than Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the new Greek-themed comedy My Life in Ruins. She wrote about how Hollywood execs are lowering the boom on movies with female leads citing tough economic times and the fact that women, apparently, don’t go to the movies as much as men. Seems kind of pointless if you ask me, the real moratorium should be on Sandra Bullock-starring romantic mismatch comedies. She’ll be doing that schtick when she’s a senior citizen at this rate.

Anyway, the story goes, according to Vardalos, that she tried to cite Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! as two movies that were highly successful though their target audience was women. Balderdash, said the execs, those were flukes, the random happenstance at the corner of chance and good timing. Naturally to Vardalos this sounded like bull mash, as it does to me as well. But what it really put in mind, especially after seeing My Life in Ruins, was that Vardalos was the fluke, not films starring female leads generally. In fact, looking back, I think you’d be hard pressed to find one person that can remember why it was the phenomenon it was. Like the people that lined up at midnight to buy Phantom Menace toys back in ’99.

The plot of My Life in Ruins is so simple that I can recite it in Tarzan mode. Ready? Lady sad. Lady hate job. Lady hate Greece. Lady sexually frustrated. Wants to leave Greece but not know how. Lady lead tour. That Lady’s job. Lady bad at job. Tourists dumb but teach Lady to find zest for life again. Well, that’s basically it. The lady, whose name is the thoroughly un-Greek Georgia, is played by Vardalos. Her tour bus is filled with the usual odd balls and nationalistic stereotypes: the drunk Australians, the ignorant Americans, the Spanish divorcee whores and the klepto British grandmother. Okay, so Grandma Klepto was actually pretty funny, and Richard Dreyfuss as the world-weary Irv actually worked as Georgia’s Obi-Wan on her quest to find the Force of life.

Is there romance? You better believe there is. Only in a Hollywood movie can the mute, borderline deranged tour bus driver with the look of an al Qaeda insurgent shave his beard, get a hair cut and give James Bond a run for his money at the soave awards. Ugh, just thinking about this clap trap a couple of hours after the fact is enough to give me a toothache with its sugary sweetness. Now I’m not immune to romantic notions, certainly, as R.E.M. once observed, “Sweetness Follows.” But as Mary Poppins once said, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” and the shallow, predictable script is a bitter pill to swallow indeed. Sorry to go all Ugly American on you, but My Life in Ruins has probably done more to deter Greek tourism since The Battle of Navarino.