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"Here, put some Windex on it."

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is an embarrassment, a film so humiliating to everyone involved, it is shocking that protesters haven't come out of the woodwork to scream bloody murder about the way people of Greek descent are portrayed in this supposedly affectionate comedy. For once, such a reaction would be justified; I'm not anywhere close to Greek, but I was offended. It seems almost beside the point to mention that the movie is akin to a bad network sitcom stretched out to feature length; not surprising, since director Joel Zwick has a resume filled out with nothing but second-rate sitcoms.

The movie is based on a one-woman play written and performed by Nia Vardalos, based on her personal history. It was reportedly discovered by Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, who made it their pet project and made sure it got to the screen. It is the story of Toula Portokalos (Vardalos herself), a Greek woman living in Chicago who has to deal with the wrath of her very, very Greek family when she falls in love with a non-Greek and decides to marry him.

Her father Gus (Michael Constantine) is obviously psychotic, offering Windex as a cure for any ailment and priding himself on taking any word and showing how its root comes from the Greek. Her mother Maria (Lainie Kazan) is an overpowering woman whose motherly instinct to feed her offspring is taken to the nth power. Her aunt Voula (Andrea Martin) is an insufferable socialite who also wants to feed, feed, feed. Meanwhile, her hubby Ian Miller (John Corbett) is a mild-mannered, polite everyman with an awful near-mullet with the blandest family on the planet. They're a match made in hell, and hilarity is meant to ensue.

There are a few clever one-liners of the laugh track variety to be found here, such as when Maria tries to guilt trip her children with "When I was a kid, we didn't have food." On the whole, the movie treats all of its characters and events as a joke without actually being funny. It thinks these people are funny, but they aren't: they're just shrill, and the script doesn't give them anything to do that would justify watching them.

Worse, they're horrible caricatures with no redeeming value; they think and talk about nothing other than their ethnicity, they're nasty, superficial and insulting when they're clearly meant to be endearing. At the end of the movie, Gus makes a speech to the effect that they're oranges, Ian's an apple, but in the end they're all fruits, and this is supposed to be a revelatory leap forward for Toula's family, which should tell you everything you need to know about them.

Oh yeah: Joey Fatone of N'Sync fame has a small part here as one of Toula's brothers, or cousins, or something. He can't act any better than Vardalos herself, although she wrote her script so that she doesn't have to: she's perpetual straight-woman to the bottomless pool of weirdness that is her kin. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is inexplicably becoming one of the summer's most profitable sleeper hits, grossing more than $35 million at the box-office due to good reviews and word-of-mouth. I don't know what came over people. Roger Ebert wrote in his three-star review that "everyone in this movie looks like they could be a real person." My God, but I hope not.