The other day, I got an email from Women In Film inviting members to attend an advance screening of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2”. Women in Film does really great screenings (like the one I went to for “Miss You Already”), so I signed up for tickets right away. Since there were limited tickets for members I wasn’t sure I would get tickets, but a day later I got the email that I got my seats!
I put it out on Facebook to see who else wanted to see the movie with me, and my friend Elisa said she wanted to go. I met Elisa through Tone It Up, she also works out at Orangetheory (but a different location than I go to), and she’s now going to be a part of my Pantages season tickets group next season. But she and I haven’t really hung out a ton by ourselves so I was excited to go to the movie with her.
I was super excited to see this movie. I remember when the first movie came out and loving it! And the story of how it was a one-woman show turned into a movie was really inspiring too. As soon as I saw that there was going to be a sequel, I knew I’d go to see it. And I’m so grateful that I got an opportunity to see a screening for it because there are so many movies lately that I want to see and I can’t afford to see them all!
We got to The Grove (where the screening was held) a little more than an hour before the movie was supposed to start. We were told that even though we had tickets it wouldn’t guarantee us seats, so we wanted to make sure we lined up early to get in. We were toward the front of the line and got our tickets pretty quickly. But then we noticed that they were not assigned seats (I thought they would be). So we didn’t want to wait too long before going into the theater. Even though The Grove has a bunch of restaurants, we both ended up getting movie theater food for dinner. Not the best choice, but I got a hot dog and water so it wasn’t too horrible.
We got some pretty great seats once we went inside (it didn’t get crowded until a few minutes before the movie started) and sat down to enjoy our dinner. We did get to catch up on life and everything since we had an hour before the movie started. Elisa has some cool things coming up in her life and job so she was filling me in on that. And we had a good time talking about all things Orangetheory. And before we knew it, the representative from the studio was talking to the audience explaining that since it was a pre-release screening they had antipiracy officers in the audience looking for cell phones and the movie was starting.
The movie was really good! I was shocked afterward to see that there were negative reviews online when I enjoyed it as much as I did. I had seen in interviews that the original cast was returning for this movie. And there were a ton of people from the first movie! Every scene it seems like I was realizing that the actor on screen played a cousin or something in the original. It’s nice to see that so many cast members loved doing the original movie and they wanted to come back!
The story was really cute and even though some moments were a bit absurd, there was always something real and heartfelt to bring it back to reality. Elisa and I both were laughing throughout the entire movie and it seemed like everyone in the audience enjoyed it as much as us. The only thing that bugged me were the women sitting next to me. They talked pretty loudly and decided to do some dancing in their seats (and elbowed me a couple of times). I’m also used to going to screenings where you cannot eat inside the theater so the noise of people eating threw me off a bit (but that’s a personal issue and not an issue with the movie).
I’m so glad that the movie was just as good as I hoped it would be! It’s tough to do a sequel over a decade after the original, and this one did not disappoint at all. And I think Elisa would have the same review as me.
I wasn’t able to hang out at The Grove after the movie because I didn’t want pay too much for parking and I wanted to get home at a decent hour. But it was nice to get out there since I missed doing my post-New Year’s cheesecake outing with my friend Joanna this year (hopefully we’ll do that eventually this year).
With it being after the awards season now, there aren’t as many movie screenings as there were earlier this year. But I’m glad that there are still some so I can go to the movies and not worry too much about having to splurge with my spending. There are a couple of movies that are screening this weekend that I’m going to, and if they are as awesome as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” was, I’ll be writing about those for sure!
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