Nice Girls Finish Last

Nice Girls Finish Last

Some movies are taken from real life situations and put into an order that shows survival of the fittest, when it works out the best people always find themselves coming out on top and making it work for them. The movies Raise Your Voice (Sean McNamara) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick) are perfect examples of women starting at the bottom and getting to the top.

Don’t hold back. Don’t give up. Raise Your Voice begins at the last day of school in choir at Flagstaff High School. Terri Fletcher (Hilary Duff) is a 16-year-old teenager with the world at her hands. Terri, who is an aspiring musician dreams of spending August in Los Angeles. The three-week gifted musicians camp she will be attending is a scholarship program that has every musician on their toes. Terri and her family then have a tragedy hit when Paul (Jason Ritter) and Terri experience a major car accident. Terri was put into the intensive care unit while her brother Paul was killed. After the death of Paul, Terri gives up on her dreams of music and decides to quit singing all together. What she didn’t realize is that, while her brother remained alive he secretly sent a self-made tape of Terri and her talents to the music camp.

Love is here to stay... so is her family. My Big Fat Greek Wedding features a middle aged Greek woman, Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos), that works in her family owned, Chicago restaurant, Dancing Zorba's. Toula has always found herself different from the rest of her family and really, has not found her true image. All her father, Gus (Michael Constantine), wants is for her to get married to a man in the Greek Orthodox. But Toula is looking for more in life. After Toula has taken the proper college training she begins to work at her Aunt’s travel agency instead of the family restaurant. While working in the travel agency she meets Ian Miller (John Corbett). Ian is a high school teacher who is not of the Greek Orthodox. When the couple starts to get very serious Ian is baptized into the Greek Orthodox so that he can marry Toula with her father’s approval. Her father must then learn to make Ian family, while Ian gets used to Toula’s family.

These two movies are very different as they introduce different obstacles that can be overcome. Terri’s life is learning to get through after a death in the family. Toula just deals with finding herself in her own life. However, the movies share the same fatherly figure. The men that play the challenging father are different people but play the same roles. Terri’s father, and his best friend, were once given a full scholarship to attend UCLA for football. Being that his father was not doing well with the family restaurant, Simon (David Keith) passed up college and worked for his dad at the restaurant. His friend went on to play football in Los Angeles and became very addicted to drugs and ended up dropping out of college. Therefore, the idea of sending Terri off to a music camp in LA is not comforting to him. Gus was born Greek and grew up Greek and therefore, his children found themselves growing up the same way, in the religion with no way to get out. Gus then finds he doesn’t know how to handle it when one of his children decide to break Greek tradition and marry outside of the religion.

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