Of course there's nothing wrong with being Czech - my point simply was Urich (actually the family name is Juric^) was not Czech.
Glad you asked for my take on 'MBFGW'. While relatively good for the genre, at least being respectful enough to get the church stuff right, it still falls into the usual pattern of using the Orthodox as part of telling ethnic jokes about Eastern Europeans. Here's what I wrote about it after seeing it.
'Dox on Film: My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Copied from my now-gone original message board (BeSeen has gone under)
Saw this slightly ridiculous but ultimately sweet, feel-good movie, the semiautobiographical work of its naturally cute star, Nia Vardalos. (She'd look better still with straight- bobbed hair but the perm fit the culture of the character she was playing.) I was expecting the self-hating/ethnic-joke aspect to offend (like when George on 'Seinfeld' converted to 'Latvian Orthodoxy' to impress a girl, or worse, Latka, Simka and Fr Gorky on 'Taxi' - I HATED that) but, though I know few Greeks (the Greek-Americans I know didn't like 'Greek school' either), it seemed to be a caricature of real things, good and bad, one observes about the group. The Church stuff seemed refreshingly accurate (unlike the TV trash mentioned above) - Nia's secular WASP fiancT (the main source of the movie's plot and tension) is baptized and chrismated to please her family (immigrant diner-owner Papa is initially dead against his daughter going out with one of the xenoi, natch). The wedding itself was interesting - seemed to be a hybrid of real Orthodox stuff and some Western flourishes. Besides the organ (a borrowing from Protestant practice the Greeks actually have), there was the 'Wedding March' up the aisle. Was this a concession to moviegoers' expectations or are Greek weddings in the US really this hybridized?
SCTV fans, note: lovely Andrea Martin, who is actually Armenian, plays Nia's worldly-wise aunt who helps Nia start her new life away from Papa's domineering.
Although there was premarital sex, overall the romance in the movie was charmingly old-fashioned and not at all like the mess that dating among secular people really is.
The tension between American individualism and old- country family togetherness gone wrong gives something for us Byzantine Christians to think about. I realized how American I am and thought of the challenge of reconciling that with the communal aspects of the faith. The ultimate message from the movie is good: American-style assertiveness need not contradict our Orthodox faith.