My Life in Ruins (released as Driving Aphrodite in the United Kingdom) is a 2009 romantic-comedy film directed by Donald Petrie and starring Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss, Alexis Georgoulis, Rachel Dratch, Harland Williams and Alistair McGowan.

She feels she has hit rock bottom, losing her passion in everything, and is told by her boss, Maria, that she has received negative feedback from the tourists who say she is boring.

Georgia finds herself leading a tour of misfits around Greece, believing she is a failure as they seem to care more about souvenirs than learning about history and culture.

The next day, an elderly seasoned traveler, Irv Gideon, helps Georgia see why she is not connecting with the group: she finds them annoying, is sick of her current job and is miserable in her life.

Nico reveals that without air conditioning on his tour bus, he got a serious headache from the constant complaints his group was making and wanted a beach day.

At the farewell party, Maria confronts Georgia about the letter and convinces her to stay, with a promise of a raise after reading the great reviews from her group.

The script is originally by Mike Reiss, based on his travel experiences, but it was later re-written by Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) after she became involved.

The film premiered on June 5, 2009, and took in $3.2 million, placing it ninth of ten for American box office income in its three-day opening weekend.

Producers Michelle Chydzik Sowa, Nathalie Marciano, Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson and Peter Safran have proven that films with broad audience appeal can still be made independently.

The website's critical consensus reads, "With stereotypical characters and a shopworn plot, My Life in Ruins is a charmless romantic comedy.

[18] Roger Ebert was unequivocal in his review of June 3, 2009 [1]: Rarely has a film centered on a character so superficial and unconvincing, [and] played with such unrelenting sameness.

I didn't hate it so much as feel sorry for it...The central question posed by "My Life in Ruins" is, what happened to the Nia Vardalos who wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding?

look...Now she is rich, famous and perhaps taking herself seriously after being worked over for one too many magazine covers...There is, in short, nothing I liked about "My Life in Ruins," except some of the ruins.Scott Foundas, writing in The Village Voice (June 2, 2009), agreed: My Life in Ruins Is Nia Vardalos' Strangely Self-Loathing Anti-Comeback: Substitute "career" for "life" in the title of this stillborn travelogue comedy, and you'll have a succinct verdict on My Big Fat Greek Wedding writer/star Nia Vardalos, whose efforts to prove herself more than a one-megahit wonder have been greeted by audiences with an apathy previously reserved for the post–Crocodile Dundee oeuvre of Paul Hogan...the result, written by The Simpsons alum Mike Reiss and directed (in a manner of speaking) by Grumpy Old Men's Donald Petrie, is a strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos's tour group as a uniformly ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece itself as a badly plumbed third-world hellhole run by lazy, Zorba-dancing louts.

[citation needed] David Stratton of At the Movies, gave the film 1 out of 5 stars and said: ... maybe they [the Greek Government] read the script and they thought, 'This is a shocker'.