Hacker Cinema
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
2002 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Joel Zwick
A young Greek woman falls in love with a non-Greek and struggles to get her family to accept him while she comes to terms with her heritage and cultural identity.
5 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
This is not true [1], it's a line from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding which doesn't even mention the etymology of "winter": "Ah, of course! Kimono is come from the Greek word cheimonas which is mean winter. So what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe."
[1] https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QQovEeLHVl0C&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=kimono+winter+related+etymology&source=bl&ots=ZFknswAqkN&sig=ACfU3U3ZmPr_pl_OGGaJ1tM-2law5gYmlg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifgav1x5DxAhWXYisKHcZFDaEQ6AEwFXoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=kimono%20winter%20related%20etymology&f=false
Have you seen the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? What you are describing is a big plot point in the movie.
Entertainment is a hit driven industry where the returns are highly nonlinear and the increase in return (whether measured in viewership, popularity, or dollars) goes up dramatically as you move up the success curve. Audiences have demonstrated without question that they prefer bigger movies (yes, I know, my big fat Greek wedding and Clerks, these are six sigma outliers that are fun to talk about precisely because they are outliers). The people who make films make them (gasp) to make money, because if their films don't make money they can't raise the money to make another one and they want to make more than one. They need to raise money because no one wants to see a film shot on a $6 budget, and no one wants to invest all that time and creative energy in a film no one will want to watch.
Usually it's about cultural or other shared affiliations. My dad was a big member of the "Emerald Society" at his employer, which was a group of Irish immigrants and mostly first-generation US born children.
A great, non third-rail example of why this is relevant can be seen in the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". There's a shared cultural, religious and other heritage and story that holds the characters together.
As a white guy, I would find a white-guy club really weird. I could see something like a dad group, baseball team or fan group, engineering society, a catholic religious/service group or something similar as something that I would potentially identify with. Maybe some sort of Irish heritage thing, but I don't know if that would be relevant to me, as there isn't really a shared experience there.
> I'm not sure why I would think that is racist.
Well educated white people tend to be more sensitive to things seeming racist, because they really don't want to seem racist. Hence the idea of political correctness (PC). I get the impression that Asians in Asia don't care as much about being PC as white people in America.
But that difference - like the differences you mention - isn't racial, it's cultural. The culture just happens to correlate with the race.
> why is there chinese school on saturday?
There are plenty of white minorities that would identify with this. E.g. Jews have Hebrew school, Greeks have Greek school. Have you seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding?