User reviews

A bit slow at times, but solid performances and quirky script makes it work. Lead actress is a bit too old for the role of a 34 year old woman, but carries great screen presence and manages to add depth to an eccentric character. Lasser, as always, is fantastic. The editing is a bit messy, but I found this little movie to be quite entertaining.

"Fast Food, Fast Women" has little to do with either. A somewhat inept, light-hearted slice-of-life indie, this flick revolves around a single 30-something woman, Bella (Anna whatever-her-name-is), who waitresses in a NYC diner, and her assorted friends/acquaintenances with loneliness and the need for relationships being the central theme. A very forgettable flick, "FF,FW" is not without its moments and manages some poignancy, quirkiness, and heart. However, in the grand scheme of all things cinema, this is just another marginally entertaining film with a bunch of where-have-I-seen-him/her-before character actors which will never be more than a so-so small screen watch. (C)

As Robert Altman's Shortcuts this film is about different people with different linked stories. This film from Amos Kollek belongs to the new independent American cinema wave: fresh, clear and very direct.

Bella is an insecure girl that works in a fast food restaurant with a tremendous need of love. Bella is very fragile so fragile that walks with the stiletto heels in order to see things with a panoramic and upper position view but with the fragility, detachment and embarrassment of a teenager. She has a periodical love-making relationship with a married man.

Three elder men, one looking for a female friend through a lonely heart advertisement, getting disappointed when the lady realizes that he has never made love in his life. The other two, very pathetic, talking and chatting about unlikely sex all the time. The mature woman stresses the fact that "merchandise is no longer valid" (at that age). The love happiness and kindness of elder people has reminded to me the Marco Ferreri's film: "La Casa del Sorriso".

All these stories that are linked by two common factors: loneliness and lack of love. The film has also to be seen not only for its cleverness but also to understand that in America not only commercial films are being produced.

Rating: 6/10

At first, Anna Thomson's bot-ox lips, nose job, and silicone distracted me. I notice that this look is big in Hollywood, the bee stung lips of so many movie stars, their big boobs on a starved stick of a body makes the young guys pant, but the girls can't possibly match the impossible can they? Anna is an educated woman that has rejected Wall Street to work as a waitress in a diner. She's 35 and her mom's applying the pressure. Her Broadway paramour, a married man has strung her along since she was 23. Enter Jamie Harris, starving taxicab driving, failed novelist. Suddenly ex-wife dumps Jamie's kid plus one on him. Naturally through a series of unlikely big city moments, Anna and Jamie hook up, lose each other, and love.

Then there's the autumn autumn match of still spry, 70 year old Robert Modica and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, ex-Woodie Allen wife Louise Lasser. This relationship of seasoned citizens so rare in film took the show away from the yougen's. We cared whether or not sweet, only had sex with someone he loved, Modica can get it up for willing Lasser. We hoped the drugstore was stocked with Viagara.

The screenplay offered some silly city shtick, New York City hip, but these scenes fall flat; nevertheless, this one, the babe and I enjoyed.

This film ran through the art house circuit so quickly most people missed it, and that's too bad. Now it's finally beginning to show up on cable, and I hope it gets a larger audience. Amos Kollek's other films are also hard to come by in the U.S. -- I know I'D like to see more of them, after having seen this one, but this seems to have the lightest touch, from what I can tell.

Among the many things it has going for it, is the incomparable Anna Thomson (Levine), a character actor I've followed since her days in the rep company of the original Tracy Ullmann Show on Fox television, through her unforgettable role in Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN, to this interesting role of Bela.

Magical Realism is a kind of sub-genre I always enjoy, and when it plays against the gritty, wonderful city of New York (my home town), I sit up and take notice. This is the kind of dark underbelly of one of my favorite (also underappreciated) TV shows, Jay Tarses' "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd." If you knew and liked that, and can do with something darker and more sexually explicit, you'll probably like this.

Bela triumphs, and so do her strange friends, in this pretty unique film, which is slow paced, as slice-of-life character studies are, so be prepared for that. If you tend to criticize films for being "too slow" or not having enough plot, you might not like this, but if you are happy examining characters and living with great dialogue and situations, hang in there. If you like "Smoke" or "Blue in the Face," you'll probably love this.

Don't waste 90 minutes of your time on "Fast Food, Fast Women." It's annoyingly episodic script with three story lines patched together is laughably bad due to predictable writing, horrific acting, and even bad music. I found the anorexic main character upsetting to watch every time she was on screen. SHE needs the fast food.

Spend the 90 minutes you'd devote to this turkey doing something more exciting...like trimming your toenails. You'd have more entertainment value.

The only redeeming thing about this film is Louise Lasser, but she deserves much better than this tired script. It's as impotent as the elder guy she courts in the movie.

VIEWER BEWARE!

It's a shame people compare this film to indie dogs like "walking and talking". This film is a work of art. Strangely compelling, clunky, human, passionate, deranged and ultimately uplifting -- this is one of the most mature and honest portrayals of women and loneliness I have seen in a long time.

For me it's up there with Hal Hartley and Woody Allen's freshest and most honest work. It's real credit that it was selected in competition for Cannes - - they understand the way elliptical themes and complex characters are often the most challenging and satisfying for a thinking audience.

For people that don't get it : Stick to TV cinema. You won't understand art if it hits you in the face.

My girlfriend and I were stunned by how bad this film was. After 15 minutes we would have called it quits except we were too curious to see if the film could possibly redeem itself. It didn't.

I can't understand the praise given to this film. The writing was downright awful and delivered by some of the worst acting I have seen in a very long time.

One thing that especially annoyed me about this film was that often when people were talking to each other there was an unnatural pause between lines. I understand using a pause to create a feeling of awkwardness (like in Happiness). This was not that type of pause -- it was just simply bad directing. This film might actually be much better with subtitles, and maybe the overseas market is the best one for this film, because then the innane dialogue and bad acting wouldn't be noticed as much.

I generally like these types of small quirky films (The Real Blonde, Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), but this one failed on so many levels that I consider it one of the very worst films I have sat through in the last few years.

I saw this movie last night on TV, and found it refreshing, personally inspiring, despite the negative comments others have written about it.

The characters redeemed themselves by sticking with what they thought they believed in, and/or went after what they thought was important to them, despite how impossible those goals seemed.

Much as Bella has chosen her waitress job, various characters meet impediments which cause them to choose one way or the other. At the end, you realize how true to themselves they really were.

The quirky personalities made the characters more real to me. I was able to envelop myself totally in this movie, forget all about myself, my troubles, my own world, despite some loose ends and unnatural jumps in the stories. Life's like that. These people seemed real to me, even when I knew they weren't.

The movie made me happy in general, happy for the characters' successes, and aware that it was a fairy tale colored a bit by some of life's inevitable disappointments. The characters were not foolish, just human. Because most of their lives were not in the movie, it seemed somewhat like a loosely structured play.

Rough, unpolished, quirky, non-Hollywood romances, people getting by, people looking for the "right" person to love them.....7.5 points from me

OK, OK... that pun is pretty lame I admit, but no worse than some of the attempts at humor in this film. Which is actually not to say that this film is completely terrible. It isn't, not by a long shot. But it just isn't that good either. I actually enjoyed Amos Kollek's earlier film "Fiona" quite a bit (and I would still be very interesting in seeing his film "Sue"), but this was really nothing like that gritty, slice-of-life, documentary-style film. This was more of a quirky, almost sitcom-ish comedy. To Kollek's credit, this predates the whole quirky indie trend by a few years, so it doesn't quite have the same pre-meditated feel as, say, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", however it has a lot of the same problems as that film did. None of the characters seem at all real, and everything they do or say feels completely scripted to be "witty" or "quirky" (and is only sporadically funny, although at least it is, a little). The whole film gives off a decidedly no-budget feel, with very primitive camera work and often amateurish acting (despite the presence of Louise Lasser), which in and of itself isn't bad, since at least it doesn't have the studio gloss of most recent similarly-minded pseudo-indie films. If anything, i give the film a little more credit than it probably deserves, just for having such a run-and-gun, no-budget feel. I did like the choppy, rough editing, for purely aesthetic reasons. Also it deserves some credit for not having too much of a plot (except towards the end), and a good unhurried pace.

This is just a sweet film. I think that if you don't like it because it's too mellow, you should ask yourself if you haven't grown to be too cynical.

All the people that normally only see trash as "Sleepless in Seattle" should see it. The film is romantic but not sticky, intelligent but not arrogant...

The performance of Anna Thomson (or Anna Levine as she is called here) is simply heartwarming. all the movie through, you never realise that this lovely Bella-character is an actress.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen! I saw it at the Toronto film festival and totally regret wasting my time. Completely unwatchable with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Steer clear.

This is the third film I've seen pairing director Amos Kollek and actor Anna Thomson. The other two, "Sue" and "Fiona", were both great and about the most depressing things you could watch ("Sue", in fact, is a masterpiece). So I was curious to see where Kollek was going to go with this, a more light-hearted, and even comic romance. Of course, we aren't talking "Sleepless in Seattle" here, thank goodness. I have to say that while I was watching the movie, there were times whenI shook my head and said to myself, "this is bad" or "that's ridiculous". In fact, this film had many more flaws and awkward scenes than Kollek's earlier work. But at the same time, after it was all over and I was walking home, I really felt like I had seen something special.

I can't explain why exactly, but one thing that was surprising is that Anna Thomson's character, while the driving force in the previous films, was comparatively dull and uninspiring and underdeveloped here. Her love interest, even moreso. But this film was buoyed by a secondary romance plot involving two 60-somethings fumbling their ways into some sort of relationship. Louise Lasser Louise Lasser, hehe, making a comeback of sorts in recent years ("Happiness"), was just wonderful. Her partner (was it Robert Modicka?) was also off-the-map charming. If I have one complaint, there wasn't enough time in the film devoted to this burgeoning romance. There is one scene involving the two that is about as tender as anything i've ever seen on the big screen. It's nice to see good love stories about middle-aged people and above and they show that often the actors, perhaps due to more experience acting, pull it off much better than most of the young and the beautiful.

In sum, another winner for Kollek and Thomson, and I just wonder when, if ever, Thomson will become a star in the states (she is quite popular in France). I kind of hope she doesn't, but that's out of my own selfishness to see her in more of these kinds of films as opposed to the inevitable lure to make the big money in the bad movies. I also hope Louise Lasser continues to get more parts because she rocks. (8 out of 10)

Today I'm happy that I'm from Israel. This is directly connected to the fact that the director of this film is from Israel either.It really makes me proud to know that the brain who create this wonderful film,grew up here. It is a comedy about life, and all the regular components of our routine: love, sex, work, children, money, getting older... All characters are looking for love and warmness, in their boring life, and they all get connected in some way... We can find ourself in each characters, even thought it present strangeness, and something bizar.This is why I enjoyed watching the film- you can't tell what happened with the character a minute after you've seen her\him on the screen. You won't get any big ideas from the film, and you won't find a message that will make you think allot after the film ends, but- it has a positive atmosphere, and you'll get out from the cinema with a big smile, and with an optimist opinion about life.

Lasser's love scene is one of the best in the movies, and may be her best work over all. What an actress. She and Robert Modica are electric lovers as two older people, senior citizens, who fall in love, who care for each other in ways that only lovers can care. And maybe only older lovers.

Loneliness and getting older are dealt with sensitively, and every movie goer who looks for something more than action will find Kolek's (the son of the famous Israeli Mayor)film moving and worth the time. Why are't there more roles for older actresses? Because there are't many actresses with Louise Lasser's sensitive emotion. She digs deep and the audience falls with her. Robert Modica is also attuned to the feelings of older men left alone.