Fast Food Fast Women (2000)

MOSTLY CHARMING "MOMENTS" FILM

As films woven around slice-of-life vignettes typically go, this is a relaxed, thoughtful, often meandering film. We follow a couple of tracks strewn with romantic hits and misses, all of which intertwine at the end. No surprise there.

The title owes its wordplay to our characters either working or lurking at a roadside cafe and chomping away their misgivings about Life-And-All-That as a means to grope, often literally, for answers.

The pace is lethargic and lends the film a fey overtone. This probably played a part in my surprise at a certain denouement twist. It's cute, depending on whom you ask.

But the characters I shall take issue with. The lead waitress is an implausible caricature, a former Wall Street banker so jaded by her career that she chose to wait tables at a nondescript corner joint. Her romantic interest is a well educated English cab driver with an immaculate London accent, a budding writer by night. The parallel romance between a 60-something couple rediscovering their atavistic bond could have been sweet but ends up teary and saccharine.

Not the biggest of quibbles, I guess, New York is a city of surprises. Plus it's an indie so warts shouldn't be shocking. Certainly a worthy rental if you don't mind the usual holes that accompany an offbeat package. June 7, 2005

Age Over Youth

At first, Anna Thomson's botox 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 to be New York City hip, but these scenes fall flat. Nevertheless, this one, the babe and I enjoyed.
March 31, 2005

More reviews at Amazon.com ...