User Reviews

I went to see this movie having read several wonderful reviews. Unfortunately, i believe it to be one of the worst movies i have seen in recent years. The acting was quite poor, the storyline never really picks up and the ending comes out of nowhere; starting off very realistically and ending rather fantastically. It does not help that the lead actress, Anna Thompson, is incredibly difficult to watch onscreen in all her plastic glory. It is hard to take her seriously as a person, let alone as an actress. Her mouth is so tight that she appears expressionless throughout the film. Her character is barely developed and you never feel any sympathy for her or ultimately care what happens to her.

It seems as though the script was written in a stream of consciousness mode where storylines only barely interconnect and no theme is ever developed thoroughly. There are three groups of people, all in different age brackets, who seem to be searching for love. The senior characters are most thoroughly developed and the best cast. One at least feels something for them and their storyline is seomwhat interesting. The middle-aged characters, however, the protaganists of the film -Bruno and Bella- are all over the place and never really figure anything out. They never talk things out and we never really know what they're feeling for one another until we overhear Bruno speaking to someone about Bella. Then there are the small children, who seem to appear in the film almost accidentally since they barely have anything to do with the rest of the movie. They appear in only ONE speaking scene which leaves the viewer with an impression that they are completely superfluous.

All in all, i thought "Fast Food, Fast Women" was a poor excuse for a film. There were many untied ends or confusing elements throughout the various plots (eg: Bella's mother coming to visit toward the end or, SPOILER: Bruno's affair with Emily) and scenes that seemed unneccesary or made little sense (eg: Vitka's son coming to learn to use the PC, the bum living below Bella's apartment). For the tiny bit of entertaining dialogue the old men provide in their park and diner scenes, one is much better off watching old Woody Allen movies or Seinfeld reruns. Don't waste your time or money on this one.

For someone who downloads his movies through the net I had fun. But maybe going out to the cinema would bring me to a more disappointing conclusion.

It seems director Kolek is speaking through his heart, telling us "age is not an issue" in life. Well, it is. The affair of that taxi driver with that 66 yrs old woman which speaks in her first date against fetishists that meet older women, is unrealistic. So is the winning of the waitress in that heritage. or many other coincidences. All the porno that sexy Anna Thompson providing us is just an excuse to wash our eyes, cheap erotics. Not that I didn't enjoy. Yes it demonstrates us very well the loneliness of big town.

But again, many untied lines and irrelevant episodes keep this movie far from being a good, worthy one. Anyhow personally I don't have big demands so I enjoyed.

Until it hit its first land mine (more on this later), I was very willing to do something I rarely do when seeing a movie with story flaws, overlook the small unreal moments. I did this because virtually every character in the movie resembled someone I had known (or knew about) during my tenure of 25 years of living in Manhattan during which I went from being an unmarried man to getting married and having a child. The characters writer/director Kollek created have been described as 'quirky' but when people like this are your friends, lovers, acquaintances.....when they are people who you learn about, intimately and otherwise.....then they are people of great variance in their experiences and are not seen to the life you lead as 'quirky'. I should add that there were people I met/experienced who initially might appear to be odd. But getting to know folks who became good friends, getting to know lovers (and the amazing and wonderful stories told during pillow talk time), I learned that 'quirky' is actually quite 'normal'. The movie handled it's characters and their converging stories very well until the first I.E.D.; when Manhattan was reduced to a small town of 1000 with one taxi in it. That is, when Bruno picks up his fare Emily. Which is then followed by their going to bed together. This "coincidence" wounded my concentration/belief in the story being told and though in a lesser film I would have ended the viewing right then, I stuck around until the second major explosion, Bella's windfall (which some people have erroneously labeled as magic realism) of an almost $9 million inheritance from a character never mentioned or referred to previously.

In conclusion, I feel very bad that the film derailed itself as it went along because it had begun as a startlingly honest look at a group of very human, very conflicted people, who, as difficult as they made life for themselves goes, also were visited by something we all have to deal with, life's misunderstandings about the vital center of our emotional being when we engage ourselves with other people.

This is a good film. No doubt about it, the actors, the atmosphere, the story. It's good. But still this movie has a few problems. In general this movie is about the loneliness of people and their search for love and identity. It is brought to us from a very personal and warm point of view; the characters with which it deals vary from young children to very old people. SPOILER ALERT The first problem is with the characterization of the people in the movie, the old people and the young children are ok, apparently they have enough character in their faces and body gestures, on the other hand, the characters that are in the middle need to have a special gift for us to pay attention to them, they all have to be either a cab driver that is actually a writer that won't give in to his publisher or a whore that used to be a dancer and can play piano. I guess that ordinary people looking for love are just not interesting enough. Another problem is that the main character is not really living the American dream, all along the movie she is fighting to stay loyal to herself but eventually (I'm telling the end now) she I really happy only after she inherits a huge sum of money with which she buys a huge estate and opens a successful restaurant chain. All in all, it is a good movie, and the director certainly has a good eye, but there's still some maturing to do.