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| Fast Food Fast Women | |
| New Yorker Video // PG-13 // $24.95 // November 17, 2002 | |
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| Review by Matt Langdon | posted December 18, 2002 |
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John Cassavettes once advised Martin Scorsese to make films about what he knows best rather than subjects he knows nothing about. If that principle is being applied today to many of the Independent New York filmmakers it would be easy to say that there are a lot of single filmmakers making films.
Fast Food Fast Women, directed by Amos Kollek, is about a disparate (and possibly desperate) group of New Yorkers who are trying to find love. There's Bella (Anna Thomson) the soon to be 35-year-old woman waitress who is seeing a married guy but wants a commitment from him. There is Bruno (Jamie Harris) a London born taxi cab driver who takes care of his two young kids and tries to keep an active sex life alive.
In the older category there is Paul (Robert Modica), a 70-something Jewish man who wants to get into the dating game again and Emily (Louise Lasser) a 60-something woman who is recently widowed and wants to find a man again in her life.
Each of the individual stories criss-cross the other in ironic and unexpected ways. Bella and Bruno eventually hook up and work out a relationship together and Paul and Emily slowly but surely get a relationship started.
Fast Food Fast Women is above average considering it has a flimsy ending and treads a lot of the same ground we have come to expect from the Independent film romance comedy genre. The reason it is better than any recent Hollywood movie I can think of on the subject is because it has such distinctive and relatively unknown actors. Anna Thomson is a skinny, tall and awkward beauty, Jamie Harris has a cocksure English way about him, Robert Modica has handsome good looks for a 70 year-old and Louis Lasser gives a star turn as an older woman who manages to be both timid and aggressive. Each of the actors is given good space to do their work by director Kollek proving that they deserve to get more good film work.
Audio:
The film is driven by dialogue all of which can be heard well in Dolby Digital 2.0.
Video:
The film uses the best of indoor New York apartments and restaurants. The colors are adequate and the image is clear with no noticeable edge enhancement. The DVD is presented in widescreen 1.85:1.
Extras:
Each of the trailers are good and worth checking out if you're interested in some of the better independent and foreign films of the past couple of years.
Overall:
This is a good romantic comedy that offers nothing new to the genre but has some very good acting. The DVD is average in that it offers nothing extra and has standard sound and image. It is worth a look.