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Cloy meets girl
All you need is love — and a zillion dollars — to live happily ever after if you're the preposterous princess of the irritatingly shallow romance "Fast Food Fast Women."
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
Bella (Anna Thomson) has a date with a British-accented cab driver named Bruno (Jamie Harris), and, needing advice, she goes to a doctor friend Sherry-Lynn. Whatever you do, says Sherry-Lynn (Lonette McKee), don't tell him you want kids — that kind of eagerness will only scare him off.
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| | | FAST FOOD FAST WOMEN | Written and directed by: Amos Kollek.
Cast: Anna Thomson, Jamie Harris, Louise Lasser, Robert Modica, Lonette McKee, Victor Argo, Angelica Torn, Austin Pendleton, Valerie Geffner, Mark Margolis, Judith Roberts, Lynn Cohen, Salem Ludwig, Loulou Katz, Irma St. Paule.
Related links: Official site |
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The mildly desperate 35-year-old takes careful note and asks, "Anything else?"
"Yeah," says the doc. "We're living in a very fast-moving world. I think you ought to fuck him on the first date."
What she doesn't know is that Bruno has kids — they've been dropped off indefinitely at his place by his ex-wife — and this is going to make it tough for him to keep up with Bella, much less ever invite her over to his place to consummate the relationship on the first or any date. Voila — instant plot complication.
Bella has other irons in the fire — notably an inexplicable relationship with George (New York theater fixture Austin Pendleton), who drops in to have a quick lay and eat her food and then leave. (He does at least get a few of the film's occasional good lines as he excitedly reveals the names of his current productions, with horrendous-sounding titles like "Godzilla on Broadway!") But she dreams of something better and believes something big is just spontaneously going to come her way.
"Fast Food, Fast Women" is irritating in nearly every way. It has no fast food — and in fact, not much exploration of Bella's life as a diner waitress. It has no fast women, exactly, but it does have bizarre romantic matches of all kinds, and preposterous-looking women who appear to be the product of a cosmetic surgeon's twisted imagination, their faces stretched into unnatural shapes and their chests absurdly out of proportion with their bodies.
Dumbest of all, our heroine's situation is resolved (not that she has much of a situation to resolve) with a sudden multimillion-dollar windfall that allows her to live happily ever after. She's faced no difficulty, learned nothing, earned nothing, but she has a lovely fairy-tale ending that's supposed to make us leave the theater happy. (We don't even have to feel bad for the person who had to die for her to get the cash — it's the parlor game of what if you had a wealthy, elderly aunt you didn't even know who died, without any suffering of course, and left you a zillion dollars.) The film doesn't only try to pull our strings, it does so in a clumsy and meaningless way.
Somewhat better is the side plot about an elderly but still handsome diner patron and his romantic interest, played by Louise Lasser. This budding relationship, with high hopes and setbacks, is a little more realistic and even has a bit of charm. But it's hardly enough to redeem this audience-insulting movie.
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MAY 8, 2001
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