Fast Food Fast Women (2000)

Review by All Movie Guide
A genial set of interlocking stories about looking for love in the Big Apple, Fast Food Fast Women is the kind of movie in which someone inherits millions of dollars for one act of kindness and keeps her day job, in spite of her professed need to quit it. If this strikes a chord with you, you will probably also find charming the regular fire-escape musings of a lovely young woman clad only in a towel, which she eventually sheds, to be picked up in the courtyard below by a vagrant. There are two main stories here, and it's the older actors who are the most convincing and ingratiating. Bella (Anna Thomson, a willowy blonde with bruised lips) and Bruno (Jamie Harris, a scrawny Brit) are the younger would-be lovers. They have sex on the first date and spend the rest of the film trying to figure out if they're really in love. She keeps mice as pets, he drives a cab but really wants to be a literary novelist. Paul (Robert Modica, looking like he could star in The John Cassavetes Story) and Emily (Louise Lasser, looking fit and fine) are the older romantics. Paul and Emily are both widowed, and their willingness to seek companionship is balanced by an understandable need for true love. Bella seems just flaky in the Holly Golightly-Annie Hall mode, while Bruno is mostly self-centered, sympathetic only when he's charming his children from a marriage gone bad. It's a modest film that could have benefited from making Bella less of a ditz and Bruno less of a rotter. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide