Fast Food Fast Women

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Film: C

 

 

Fast Food Fast Women (1999) is one of the unfunniest comedies I have seen in a long time.  Set in New York, it wants to be a Woody Allen film, then it wants to be a John Cassavetes film, then it wants to be a TV sitcom, then it thinks it might want to do Martin Scorsese’s comic side, and in all cannot make up its mind.

 

This has a good cast too, including Anna Thompson, Louise Lasser (in Gena Rowlands overdrive, including the hair), Victor Argo, the underseen Lonette McKee and Austin Pendleton among other familiar actors and character actors.  Many of them are even known for comedy, but this is simply a dud.

 

Writer/director Amos Koliek is presenting a sense of humor that only he seems to be in the joke about, and I never believed the lives of any of these characters, nor did I believe any of the outcomes of the storylines.  All the issues the film addresses about age, loneliness, happiness, and living in the big city have simply been done better elsewhere.  I got more about these things out of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or That Girl.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is above average, not exactly an exemplary transfer.  I have seen better from both New Yorker and the Lot 47 (L.I.E., The War Zone) company.  Reds and blacks are not quite right in some subtle way, and Jean-Marc Fabre’s cinematography is not too memorable either.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo surround is supposed to be from the original Dolby SR analog tracks for the film, but the surrounds are almost missing in one of the strangest Pro Logic encodings I have ever come across.  The only extra is the theatrical trailer.

 

This film epitomizes the kind of boutique filmmaking I am very tired of.  Did anybody read this script?  All these talents did agree to do this, which helped me not to fall asleep.  Fast Food Fast Women could not end “fast” enough.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo