I saw this movie last night on TV, and found it refreshing, personally inspiring, despite the negative comments others have written about it.The characters redeemed themselves by sticking with what they thought they believed in, and/or went after what they thought was important to them, despite how impossible those goals seemed.Much as Bella has chosen her waitress job, various characters meet impediments which cause them to choose one way or the other. At the end, you realize how true to themselves they really were.The quirky personalities made the characters more real to me. I was able to envelop myself totally in this movie, forget all about myself, my troubles, my own world, despite some loose ends and unnatural jumps in the stories. Life's like that. These people seemed real to me, even when I knew they weren't.The movie made me happy in general, happy for the characters' successes, and aware that it was a fairy tale colored a bit by some of life's inevitable disappointments. The characters were not foolish, just human. Because most of their lives were not in the movie, it seemed somewhat like a loosely structured play.Rough, unpolished, quirky, non-Hollywood romances, people getting by, people looking for the "right" person to love them.....7.5 points from me

My girlfriend and I were stunned by how bad this film was. After 15 minutes we would have called it quits except we were too curious to see if the film could possibly redeem itself. It didn't.I can't understand the praise given to this film. The writing was downright awful and delivered by some of the worst acting I have seen in a very long time.One thing that especially annoyed me about this film was that often when people were talking to each other there was an unnatural pause between lines. I understand using a pause to create a feeling of awkwardness (like in Happiness). This was not that type of pause -- it was just simply bad directing. This film might actually be much better with subtitles, and maybe the overseas market is the best one for this film, because then the innane dialogue and bad acting wouldn't be noticed as much.I generally like these types of small quirky films (The Real Blonde, Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), but this one failed on so many levels that I consider it one of the very worst films I have sat through in the last few years.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen! I saw it at the Toronto film festival and totally regret wasting my time. Completely unwatchable with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.Steer clear.

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.