Monday, February 7, 2011

Run Lola, Run.

Run Lola, Run, 1998, directed by Tom Tykwer.
starring: Franke Potente, Mortiz Bleibtreu

"A young woman in Germany has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend before he robs a supermarket." (IMDB).

This is by far the tamest thing on the LLL list; it's crazy fun (and totally MANA for me). I really, really love this film. It's German, subtitled, and a bit heavy on camera motion, but it's very clever.

If I were a writer/director, I'd want to come out with something like this, a simple story told in an entertaining way with a killer soundtrack. The *telling* of the story is what's impressive, not just the narrative. I love the animated credits, each of the environments (Lola's room, streets, bank, casino), the split screens, the random flash forwards of the bystanders she encounters on her run (s), the fact that she somehow recalls the details of each failed attempt to get the money and then can act on them with each new encounter (DESMOND HUME?), the way she looked, Manni's completely sexy arm tattoo; all of it. It's a little like crack for your eyes.

I tried to get my mother to watch this when it first came out, she's a retired German teacher who doesn't get to speak it much anymore (unless Charlie or I get hammered enough start slurring old textbook dialogues); she didn't like it---said all the running made her too tired. And there is a lot of running. As this was actually pretty mild, despite being on the LLL list,  I watched this with my two oldest kids; they had fun noticing the differences each time around, like Hey! The dog snapped and made her fall down the steps, now she's running slower! Or Look! That nun was wearing sunglasses this time! That guy hit the other side of the car last time!

It's a good time, I really recommend it.

3 comments:

Donald said...

This is one of those movies that I remember nothing about, except that I thought it was awesome. I should rewatch it sometime.

Jackie said...

My very last college class was intro to film, and we watched this film. I agree with your mom, it was exhausting but I also liked it!

Elyssa said...

"unless Charlie or I get hammered enough start slurring old textbook dialogues"

Genius. This is how Marissa and communicate using our Spanish.

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