Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run is a 1998 German film directed and written by Tom Tykwer, starring Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu. Run Lola Run is about a young woman (Potente) in Germany who has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who lost that same amount of money that he was transporting for a mob boss. If Lola doesn’t get to Manni in twenty minutes, he is going to rob a supermarket in one last desperate attempt to save his own life. The film is actually three different stories with basically the same elements, with only a second or so difference between them. The few seconds make all the difference, as each of the stories have vastly dissimilar endings.

I thought that the concept for Run Lola Run was great. It reminded me of a video game that you can keep restarting until the objective is achieved. It also illustrated how every choice and action you make will affect the rest of your life.

My favorite parts were just the scenes of Lola running, and seeing how each time was a little different.

I enjoyed Run Lola Run. It was different, it was well put together, and I really liked the music. It was a story that I hadn’t seen in a movie before. Certainly, there are “race against the clock” types of movies, but this movie addressed the fact that actually beating the clock was a long shot. Only one of the three stories had a happy ending, and that’s the ending the movie left you with.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is very different than any movie I’ve ever seen. It was directed by Michel Gondry, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. I actually have seen it once before, so it was easier for me to see how it was pieced together this time. Eternal Sunshine is about a couple called Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Winslet) who have had very good times, but like all couples, very bad times, too. After a particularly tough fight, impulsive Clementine gets Joel erased from her memory. After learning what Clementine has done, Joel is reeling from sadness and wants the same procedure done. Only after he is in the process of getting all remnants of Clementine erased from his head does he realize how much she means to him, even the stubborn, selfish parts of her.

The first time I saw the movie, I did not realize that it went out of order, starting with the second “first meeting” of Joel and Clementine. The editing was all over the place, but added to the surrealism of the adventure inside Joel’s head. This movie had some of the same similarities as a collage does. It feels just like pieces of Joel’s life, thrown together to create a whole, or at least his adult life.

The movie was basically one big collage, moving you from one spot to another as quickly as Joel was thinking it. Even though his memories were out of order, it added to the tone and Joel’s own increasing awareness of how much Clementine means to him. Once Joel starts to get his memories erased, the memories are first of the hard times that he and Clementine had; of their last fight, their arguments about having a child and Joel telling her she wouldn’t be a good mother. The scenes when Joel’s memory is getting erased are all overlapped; things are sucked out of the scene as soon as it is erased from Joel’s mind. This parallels the fact that all the scenes have a similar aspect, since Joel’s mind transitioned from one of the scenes to the other. This is also made evident because the audience is aware that the Erasers are trying to erase all remnants of Clem, and obviously she is in every scene that is going on in Joel’s head at that time.