FORL 3160

February 25 2002

Run Lola Run Minutes

This movie was very interesting and chaotic. It is introduced with a soccer game but quickly switches to a phone call from Manni to Lola. Manni is Lola’s boyfriend and has lost over 100,000 Marks that has to be delivered within 20 minutes. He left the money in the subway and a bum had picked it up. Manni calls Lola for help because he will be killed if he doesn’t deliver the money. Quickly, Lola realizes that she has to go ask her father for the money and starts to run. From the point where she hangs up the phone, the plot of the story changes three times within the movie. Each time is different.

The first time, Lola does reach her father and he refuses to help her. He throws her out and tells her that she is not his daughter. She then goes and tries to get to Manni before he decides to rob a store, but she is late and has to help him. After Manni and Lola rob the store, they try to run, but the police shoots Lola. It flashes back to a bedroom scene that Lola realizes that she isn’t ready to leave Manni. Then the plot starts again.

The second time, Lola reaches her father again and he won’t help her. She then decides to rob the bank where he works. She gets the money and finds Manni, but he gets hit by a vehicle when crossing the street to see her. Then the movie flashes back to the bedroom scene again where Manni is asking Lola whether she’ll get another man if he dies. Then the plot starts again.

The third time, Lola doesn’t reach her father. She instead spots a casino where she bets twice and wins the 100,000 Marks. In the meantime, Manni spots the bum and gets the money back. She reaches the spot where Manni is supposed to be and he isn’t there. He later shows up and everything is fine. They also get to keep the money she won.

In all three plots, Lola runs by people whose lives are shown to the audience. Each time she runs by them, their lives end up changing. This film is very chaotic, but fun. You really have to pay attention to capture the significance of the film. I really could not find any bad reviews on the film, so the next three are good or mediocre reviews.

Source: http://apolloguide.com/mov_fullrev.asp?CID=1459&Specific=2086

Run Lola Run

Apollo Score:

Readers' Rating: 78 (73 votes)

Shop for the Poster

The irresistible frenetic kinetic energy of Run Lola Run is established immediately in an opening sequence that pulls the audience right into the movie. Director Tom Tykwer employs a series of directorial tricks so incessantly dynamic that it's easy to forget that he's also crassly manipulating us.

Lola's beau, the rather simple Manni has misplaced 100,000 Marks he is supposed to deliver in 20 minutes to his boss. If he can't come up with the dough, he'll be killed. Manni calls Lola, begging her for help, and Lola--whose moped was just stolen--sets off on a 20-minute race against time. Her fiery hair blazing, Lola (Franka Potente) careens across the screen, bouncing from one near-disaster to another, in her quest to save Manni from his grisly fate. Shot in real time, Tykwer borrows a gimmick seen recently in films such as Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors, as once Lola's twenty-minute race is over, he allows his protagonists to relive the events. By making ever-so-slight adjustments in Lola's game of beat the clock, Tykwer presents a cinematic version of the chaos theory. By setting in motion the same action, but with slightly different starting conditions, the characters come to completely different outcomes--not only Manni and Lola, but all the people they meet over the course of those twenty minutes. The three-part structure creates the film's fractured karma, as we see how little changes in people's actions, words and behaviour can lead to profound changes in their destinies.

Run Lola Run is enriched by the work of the charismatic Portente, who is the fulcrum on which all three stories are levered. However, in the auteur tradition, Run Lola Run is foremost a director's film, and watching Tykwer at work is like watching a child at play with a new toy; at nearly every moment we share the percolating joy of his discovery. Tykwer's marriage of camera, music and story creates an effervescent display of cinematic emotion. Appropriately, while the film pulsates with visceral vitality, it is at its weakest when trying to develop intellectual depth. Specifically, the flashbacks of the conversations between Lola and Manni show us a couple not so much engaged in a discussion as tossing around ideas for our amusement.

This is invigoratingly elemental filmmaking. A giant pinball game of a movie, Run Lola Run may be superficial and relatively meaningless, but it sure is great fun.

Dan Jardine

Source: http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi

RUN LOLA RUN

*** (R)

Lola: Franka Potente
Manni: Moritz Bleibtreu
Lola's Father: Herbert Knaup
Mr. Schuster: Armin Rohde
Tramp: Joachim Krol

Written and directed by Tom Tykwer. Running time: 81 minutes. Rated R (for some violence and language). In German with English subtitles.

BY ROGER EBERT

"Run Lola Run" is the kind of movie that could play on the big screen in a sports bar. It's an exercise in kinetic energy, a film of nonstop motion and visual invention. A New York critic called it "post-human," and indeed its heroine is like the avatar in a video game--Lara Croft made flesh.

The setup: Lola gets a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He left a bag containing 100,000 deutsche marks on the subway, and a bum made away with it. Manni is expected to deliver the money at noon to a gangster. If he fails, he will probably be killed. His desperate plan: Rob a bank. Lola's desperate plan: Find the money somehow, somewhere, in 20 minutes. Run, Lola, run!

The director, a young German named Tom Tykwer, throws every trick in the book at us, and then the book, and then himself. The opening credits spring a digital surprise, as a shot of a crowd turns into an aerial point of view and the crowd spells out the name of the movie. Lola sometimes runs so frantically that mere action cannot convey her energy, and the movie switches to animation. There's speedup, instant replay, black and white, whatever. And the story of Lola's 20-minute run is told three times, each time with small differences that affect the outcome and the fate of the characters.

Film is ideal for showing alternate and parallel time lines. It's literal; we see Lola running, and so we accept her reality, even though the streets she runs through and the people she meets are altered in each story. The message is that the smallest events can have enormous consequences. A butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, causing a hurricane in Trinidad. You know the drill.

Franka Potente, who plays Lola, has a certain offhand appeal. I liked her, though I can't say I got to know her very well, and she is usually out of breath. She runs down sidewalks and the middle of streets, arms pumping, bright red hair flying, stomach tattoo wrinkling in time with her footsteps. She loves Manni and wants to save him from his own stupidity. Occasionally the movie pauses for moments of sharply seen detail, as when her rich father refuses to give her the money, tells her he plans to leave home and marry his mistress, and throws in for good measure: "I'd have never fathered a girl like you. You're a cuckoo's egg."

Manni does his share of running, too, and there are various alternate scenarios involving car crashes, gunshot wounds and the sly use of that ancient movie situation where guys are carrying a huge sheet of plate glass across the street. Tykwer also adds segments titled "Now and Then," in which he singles out minor characters on the screen and uses just a few startling flash-frames to foresee their entire lifelines.

"Run Lola Run" is essentially a film about itself, a closed loop of style. Movies about characters on the run usually involve a linear story ("The Fugitive" comes to mind), but this one is basically about running--and about the way that movie action sequences have a life and logic of their own. I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.

Source: http://members.fortunecity.com/roogulator/fantasy/runlola.htm

RUN LOLA RUN

(Lola Rennt)

Rating: ½

Germany. 1998.

Director/Screenplay - Tom Tykwer, Producer - Stefan Arndt, Photography - Frank Griebe, Music - Tykwer, Reinhold Heil & Johnny Klimek, Production Design - Alexander Manasse. Production Company - X Film Creative Poole/Arte/Bavaria Film/Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

Cast:

Franka Potente (Lola), Moritz Bleibtreu (Manni), Herbert Knaup (Lola’s Father), Nina Petri (Jutta Hansen)

Plot: Lola receives a panicky phone call from her boyfriend Manni. Manni has to pay 100,000 marks from a drug deal to a gangster by midday or else he will be killed – however Manni has accidentally left the money behind in a bag on the train and it has been taken by a homeless person. He has twenty minutes to find some other way of getting the money - if he cannot in that time he intends rob a supermarket at gunpoint. Lola runs across town to her banker father's office to borrow the money. But when she finds her father with another woman he throws her out. She tries to stop Manni robbing the store but she is shot by police. As she lies dying, she realizes events do not have to happen that way and reruns alternate versions of the same events, seeking a better outcome.

Run Lola Run is another entry in the burgeoning new mini-genre of alternate timelines stories. It follows the likes of the Hong Kong gangster film Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997) and the women's films Sliding Doors (1998), Twice Upon a Yesterday (1998) and Me Myself I (1999).

Run Lola Run became a cult hit in Germany and in the arthouse in the West, largely it seems due to its score which is designed to appeal to the drum-and-bass crowd. Director Tom Tykwer co-opts the inventively schizophrenic visuals that have become the cutting edge of trendy directorial dazzle with directors like David Fincher, The Wachowski Brothers and Oliver Stone. The film frenetically assaults one with slick, snaking camerawork, split screen, speeded-up camera, rapid-fire zooms, changes of film stock, even witty little animated sequences. It’s the anything-goes co-opting of MTV visuals - the opening, for example, is a highly inventive shot which cuts from a quote from a footballer to a football flying up into the air and coming down on a crowd that forms into the film’s title. Tykwer also gets a lot of witty mileage out of little freeze-frame montages that flash forward to tell the stories of the various people Lola bumps into.

That said Run Lola Run also ends up a rather slight film. It’s a lot more enjoyable overall than the bland Sliding Doors, but unfortunately by now the alternate timelines genre has lost its novelty and Run Lola Run doesn’t do anything particularly different with it. There’s some individually amusing sequences such as where Lola takes her father hostage in the second story or where she ends on a winning streak at the casino in the third. But the film’s only real novelty is in spinning the same events out with an infinite series of variations, not unlike one of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. But films like this, when they create stories about wide variations resulting from different choices, need to make it very clear what different choices it is that end up affecting different outcomes - alas in some of Lola’s sequences it is never clear what it is that brings some wildly differing outcomes about. For all its status as a culty, original film, Lola’s only real success is one born of an aggressively busy directorial assault and a niche soundtrack than it substantially is of presenting fantasy of originality or depth.