Run Lola Run (1998, Tom Tykwer) (Patreon)

67/100

Third viewing, last seen December 1999*. Wrote only a single-sentence drive-by the first time around: "On the one hand, a dazzling display of technique and the most enjoyably kinetic reminder of why they call them "movies" in some time; on the other, it'd be nice if, like its forerunner Blind Chance, it were actually about something." I've since soured a bit on the Kieslowski, but this still feels philosophically glib, at once suggesting that our lives are ruled by the Butterfly Effect and that we can wrest our destiny in the right direction via selfless decisions, à la Groundhog Day. Seems less like thoughtful equivocation than just a cheerful shoulder shrug, though the resulting weightlessness (despite life-or-death consequences in each iteration) kinda works for a movie whose heroine almost always has at least one foot in the air. It really is fundamentally about motion, and Franka Potente, unlike Tom Cruise, finds a pumping rhythm that conveys frantic speed without making her look faintly ridiculous. (Helps that she's taller than he is.) It's as if Tykwer loved the first 30 seconds of Trainspotting so much that he decided to see if he could sustain that breakneck energy for an entire (short) feature. What retroactively surprises me is how little influence Lola wound up having. Seismic at the time, the big arthouse hit of that summer...yet I can't think of many subsequent films that took its throbbing breathlessness and, well, ran with it. Tykwer himself downshifted immediately into a more serene, dreamlike stylishness; if he passed this baton to anyone, I guess it'd be Edgar Wright, though Wright's metronomic briskness always has an overtly comedic function. There's a big opening right now for a filmmaker who wants to indulge in pure pop dynamism. And should a gifted young woman make her generation's Run Lola Run, we're talking potential phenomenon. 

* Though I'm not sure how. My '99 log suggests that I was at my dad's house for Christmas at the time, which makes sense; it was 20 Dec, and the two films I saw immediately afterward—re-viewings of The Matrix on the 21st and The Iron Giant on the 23rd—were definitely choices dictated by which DVDs he'd recently bought. Remember that quite clearly. But I can't imagine that he ever owned Run Lola Run. And I certainly never have. Maybe I watched it on the flight from New York? Really wish I'd thought to include these details; they'd be so useful now.