Here are a few clips to view. Use them to respond to the Run Lola Run Film Reaction Journal.
These first is the transition between Act I and Act II. The second is the transition between Act II and Act III.
These nest three are from Acts I, II, and III. They each depict a similar event: as Lola bumps into a woman, we see the rest of her life flash before our eyes.
Showing posts with label Run Lola Run. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Run Lola Run. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
Run Lola Run
If you missed part of the movie, it is available through Youtube... (At least for now...)
Thursday, February 7, 2013
The Chase Is On
So this week we're looking at editing, and how a film editor manipulates time within a film. We just finished watching Run Lola, Run, which pretty much uses every editing trick in the book in an attempt to get us on the edge of our seats while Lola runs her guts out to save Manni - slow motion, graphic matches, flashbacks, dissolves, jump cuts...you name it. Below you will find three film clips. They are all chase scenes, but each is from a different era. The first is from Buster Keaton's 1926 silent film The General. (Watch it on mute. Someone has dubbed Ozzie Osbourne over it.) The second is from the 1971 film The French Connection. And the third clip is from 2005's The Island directed my Michael Bay. Your task is the following: watch each clip, paying particular attention to the editors' use of editing techniques. (Have your study guide out for reference as you go.) Next participate in an online discussion over the next few days. Throughout the discussion, we will be answering the following questions:
Bonus Clips - Below you will find two additional clips. Both are from Gone in 60 Seconds. The first is from the original 1974 version; the second is from the 2000 remake. These can be a part of the discussion too, if you like.
- How are the scenes different with regards to editing techniques and pacing?
- How has chase scene editing changed over the decades?
- Which scene is best edited?
- What scenes use what techniques and for what effects?
Bonus Clips - Below you will find two additional clips. Both are from Gone in 60 Seconds. The first is from the original 1974 version; the second is from the 2000 remake. These can be a part of the discussion too, if you like.
The Runaround
Want some extra credit? Here's an analysis of Run Lola Run. Give it a read, and then check back in with me at the end.
Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs. Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.
"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.
Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.
Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."
Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.
Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.
The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.
Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.
Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?
Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.
Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:
Movie Maid
Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs. Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.
"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.
Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.
Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."
Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.
Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.
The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.
Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.
Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?
Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.
Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:
- Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game?
- Is Lola a feature-length music video?
- If Lola is a movie, which genre applies?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Run Around
Here's an analysis of Run Lola Run. Give it a read, and then check back in with me at the end.
Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs. Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.
"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.
Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.
Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."
Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.
Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.
The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.
Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.
Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?
Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.
Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:
Extra credit: As always, feel free to comment on the comments of your peers. Also, if you wish, you may answer the third question for extra credit.
Movie Maid
Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs. Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.
"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.
Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.
Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."
Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.
Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.
The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.
Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.
Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?
Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.
Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:
- Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game?
- Is Lola a feature-length music video?
- If Lola is a movie, which genre applies?
Extra credit: As always, feel free to comment on the comments of your peers. Also, if you wish, you may answer the third question for extra credit.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Action Cinema - European Style
Years ago, I read a review of Roger Ebert's. A quote in it has stuck with me ever since. In his review of the film Eyewitness, Roger Ebert wrote:
"Somebody was explaining the difference between European and American movies to me the other day: European movies are about people, but American movies are about stories."
Ebert went on to explain why, for this reason, he felt that Eyewitness, to him, felt more like a European movie that an American movie. To this day I can't watch a European film without considering whether or not the film is 'about the characters' or 'about the story.' And there are plenty of American movies I watch that, to me, feel as though they have a European aesthetic.
Questions:
"Somebody was explaining the difference between European and American movies to me the other day: European movies are about people, but American movies are about stories."
Ebert went on to explain why, for this reason, he felt that Eyewitness, to him, felt more like a European movie that an American movie. To this day I can't watch a European film without considering whether or not the film is 'about the characters' or 'about the story.' And there are plenty of American movies I watch that, to me, feel as though they have a European aesthetic.
Questions:
- What do you think the quotation means?
- Forget that Run Lola Run is a literally a German film. Does it fit the above definition of 'European movie'?
- Can you think of any American movies that, to you, feel European - for what ever reason?
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