Quick recap: Lola has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks before her boyfriend is found and killed by the mob.

Run Lola run!

Fun (?) fact: There are many spirals in the film because director Tom Tykwer loves the movie Vertigo.

My thoughts: I find it a little weird to 1) have two movies with Lola in the title on one list and 2) to have watched both films unintentionally so close to each other. Whereas the first Lola I watched a couple of weeks ago was sweet and sad, this Lola is spunky (you can tell because of the red hair) and much more resourceful than her counterpart. This Lola would laugh at the thought of sitting around waiting for her love to return. I highly doubt Other Lola did any running at all, and if she did,it certainly wasn’t to save anyone from being murdered. Get it together, Other Lola, or should I say Lesser Lola?

What the movie lacks in plot, it more than makes up for visually. There is so much to take in that it becomes overwhelming at times, and it was difficult for my mind to figure out what I was supposed to be paying attention to. There seem to be a lot of clues hidden throughout the movie, although I never could figure out what they meant.There are actually three different scenarios Lola goes through as she tries to find a way to save her boyfriend and I kept trying to figure out which was the ‘real’ scenario.In the end, I had to tell myself that this isn’t Memento and maybe I should stop analyzing what might not even exist. Run Lola Run works best if you think of it like a live action video game. With each ‘death’, the character learns what not to do and how to make it to the end successfully.

One aspect that I did manage to pick up on was how everyone’s lives intersected with each other in some way. Many of the meetings fall in to the ‘butterfly affect’ philosophy, with the idea that merely brushing into someone can drastically change the entire course of their life. The film also relies heavily on the concept of time- that being one second early or one second late can also have major consequences. It was interesting to see this played out, although I don’t think the idea itself is all that complicated. Many people attribute things happening to fate when really, it all boils down to being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.

Final review: 4/5. The movie is a lot of fun and I recommend checking it out if you haven’t before.

Up next: Good Bye Lenin!