I love to watch films. I also like most of the movies I watch. I guess I just hate to hate a movie, but every now and then a movie comes along that I just despise. I recently watched a terrible movie and it reminded me of the other movies I hate. So in honor of that horrible film which brought up old memories, I hate Run Lola Run.
It is a German movie. (German title: Lola Rennt.) A friend of mine recommended it to me. That gave me the hope that it would at least be decent. Unfortunately things turned out otherwise. The movie is based on the premise of chaos: that a small initial change can lead to an unpredictably large one. This is a cool thought and fantastic to play with mathematically, but in a film it is a disaster (please note other awful movies such as Butterfly Effect.) The problem is that by showing a specific series of events (as you would in a movie) you defeat the entire premise of chaos and undermine the whole meaning of the idea. The only way it could work (for me) is if they could show every possible outcome. This is probably impossible, and if it is possible it probably would still be terrible.
Run Lola Run achieves its status as one of the few films I have turned off before finishing it by attempting to be deep and philosophic with its treatment of chaos. Instead it bitch slaps it (and the viewer) and gives us three outcomes from the slightly changed initial settings, three outcomes which are completely arbitrary and tell us nothing other than the fact that the best way to write a movie about chaos is to pull random shit out of your ass. Essentially the movie boils down to a ballad of ‘deus ex machina’ which is Latin for ‘God out of a machine.’ That’s the film term for when something magically happens to resolve a situation or move the plot along. It is lame. Anyone can write a script like that. (Notably, the best treatment of deus ex machina is in the movie Dodgeball. After losing, Vince Vaughn’s character suddenly reveals that he bet a ton of money on the other team. As their winnings are rolled out you can see ‘deus ex machina’ written in small letters on the container holding the dough.)
Back to being angry… So please, don’t write crappy scripts and pass them off as something smart. Honestly, for me, the worst part of the movie is seeing how many people really like it. It really makes me sad, sad for this world. Seriously, it is rated 8/10 on IMDB with 60,000 votes. I am about to tear up. Now go and do yourself and film and your soul a favor and don’t watch this movie.
1 comment:
you are not alone. I really hated this movie too. What does the stupid cartoons have to do? Some cartoonist needed really a job? That girls annoying hair and clothes running like an idiot on the street just to get money to the idiotics moron boyfriend. I would myself make a better movie than that idiotic/empty/videoclip crap.
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