Run Lola Run

Running with a mop on your head is not recommended.

Run Lola Run is the story of the titular woman trying to prevent her boyfriend from getting killed by mobsters.  For no clearly explained reason, Lola gets to relive the day until she succeeds.  It’s like Groundhog Day, but with less Bill Murray and more red wigs.  Lola runs in one direction, jumping over obstacles and avoiding baddies while a clock ticks down.  If she fails, she has to start over at the beginning of the movie, but she only has three tries and oh just read the manual for Super Mario Bros. 

The movie gets off to a great, energetic start.  Music pumps.  Credits that I can’t read because they’re in German scroll by as a cartoon character runs and runs.  Then, the movie starts and an actual person runs and runs through a drab city while some unenthusiastic German techno throbs in the background.  It has all the excitement of a high school track meet, or more accurately, three largely identical track meets in a row. 

Little things change between attempts (oh, the goomba is headed left this time!), but since everyone is a bad person, it’s hard to care.  The whole thing only takes 80 minutes or so, but since the movie just replays virtually the same footage three times, it managed to bore me to tears.  By the third go round, I was thinking of taking up knitting just so I’d have a needle to shove in my eye.  Luckily, I remembered the fast-forward button before inflicting ocular trauma on myself or, God forbid, knitting a scarf. 

Even when I made it to the end, Lola has no impact on the actual resolution of the story, even though the whole mess is her fault to begin with.  She just ran and ran for no purpose it all.  She might as well have been on a treadmill eating Häagen-Dazs.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

M

He’s concerned it’ll set before he gets it in the wash.

M is really boring.  The movie was released in 1930’s Germany, and it’s pretty common for movies made before the discovery of ADD to have scenes that run so long an innocent viewer might assume the camera operator snuck out for a quick schnitzel break leaving the actors to yell at each other in German for a few extra minutes while the subtitles give up and start rolling quotes from Mein Kampf.  So little happens that if it was written down, it’d be more of a pamphletization, not a novelization.

Other than the 70% of the movie where nothing happens, M’s a great movie!  It manages to convincingly portray a man trying to elude a town full of Germans angry at him. He’s a serial killer of children, so he probably deserves whatever’s coming his way.  Still, watching 1930’s Germans hunting a man through the streets, marking him so he can be clearly identified…I’m probably reading too much into it.  Then again, the killer is played by Peter Lorre, a Jewish man who had to flee Germany after this movie was made for fear of his life.  I guess I’m reading exactly the right amount into it. The whole thing has a creepy Holocaust training video vibe to it.

Nobody other than the killer, has much of a personality aside from “Angry German”, making it difficult to care as they s-l-o-w-l-y hunt for the criminal.  I suppose it didn’t take a lot to make Germans angry in the 30’s.  There are numerous scenes where angry citizens take up arms, and criminal syndicates have more success than the police at tracking down the killer.  I think that’s supposed to be a pointed social commentary, but if I was to make a “Top Problems with Germany in the 1930’s” list, “Too Inefficient at Hunting Down Jews” wouldn’t exactly bubble to the top.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

Nosferatu

I would not hit that.

In an era of sexy vampires with a penchant for pedophilia, it’s nice to remember that vampires were at one time scary and as attractive as a pile of guano.  Made in 1922, Nosferatu is the first vampire movie.  Maybe.  For all I know, in the late 19^th century between filming the classics Man Sneezing and Cats Boxing, someone made Vampire Sleeps with Nubile Young Woman.  Since the filmmakers didn’t have the rights to Dracula, we get Shmracula, and the familiar story of the people who visit him, and how that turns out to be a bad idea.

At least partially because it’s played by a German, the vampire is pretty creepy.  It actually looks like what would happen if a Transylvanian bat farmer copulated with his livestock.  This is a silent movie, so you’ll have to read something every so often, but it moves at a brisk pace and eschews all the extra pageantry of later vampire stories.  It’s a straightforward story about a scary monster told in a bleak and lonely way.

Rating: Must-See

Did I fast forward: Nope.