Run Lola Run (1998)

Lola rennt (German)

Run Lola Run

There are a few movies which deserve constant attention of the viewers; otherwise the viewer will not be able to understand it fully, for example ‘Inception’, you took a phone call in between the movie for 5 minutes and boom, you start wondering what happened. And than there are others that warrant the imagination of the viewers or else the viewer will be lost again.

Run Lola Run belongs to the later category, the director wants the viewer to imagine and just believe. And why is that required is for a simple reason, the movie plays the same events 3 times. It’s just like ‘what-if’ scenarios, what would have happened if something in past would have been done in a slightly different way; surely it would have impacted the present and the future.

The movie starts with a phone call received by Lola, ‘Sammy’ her boyfriend is on the other side, he is a small time criminal, and whose attempt to climb up in the crime hierarchy had gone terribly wrong. He now owes 1,00,000.00 Marks (German currency) to some pretty bad criminals and he needs it in the next 20 minutes, or else as a back up plan he intends to rob a nearby super market. That leaves Lola with twin objectives to achieve, she needs to arrange that kind of money and reach his boyfriend as well in the next twenty minutes.

She starts running immediately with intention to ask his father for money, and while on the way she interacts with a few people, and you can see that even those people are shown to have different future outcomes in all the three scenarios. What changes from one scenario to another is the speed with which Lola runs, like on first time she runs at the normal speed, next time due a mischief by a neighbor she falls on the stairs, so she is a bit slow this time, and in the last act she is shown to have a faster start to her sprint.

Due to the change in pace the interaction with different characters and situations are changed considerably, which impacts the conclusion of the story every time.

The movie is fast paced as you may have guessed by now; even the length of the movie is just 81 minutes. However an attempt to remake it in Bollywood went south when some very talented people like Rahul Bose and Nandita Das starred in Ek Din 24 Ghante, this movie was plain pathetic for lack of a worse word. However the original one deserves a watch.

Rating ***

Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

It is not everyday one comes across an intelligent yet funny movie like EMAET. EMAET scores where every other rom-com fails, it’s a very stylish, non melodramatic, yet effective and entertaining affair.

I must warn you in the beginning itself that many people may not be able to relate with the characterization of a few character, mainly the open minded parents of Kareena Kapoor. The overall movie is placed near the lines of profanity but never crosses it, the maker should be applauded that he never used the modern theme of the movie to venture into the areas of so called boldness or vulgarity.

The movie deals with two separate kinds of individuals, who by mistake get married in Las Vegas out of their utter intoxicated condition. They realize the mistake soon enough and are mature enough to go for annulment i.e. declaring the marriage null and void from the beginning. However the heroine is kicked out of her job, as well as her apartment (due to non payment of rent), and since there is no where else to go, she stays with the hero. Even the hero has been kicked out of his job, but has not told his parents. As the hero is living his life in a miserable condition since childhood, as his overbearing, filthy rich parents have never appreciated him and that has turned our hero in a dull and uninteresting personality. With the entry of ‘high on life’ heroine in his house he starts getting easy on his life. While developing a soft spot for the heroine in the process.

This is one of the better performances of Kareen, any may be the best one for Imraan. The supporting cast has done a wonderful job as well; Boman Irani, Ratna Pathak Shah as Imraan’s parents are excellent, even Ram Kapoor who gets just 2 scenes is pretty good. The dialogues are good, the music is great, the scenes are funny; especially look out for Imraan’s wild encounter in bathroom, and the family dinner sequence near climax.

But the icing on the cake for me was undoubtedly the climax. Many may not agree with it, I feel there could not have been a better culmination to the story. The first time director has got every thing right, starting from the script to the casting, and music to editing.

One of the best movies of the year, go for it.

Rating ***1/2.