Wheel turning round and round

Lola rennt (Run Lola run)

(1998)

Huh! Honestly, all I was thinking when I chose this was, "I need something wildly entertaining tonight to make up for the drearily unentertaining thing I subjected myself to this afternoon." I wasn't thinking about watching something that does well the narrative reprises that Void does for no discernible reason other than to extend the running time. And I certainly wasn't thinking of the fundamental similarity between this and last Sunday night's film.

In fact, one of the kickiest things about the film--apart from the 80-minute shot of adrenaline, and Franka Potente's rrrrrrrred! hair--is the way the story triply plays out, such that, like Phil Conners (but without the logic that that context provides), Lola learns from the earlier iterations of her narrative, knowing how to take the safety off the handgun the second time around, leaping over the scary stairway dog in the third. How can she learn from something that can't have happened if what's happening now is happening? Hey, go spoil some other movie's fun!

Whoa! Just checked IMDb to confirm that director Tom Tykwer was also Potente's director in The Princess and the Warrior, which I've had on my DVR for ages. Yes, he was, but the whoa! is for the discovery that his next is an adaptation of the wonderful David Mitchell novel I've just read, Cloud Atlas, starring Natalie Portman as Sonmi-451, Halle Berry as Meronym (but wait, spoiler alert: my understanding was that Meronym is Sonmi-451), Tom Hanks as Dr. Henry Goose, and Ian McKellen rumored as Timothy Cavendish. Woo-hoo!

Cautionary note: the Wachowski brothers are listed as screenwriters, along with Tykwer. Except am I the last to know that the Wachowski brothers are now brother and sister, that Laurence is now Lana?