1999 was a great year for indie/arthouse films -- American Movie, Being John Malkvovich, Virgin Suicides, Magnolia, Election, Ratcatcher, The Limey, But I'm a Cheerleader -- and Run Lola Run is among the best. It also just might be the most fun. It burst onto the scene with its propulsive pacing and rapid editing; a clever, music-video-inspired use of animation; and a nonlinear, playful approach to narrative. 

The narrative premise is fairly simple: Lola, whose motorbike (and only form of transportation) has been stolen, gets a phone call from her boyfriend, who needs her to pick up his bag of drug money and deliver it to him within 20 minutes or the big drug boss will kill him. But it’s in the execution of how the film shows Lola’s frantically mad dash to save her boyfriend’s life that the fun really begins. 

For my generation of 20-something film lovers at the time, Lola was one of those films that we introduced to our non-cinephile friends who may have thought subtitled films were "boring" or “difficult” or "serious.” For, while drawing on the distinguished traditions and innovations of films that came before it, from the French New Wave and New Hollywood to the neo-new wave, Lola is an irrepressible, irresistible film, a film that self-consciously plays with cinematic language without taking itself too seriously. It is, as J. Hoberman noted in the Village Voice at the time, “an enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion” and “a sort of power-pop variation on the mystical time-bending Euro-art movies made by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski.” 

But you don’t need to know who Kieslowski is or what the New Wave is to love it.  Run Lola Run, winning the Audience Award at Sundance in 1999 is, quite simply, a whole heckuva lot of fun.

We also have several special events this week. First up is the next film in our Third Eye series of staff-curated cult classics: Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, selected this month by projectionist Steve Meyers (the Pickford’s longest standing staff member!). Steve will be on hand at the screening to introduce the film for us, but in the meantime, here’s a description I love from Kristy Puchko in Pajiba:   

“Before there was Moonlight, before there was Carol, there was Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’s fearlessly fantastic and brazenly queer re-imagining of the history of glam rock. This is the cinematic wonder that dared to ponder what if Oscar Wilde was not only the forefather of the gender-bending music form, but also an alien gifted to us from another planet to bring glamor, beauty, and decadence? What if the story of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed’s rise to stardom were reimagined as a heady gay romance, snarled with broken hearts, breathtaking musical numbers, and an assassination hoax, and all that unfolded in the non-linear structure plucked from Citizen Kane? ‘It’s all too much,’ you can imagine the pearl-clutchers screaming. But in 1998, Velvet Goldmine gave us glam rock gods glittering, glorious, vulnerable and broken.”  

And it’s just as glitteringly resplendent as you might imagine. Join us Saturday night at 10 pm!