Lola Rennt

Last night I watched run Lola run, it's a German film, and it's significant because it blends perfectly the hermeneutic and proairetic codes (from Roland Barthes's book S/Z). The base story is a fairly simple one: a girl called Lola must deliver 100,000 marks to her boyfriend Manni before 12:00. From there it branches out before the eyes of the audience into the events which occur as Lola tries to procure this money and cross town to reach her boyfriend in time. Each of these events has their own sub-plot, sometimes they're completely unrelated to the base story, sometimes they return later in bizarre twists. Some of the pivotal characters involved in these events are hinted at in the opening 4 minutes.

This chain of events is repeated three times with different outcomes each time. It becomes boring because the audience is made to watch the same pieces of film 3 times over. And my second criticism is the near-constant 'Dumdumdumdumdeedeedumdumdumdeedeedum' techno music used to emphasise the urgency of Lola's journey. It got so bad that I considered turning off the volume and just reading the subtitles.
Despite all that, I carried on watching out of curiosity over what happened next. I'd liken it to playing 'the Secret of Monkey Island' just to see how the story progresses. The story goads on the audience with interesting twists and by linking some of the sub-plots together until it reaches a 'happily ever after' perfect outcome.
It's a story about a journey and in that respect it's similar to the Lord of the Rings, the story is not the outcome, but the events that lead up to it.

In hindsight, I greatly enjoyed it and learned a bit about how narratives work.
In other news, I stalled editing some of the machinima until I had dialogue because I'll construct various shots around the dialogue, and not the other way round. I did however have chance to put together the initial sequence of shots which relies mainly on dark slapstick humour and has very little dialogue.