I vividly remember seeing this for the first time after renting it because so many of my new film loving friends in college loved it. I loved it too. It's so different from American movies - just the pacing and visual language of it - and for this suburban escapee, Trainspotting-loving (oh Shannon) 18-year-old, it was a terrific gateway drug.
First and foremost, the soundtrack is a banger. And it might be the thing that radicalizes me on physical media for soundtracks, too, because it is not available on Spotify and I'm heartbroken. I looked it up the second the movie ended. There are some solid fan attempts at playlists, but you can't get Franka Potente's tracks, so what's the point?
It's hard to explain my love for this movie. It's delightfully German. It's rough and straightforward. There's not a lot to examine or analyze. As Ben brilliantly said tonight, "I love the triumph of this movie." This is a movie that for all of its style and simultaneous grittiness, it really earns its heartfelt ending. While I've never experienced quite what Lola and Manni go through, now that I'm on the cusp of 40, I know well the days in which everything is going wrong and it feels like it cannot possibly get better and you're just racing yourself to the terrible ending when... oh. It's not the end of the world. Things are okay. Better than okay. And it's not a raucous celebration. There's no parade. No fireworks. But honestly, after all that, the quiet is nice. Welcome, even.
I went back and forth during this viewing about the snapshot "flash forwards" for the side characters. Some felt mean for the hell of it and in the end that feels contradictory to the message of the story. But then, those particularly grim flash forwards come in the grim "runs" so I guess it makes sense. Still. I guess I love the method of storytelling, I just didn't need to see some of those particular images.
This movie, like Amelie, makes it hard for me to sit still and think afterwards. I just want to get up and live. So I guess I will.
Mixed media.
Takeaways:
-We watched this a couple days before leaving for Germany because it seemed appropriate. It was lovely to revisit and I knew I wanted to do something that referenced the torn bill postings and graffiti shown as Lola runs. So why not pick up some newsprint/magazines in the place itself?
-I tried to once again use the gelli plate and was kind of disappointed in it. It gave me a difficult time again and I realized it may just not be a medium for me. I've watched so many Instagram reels of people doing beautiful, masterful stuff with it since I did the Birdman piece and while I'm sure a lot has to do with how much they've used it and learned how to use it... I'm still struggling to get halfway decent pulls with the supposedly perfect kind of print/paper and it's not worth the frustration. But! Even the failures made a neat background that I then decoupaged on top of before doing a lino print. I have been finding myself hoarding magazines "in case I do more collage" and I wonder if I'm just hoping to do more. We'll see!
-I wish the lino was a teensy bit clearer/cleaner but it has the kind of chaotic feel to it that I wanted so hooray! The green ink that I mixed was so pretty. I wished I had more to do with it but I just did the one printing because of the nature of the gelli plate/decoupage. I did quite like how my test sheet looked, though, so I included it here (second image) because why not.
-In this, the year of the schnecken (snails), I had to include my favorite bit of graffiti I noticed in Munich. A tagger used a neat little one-continuous-line snail doodle and I found it all over the city. And just like medieval monks with their manuscripts, I included a lil snail in my art.
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