~aschuth
Mon, Jul 5, 1999 (13:06)
#13
The next big european movie idea Hollywood will turn into a boring remake? Was a big thing here... Original title: "Lola rennt" - "Lola runs"
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WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET
Review: 'Run Lola Run' -- Get out of the way!
Web posted on: Thursday, July 01, 1999 11:23:05 AM EDT
By Reviewer Paul Tatara (CNN) -- In the trailer for German writer-director Thomas Twyker's "Run Lola Run," there's a blurb from an apparently over-excited (and widely read) critic that describes the film as being "post human." This may well be the single most frightening piece of "praise" ever lobbed toward an art form.
You've probably heard of art. It's a way humans can communicate ideas normally difficult to express. Tellingly, they communicate these ideas to other humans.
Films, when people invest the emotional energy required to complete the artist-audience transaction, are capable of jarring us into self-examination. Or at the very least, they can encourage us to wonder why we persist in getting so hopelessly lost while trying our hardest to make some sense out of life.
MULTIMEDIA Theatrical preview for "Run Lola Run" Real28K80KWindows Media28K80K
A director can say something worthwhile to an audience by having his characters laugh or cry or dance or throw people off glistening high-rises, if that's what he's into. He or she just has to make sure we care about the characters. "Post human" movies aren't about to generate that kind of response. And "Run Lola Run" is post human enough to be a big hit.
There are many journeys taken in "Run Lola Run," several of which play themselves out three or four times and come to three or four different conclusions. Hair in a hurry
Franka Potente plays Lola, a punkish young German woman with bright orange hair. Lola's boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) calls her up on the phone as the film opens. He's lost a bag of money he was supposed to deliver to a vicious drug lord, and now he needs Lola to come up with 100,000 deutsche marks in the next 20 minutes, or he'll be killed. If she doesn't get to the phone booth before the time is up, he'll take his handgun to a nearby supermarket and try to steal the cash.
The electronic score (which sounds like a cross between The Chemical Brothers and a Nintendo kick-boxing sonata) leaps into high gear -- WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET -- and Lola sets off running.
Lola runs and runs and runs. And runs some more. She's heading to the office of her father, an evidently rich businessman who may or may not have a difficult past with his daughter. It's really hard to say because the moments of supposed high emotion are just tossed into the action like paprika sprinkled over a personal computer. Lola's journey consists of dodging and running over various obstacles, some of which are inanimate objects and some of which are people. They all, however, add up to the same thi
g in the (very) long run.
Twyker kicks the high gear into even higher gear by taking little detours into the lives of the people Lola is ignoring. Each time she bumps into someone, we see a little five-second photo essay on what happens to that person from that day forward (a woman gets her baby taken from her; a man and a woman fall in love and have an S&M relationship, etc.) Then we zip back to Lola tearing across Europe. WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET.
A T.S. Eliot quote that appears before the credits is supposed to imply that there's more here than meets the eye, but all the film ultimately says is that Lola doesn't have any idea what's coming next. This is a scoop.
The rest is (quite intentionally) an elaborate video game disguised as a motion picture. It's not ruining anything to tell you that, once Lola gets shot and dies, everything starts over at the beginning. She gets the call, drops the phone and takes off running. Each time, however, there are variations in the action, and the five-second biographies of the human flotsam on the streets are completely different. Then it starts all over again. WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET.
There's no reason to wonder how Lola will respond to the next jet-powered diversion. And, most importantly (in light of the self-imposed laziness under which modern audiences usually operate), there's no reason to care what she does next. She just does it; anticipating how "cool" it'll look when it happens is the only reason to watch.
It's not that Twyker fails at what he's trying to do. There's always tons of unmotivated flash to keep the viewer rattled, and the revved-up pacing doesn't give you time to wonder what the point is. It works like gangbusters, but so would someone repeatedly shooting a pistol over your head. The visual assault contains enough jarring quick-cuts to hold together a weekend of Lenny Kravitz videos. Forget about applause; Twyker is looking for hyperventilation and pants-wetting.
It's Ms. Pac-Man meets Quentin Tarantino. I'll eat my dog if there isn't a Hollywood remake on our screens in the next 18 months.
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"Run Lola Run" is bound to be a hit with the fashion-disco crowd, in which interpersonal connections are fostered by shouting above a mechanical din while wearing the "right" clothes. Contains violence and profanity, but it's all rather cartoonish; there are even some animated sequences of Lola running. Rated R. 81 minutes, which says a lot about the content. In German with English subtitles ... when people have to talk.
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~MarciaH
Mon, Jan 10, 2000 (19:49)
#30
Life in the Eye of the Hurricane
TORONTO�He speaks not in sentences or paragraphs but in highly polished
sermons delivered with the rhythmic cadences of a gospel preacher. Although
he has sight in only one eye, his gaze is piercing. And while his
mantelpiece displays a belt attesting to his honorary title of middleweight
boxing champion of the world, the fighter once known as "Hurricane" because
of his punishing left hook now concedes that he finds the sport barbaric.
His new passion: gardening.
What's most striking, however, is this: Despite having spent 19 years in
prison for a triple murder he never committed, Rubin Carter considers
himself blessed.
"I would not change one thing in my life, not one single thing," he says as
he sits in the basement of his tidy brick house on Toronto's west side.
"Remember, everything that went before has made me what I am today. And
today I am deeply and seriously in love with myself. I don't want to be
anyone but who I am. I am perfect."
He lets out a loud, theatrical laugh meant to demonstrate his newfound lust
for life. But as the conversation continues and the laughter is repeated, it
becomes clear that it also serves as a salve for deep emotional scars,
wounds that have left him estranged from much of his family, his country and
even those who worked hardest to win his release.
Still, these are heady days for Carter, 63. His story, chronicled early on
in a Bob Dylan ballad, is now movingly portrayed by actor Denzel Washington
in the film "The Hurricane," which opens tomorrow in Washington to a
full-buzz of Academy Award expectations. Carter has already been to a
special screening for President Clinton at the White House, and later this
month there will be another at the United Nations to celebrate Human Rights
Day.
Then, too, there's "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter," the
new authorized biography out this month by journalist James S. Hirsch, along
with a reissue of "Lazarus and the Hurricane," an earlier chronicle of his
fall and rise by Canadian friends Terry Swinton and Sam Chaiton.
And yet in the middle of what has become a whirlwind of publicity and
celebrity hobnobbing, Carter is intent on not losing sight of his new
mission: gaining freedom for others who may have been unjustly imprisoned.
His Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, run out of the second
floor of his house, has already helped spring a number of high-profile
prisoners from Canadian jails with the use of volunteer lawyers and gumshoes
and newfangled DNA evidence.
"I'm supposed to be locked up in Trenton State Prison, but I'm here in
Toronto speaking to you free, alive and healthy, and the world is applauding
without knowing what it is applauding," Carter says of his renewed
celebrity. "What needs to be discussed is why do people have to undergo this
kind of struggle when it is really unnecessary. The fact is that there are
many innocent people locked up in prison, and somebody ought to be held
accountable for that."
Playing the Race Card
In the case of New Jersey v. Rubin Carter, it's fair to say there has been
no accountability. Most of the prosecutors have gone on to become trial
judges and the trial judges have gone on to become appellate judges. The cop
who headed the investigation was promoted. H. Lee Sarokin, the federal judge
who finally overturned Carter's conviction, was virtually hounded into
retirement by law-and-order Republicans who tagged him with the moniker "Let
'em go Lee."
Now, however, Hollywood aims to even the score with an inspiring morality
play that not only demonizes the Jersey cops and prosecutors and glorifies
Carter's saintly resolve but also tells the largely unknown story of a small
band of idealistic Canadians who turned their lives upside down to win
Carter's freedom.
The essential story begins in Paterson on the night of June 16, 1966. Two
black men entered the Lafayette Grill and opened fire with a shotgun and a
pistol, killing the owner and two patrons before fleeing in a white sedan.
Within hours, Paterson police pulled over a white Cadillac driven by
19-year-old John Artis with Carter, the car's owner, in the front seat.
Carter was well known to the Paterson police. As a child, he had been sent
to reform school for throwing a bottle at a man's head; as an adult, he had
served several prison terms for beatings and purse snatchings. Then, once
his career as a boxer took off and he started to pick up the black
nationalist rhetoric of the time, the brash middleweight began to talk
openly of the need for blacks to use guns if necessary to protect themselves
from bigoted white cops and judges.
The initial evidence from the Lafayette shootings did not point to Carter.
Although he and Artis were brought to the bloody scene and later to a
hospital where one of the victims was still conscious, various witnesses
declined to identify them as the shooters. Their own stories � that Carter
was merely giving Artis a lift home before heading to a meeting with his
sparring partner � were supported by lie detector tests. The guns were never
found.
But several months later, Paterson police claimed to have turned up two
petty thieves who had been staking out a nearby building when they saw
Carter and Artis flee the bar. Although their testimony had won them
immunity from prosecution on burglary charges, it apparently was credible
enough for the all-white jury to convict Carter and Artis of the killings.
Both received life sentences.
Artis would become a model prisoner and win parole in 15 years, but Carter
proudly and stubbornly resisted accommodation to prison life. He refused to
wear prison clothes, eat prison food or take a prison job, winning himself
long and repeated stays in solitary confinement. He slept during the day,
and at night he read law books to help with his appeal and tapped out an
eloquent and angry biography, "The Sixteenth Round." He insisted that guards
and other inmates call him Mr. Carter, and out of some mixture of respect
and fear, they did.
In the racially charged, protest-driven politics of the early 1970s, Carter
became a folk hero for the radical chic. His cause was taken up by the likes
of Burt Reynolds, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, Ed Koch, Jesse Jackson,
Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Candice Bergen and
Bob Dylan. There was a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, marches on
the governor's office in Trenton, interviews on national television.
Finally, after Alfred Bello, one of the two thieves, recanted his story in
an interview with the New York Times, Carter and Artis were granted a new
trial in March, 1976. Muhammad Ali showed up to post bail.
But by the time the second trial rolled around, police had pressured Bello
to recant on his recantation. And prosecutors, desperate to provide a motive
for the killing, played the race card, asserting without offering much proof
that the Lafayette Grill murders were revenge for the killing of a black bar
owner in Paterson six hours before. With Carter's history of inflammatory
racial rhetoric, the jury apparently was open to the prosecution theory. He
and Artis were convicted a second time.
That conviction broke Carter's resolve. Back in his barren cell, he cut off
all communication with his wife and children from his first marriage, his
supporters and even his New York attorneys, who continued to push his
appeals even without compensation. He threw away all of his law books and
began reading philosophy. His diet consisted of one can of soup heated up
every three days with an electric coil. Because of a botched prison surgery,
he lost the sight in one eye.
But one day in 1980, Carter decided to open one of the many letters he
usually let pile up in the cell unanswered. It was from a 17-year-old black
teenager, Lesra Martin, in Toronto. Martin had picked up "The Sixteenth
Round" at a library book sale and was so inspired by it that he wanted to
thank Carter.
Martin had grown up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant,
desperately poor and, until that point, functionally illiterate. That
summer, he'd been adopted, in effect, by a group of leftist University of
Toronto graduates who were as impressed with his wit and intelligence as
they were appalled by the ghetto conditions in which his family lived. With
his parents' permission, he moved into the Canadians' group house in a tony
Toronto neighborhood and began to get daily tutoring. "The Sixteenth Round"
was the first book he had ever read and his letter to Carter the first he
had ever written.
"That book, 'The Sixteenth Round,' I threw that book out over the prison
wall hoping that somebody would see its message bobbing on the ocean of
life, pick it up and come rescue me," Carter recalls. "And Lesra Martin did
just that."
Carter's response led to more correspondence, regular phone calls and then
visits � not just from Martin but from four other members of the commune:
Gus Sinclair, a Vietnam protester who gave money to American draft dodgers;
Lisa Peters, a tough woman who had run away from home as a teenager and grew
up on the streets of Toronto; Terry Swinton, whose father was the president
of Encyclopaedia Britannica International, a product of Toronto's wealthiest
neighborhood and an alumnus of its most prestigious private school; and Sam
Chaiton, whose parents were survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen. Carter's plight appealed directly to their leftist politics,
their anti-American bias and their determination to help
stamp out racism and injustice in the world. And their genuine interest in
Carter rekindled in him not only the will to live, but the
determination to get out of prison.
By 1983, in fact, Carter had become so emotionally entwined with the members
of the commune, and his cause was such a focus of their activities, that
Peters, Chaiton and Swinton moved to an apartment 20 minutes from the prison
to work full time on his legal appeals. Martin, now enrolled at the
University of Toronto, often flew down on weekends.
"We were dubious at first," recalls Myron Beldock, Carter's lead attorney,
of the first meeting with the Canadians. "We had a hard enough job as it
was, with no resources, and when these bunch of amateurs showed up one day
at our office, we thought it would be a waste of time."
As it happened, the Canadians turned out to be terrific at organizing the
mass of material associated with a case that had dragged through the courts
for more than 15 years, tracking down leads and turning up new evidence and
witnesses. In time, they were even drafting sections of legal briefs.
"The Canadians did an enormous amount for Rubin psychologically," says Leon
Friedman, a Hofstra University law professor who was also part of the
defense team. "What was decisive for me was that these guys came down and
devoted several years of their life to this case. If they could do that,
then we lawyers had to up our commitment. And we did."
When Sarokin finally issued his decision on Nov. 7, 1985, the value of the
Canadians' contribution was confirmed.
"The extensive record clearly demonstrates that [Carter's and Artis's]
convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason,
concealment rather than disclosure," Sarokin wrote. He called the police
threatening of witnesses and concealing of evidence, and the prosecution
appeals to racial prejudice, violations of the Constitution "as heinous as
the crimes for which these petitioners were tried and convicted."
Bonding and Uncoupling
While the Hollywood version of "Hurricane" ends with Carter drinking in the
sunshine and vindication on the courthouse steps, the real-life story turned
out to be a good deal more complicated. Carter still had to wrestle with the
demons he had brought with him to prison and those he had accumulated during
his 19 years behind bars.
He joined the Canadian group home � first in Mount Kisco, N.Y., while the
prosecutors pursued an unsuccessful appeal of Sarokin's decision, then over
the border in King City, Ontario. In many ways, the halfway house in the
horse country north of Toronto was perfect for Carter, who needed help with
even the most routine tasks of daily life. He came face to face with his
alcoholism, which had begun before his conviction and was nurtured over the
years by prison moonshine. With his release, a platonic love affair with
Peters also quickly developed into something else.
But in time, Carter came to view the house � with its strict rules against
alcohol and cigarettes, its uncompromising communalism and its unabashed
insularity � as something of a new prison. He began to resent the fact that
much of the group's current income came from selling his story, as if he
were some sort of "trophy horse," as he put it to biographer Hirsch. And the
relationship with the strong- willed Peters, always tempestuous, turned even
more so almost immediately after they decided to marry.
Carter stormed out of the house for the last time in 1994, showing up with
his bags at Lesra Martin's studio apartment in Toronto. Within a few months,
even that filial arrangement broke down after Martin, also struggling to
figure out who he was and what he wanted to be, announced his intention to
resume law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
"It was time for me to go out for me," Carter explains, making clear the
break was his decision. "I just left. There was no argument, no animus. I
loved those people � they committed to me when no one else would. I owed
them a big debt. And when I repaid it, I left. I needed to be captain of my
own ship again."
It is a measure of their estrangement that at the special opening of the
movie in Toronto last week, Carter and the Canadians sat three rows away
from each other and never exchanged a word.
While Carter was loosening his bonds with one group of Canadians, however,
he was forging new ones with others. In 1991 John Ketchum, a hustling
television producer in Vancouver, put down $100,000 in family money to
option the movie rights to "Lazarus and the Hurricane," which had just been
published in Canada (no U.S. publishers were interested).
With the contract in hand, Ketchum headed for Hollywood, beginning a
frustrating seven-year search for a director and funding that eventually
ended with Canadian-born Norman Jewison and Seagram's Universal pictures,
now controlled by Montreal's Bronfman family. All the while, the script went
through 27 drafts, each requiring Carter's approval.
"I would not allow this movie to be Hollywoodized, to be sensationalized,"
Carter says. "In the United States, there are not
many images projected of black people in a dignified manner, and I wouldn't
allow my image to be portrayed in an undignified manner. So I threatened to
close it down four or five times."
As the start of shooting approached, Carter spent time with Denzel
Washington, traveling on the actor's private jet from Toronto to New York
and California and then back to Toronto, talking about his life and taking
the measure of the man who would portray him.
"I remember after one particularly intense conversation, we went around the
corner for lunch," recalls Carter. "After the meal, I
excused myself and went to the restroom. And when I was heading back, I
found Denzel in the foyer just staring at himself in the mirror. I thought
he wanted to be alone, so I went right by. And when he came back to the
table, he looked different to me somehow, although I couldn't put my finger
on it. And the more we talked, the more I began to like him. It was a real
emotional surge. I liked the way he moved, his vocabulary. I like his
tenacity. I like his stridency. I loved his laughter. � And then it hit me
like a double left hook to the jaw: When I had seen him at the mirror, he
was clearing his canvas, so to speak. From that moment on, he was giving me
back to me � and I was loving what I saw."
Starting Over
Even now, there are unmistakable traces of the old Rubin Carter in his
recitation � the boastful, egotistical, cocky Carter of his middleweight
days, sparring now with words instead of his fists. Still the dandy, he
proudly shows off his updated wardrobe to a reporter. Outside, the white,
monogrammed Cadillac has been traded in for a vintage blue Mercedes-Benz.
And like the Carter of Paterson, N.J., the Carter of Toronto largely views
the United States through the dark prism of race,
which explains why he refuses to ever set foot in New Jersey again and why
he has applied for Canadian citizenship.
"When my son back in New Jersey threatened to burn down his girlfriend's
house last year, he was put in jail for three months and fined $50,000. But
when the grandson of one of the victims of the Lafayette bar murder told a
television interviewer that Rubin Carter and John Artis should be hunted
down and shot, nothing was done about it. Why is that grandson not in jail
as they put my son in jail? I'll tell you why � because that's the way it's
always been in the United States: There's a white standard and a black
standard.
"The authorities in the United States don't need a reason to do what they do
to black people," he continues, leaning into the
conversation, his voice nearing a whisper. "They just need an opportunity �
and I don't want to give them another opportunity."
These days, Carter has a new girlfriend � a 27-year-old South Carolina woman
he says he met "in heaven" (actually, it was while delivering a motivational
speech to a group of Subway sandwich franchisees in Reno, Nev.). He talks
frequently with Artis, who now counsels youthful offenders in Norfolk, Va.
And he has reestablished relations with Lesra Martin, who, after completing
law school, was sworn in as a prosecutor in Kamloops, British Columbia, with
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter watching proudly from the audience. The freshly
minted "crown attorney" recently tried his first murder case, winning a
guilty verdict.
"I am in a unique position to make sure that wrongful convictions don't
happen," Martin says of his seemingly incongruous career choice. "As Rubin
will tell you, it's easier to stop one before it happens than to overturn it
afterwards."