Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was a psychological thriller that hardly psychologically thrilled me. From the beginning, the plot was too hard to comprehend on a sensible level and as the movie progressed, Jimmy Stewart's character started to become too creepy for my taste.

I also did not like the way women are portrayed in this film. I found it highly annoying when Judy agreed to Scottie's every word just to change for him to love her. Her desperation for love in combination of letting this man create an image out of her was less than favorable in my opinion. There was an underlying message that men had the ability to control women. This was also apparent when we find out that Gavin Elster dressed and made Judy Barton act like his soon to be dead wife, Madeleine. Judy was a puppet to both of these men.

The ending somewhat had me on the edge of my seat. I was unsure of what Scottie was going to do to Judy, actually. Was he going to throw her off the bell tower in his deranged state or try to change history and save her from a fall? A lot of ideas started coming to mind and I thought he was going to do the latter. In no way did I expect a nun to come out of the corner and frighten Judy, having her fall to her death. The lack of emotion from the nun and Scottie after Judy died was quite laughable to me. It just made the film seem even more unbelievable. This twisted ending was surely not expected on my part.

Vertigo was just not my cup of tea I suppose. You can’t win them all, Mr. Hitchcock.

Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run directed by Tom Tykwer was a very exciting film for me to watch. My first thought of the film was that the effects were just really in my face. I actually liked it a lot because of the film's various effects and editing. There were a lot of fast cuts even within short scenes, which made the movie appear really fast paced along with the upbeat Euro-trance music. I can only remember the times when the music slowed down were during the "red flashbacks" and when Lola got shot.

My favorite scene because of the visuals was when Lola was running to Manni near the store when he was about to go in and rob it. There was a split screen that showed two views of the same scene. On one side you can see Lola running to Manni in the distance and then on the other side you can see Manni walking towards the store with Lola running in the background. I thought it was cool that you could see two versions of the same thing.

Also with the visual aspects of the film, the lighting was very bright in every scene except for the "red flashbacks." Just from watching it the first time around, it was obvious that red was a really important color scheme used in the film. There were red lights, a van, the telephone, the money bag, and even Lola's crazy hair. To me, it was pretty ironic since she won the 100,000 marks at the casino on 20 black.

This is probably irrelevant, but I like to use the word "scheisse" every now and then since I've watched this movie.