Brief movie review: Run Lola Run

This is a German film that was the hit of the Toronto film festival last year, and won the audience award for best foreign film at Sundance this year.  And for good reason, I think.

This movie is best described as Sliding Doors meets MuchMusic/MTV. Our heroine, Lola, spends almost all of the film running.  She has 20 minutes to save her boyfriend (who has managed to leave 100,000 marks on the subway) from death at the hand of the thugs on whose behalf he retrieved the money.

But Lola doesn't get the ending she wants in the first 20-minute episode, so she tries again.  And once more.  Yes, it has a happy ending; otherwise, I'm sure she'd have kept reliving the thing till she got it right.

Technically, this film combined video, film, and animation, with a great soundtrack.  To the middle-aged and older, this film is an oral assault, but still worth seeing. 

My only complaint with the film is that the happy ending episode features prayer and intervention by an angel on earth;  the suggestion is that our heroine could only win by invoking the deities.  Some will find that reassuring.  I found it to be a flaw in an otherwise very good film.

I can't decide whether I envy or pity those who love filing.  Even those who like filing are suspect in my books.  How can anyone like the unbelievably tedious task for putting pieces of paper into other pieces of paper, in hopes that one day, this piece of paper will be the one that is actually required, and that it won't have migrated by then to some other file or have been purged?  Seriously, isn't filing the most mind-deadening activity in the world? I certainly think so.

Hence, I don't file as often as I should.  Wait, I've banned the word "should" from my vocabulary as an experiment, so I need to re-word that.  I don't file as often as I might.  If I filed more often, it might be less mind-deadening, since it wouldn't take so long.  But, if paper is fresher, it might still feel more important, and I might be more likely to file it than toss it, just in case I ever needed it again.  I don't think I've needed -- and found -- a piece of paper I filed more than 20 times in my life.  And I'm almost 50! (Okay, getting on toward 50, but older than a lot of people!)

I remember (waxing nostalgic) when "they" promised us a paperless office.  Ha!  I suppose we're getting closer.  I know I'd be swimming in a sea of paper (rather than slogging through big puddles) if I didn't have computerized records of documents; if my fax weren't on my computer; if I didn't have "notes" in my personal information manager as a depository for all those trivial bits of information that are really, really important, for at least two days of my life.

And I used to have software (which I understand has been re-issued in a 32-bit version at last) that scanned documents, and you could keep them as graphical images, keyworded, searchable, and archived (read compressed).  This worked well for me.  Scanning takes time, of course, but computers -- unlike humans -- were made to retrieve information.  And after the scanning, one could toss the original.  

In my experience, with a very few exceptions, one doesn't need the original copy of anything; one just needs to prove to those who hold an original copy that the piece of paper exists.  Or at least it existed once. Cancelled cheques, for example.  Warranty cards with product numbers.  Bank deposit slips.  If you can prove you once had it, they can usually find whatever it is they're expecting you to have kept while they lost their copies. 

Of course, keeping graphical images of everything takes up a lot of hard-drive space.  But is there anything cheaper these days than computer memory?   RAM is down to a buck per meg.  A 10-gig hard drive is under $300 (Canadian!).   Can't rent the space to store the hard copies for that price over time. 

Given that filing is one of those tasks (and why are there so many of them?) that is never really done.  It's only done "for now".   Within a day.. heck, sometimes within a hour .. there is more filing to be done.   I think I"m going back to scanning instead of paper filing.  As I recall Page-Keeper even has a discount price on upgrades till the end of this month.  At least I can throw out paper when the scanning is done.  And I have a better than average chance of finding the document again.  

Assuming of course, that my hard drive doesn't crash. Hmmm.   Maybe I should postpone scanning over filing until I've got a tape back-up that works.  (Don't ask; it's another story for another day.)  Did I mention that I hate technology, except when it works?

Next entry

Archived entries