Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors and Happy Accidents

These three movies are a crash course for me on a quantum physics that explains theory of multiple universes and time travel.

Let me say this first. There is a line in Happy Accidents that "Time is a personal thing" and I completely agree with that. The character says after that "how bad times seem to last longer than good times" (more discussion at some other time). The point is that I completely believe in time travel, parallel universes and stuff like that.

I like Run Lola Run at two levels.

At a practical level, it shows the consequences of making certain choices and how it affects your life, your loved one's life and the world. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't. And the last two things have very little do do with each other.

At a metaphysical level, I like it because it shows that course of time can be altered with extreme emotional response. ("break the causal chain" as in Happy Accidents) I would really like to believe that. A lot of people have said that if you believe in something then you find a way to it. Run Lola Run is an extreme example of that.

In RLR, things happen in sequence. In Sliding Doors, they happen in parallel. It is also about your choices and how they affect the world. But the most beautiful part of the movie is that it shows connections between parallel universes or rather some synch ups, like when Gweneth Paltrow's character becomes pregnant and when the character has an accident. It shows that things do get transferred between these universes at these extreme emotional levels.

The final scene in the lift is the best one. I also like it for some other reason (which is based on Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind ... discussion for later)

Happy Accidents takes one step further. It shows that time travel is possible. It also shows that people in the future have proved theory of parallel universes. Finally, it shows that course of the future events can be changed by an extreme emotional response like loss of loved one.

If you believe in movies then you don't need science and it all makes sense!

Pulp Fiction, Memento and Mulholland Drive

Three movies that played with the sequence of frames and I am a great fan of all of them.

Pulp fiction randomizes the sequence and became popular for the experimentation.

Memento reverses the flow of the movie (although there is a storyline that goes in the right order). I guess that the point the director is making was that the world would look distorted if you see it from the main character's point of view. Throughout the movie, We are with the main character, we sympathize with him and we believe his story. But reality is very different. I would rate Memento higher than Pulp Fiction because it was not just a random sequence but there was something deeper there.

Mulholland Drive beats all of them. It is so confusing that I had to read the story on the laptop while watching the movie to stay focused. But, I think it makes a lot of sense if you see the movie as if it is a dream (and that is what it is). It has all the things that we see in our dreams:
1) distorted visualization
2) weird symbolism
3) part where the wishes come true
4) threads of reality in between
I think the director has done a great job in conveying all these things, particularly because it is not very easy to do that. I think it is the one and only movie that has even attempted to do something like this.

The thing that makes this movie the best is that the distorted visualization originates from the complicated storyline (which is a dream) and it does a great job of conveying the actual story through the visualization.