In the last two days I've watched movies about time, and what we do with it. That's something I think a lot about, because I never have enough time, and yet I often find myself wasting time. Time can drag on forever, or it can rush by in a heartbeat.

In Tuck Everlasting, people have too much time. It's an exploration of the implications of immortality. If you're going to live forever, how do you spend each day? If there's no reason to wonder how many tomorrows you have, does it lessen the value of today? Is it only the realization that we're limited to whatever time we have that gives urgency to our lives?

The biggest question is what to do if you have the choice. I don't believe everyone wants to live forever, but I don't think most people really want to die. We know we will, but we try not to let it creep into the way we plan our time. We'd choose immortality if we could.

Or maybe we wouldn't. Maybe if we thought about what it would mean to live forever, we'd be better able to accept the inevitability of dying. In the movie, the choice once taken can't be given back. There's an air of doom hanging over both the mortals and the immortals in the story, just because the choice is available and yet irreversible.

The characters, even the mortal ones, have time to think about their lives and their choices. They're wealthy people, and the setting is America in the early twentieth century, before the explosion of population and technology made the world so much smaller and more hectic. If life seems long enough and slow enough, maybe immortality doesn't have the attraction it does today, when so many of us are trying to do too many things in too short a time.

In Run Lola Run, there's a choice also. In fact, there are hundreds of choices made over the twenty-minute period that the story reveals. Each one of these choices fans out like cracks in a pane of glass, taking passing strangers and unwary acquaintances along with it. Sometimes it's coincidence that drives the action, and at other times there's a sense that the forces that bring people together are stronger than anything we can do to avoid them.

The movie is a headlong rush of events that happen so quickly, one after another, that it takes eighty minutes to tell what goes on in twenty. The pace is so deliberately fast and the interconnected events so rapidly played out that it can make us wonder. How many times in a day do we turn left when we could turn right? And how many things are changed by each of those decisions? How is the world shaped in tiny twists of individual lives?

There are moments in Run Lola Run when time seems to stand still. Things are happening so fast that the slightest pause can become an eternity. Lola has twenty minutes to solve a life-or-death problem. Downtime seems an impossible concept, but she's living her complex life even while she's racing to complete one simple task.

We really exist on both levels. Life is a marathon, but to live it we have to sprint once in a while. We can live as if we'll never die, or we can live each day as if death were catching us up from behind. Sometimes we have a choice of how to make our time count, and sometimes the course of the day is chosen for us.

We know how our race will end, in the long run, even if we don't often acknowledge it. It's how we run each leg, whenever we do have options, that determines how we affect the time and the lives of those around us. Since we can't account for coincidence anyway, the best we can hope for is that good intentions will over time tip the balance in our favor.

I liked Tuck Everlasting. It's a sweetly romantic story in which good intentions play a big role in easing the pain of loss. Doing the right thing can be difficult, but there's a nobility in sacrificing oneself for love. I thought Run Lola Run was a better movie, a great movie that I've been wanting to see for a long time. It's anti-romantic, in that it points out the absurdity of life in a world where the pace often outruns our best efforts. And in its own way it deals with immortality, because it reveals how some of the split-second life-or-death choices can go either way.