Movie Details
| Title: | Trainspotting | |
| Director: | Danny Boyle | |
| Year: | 1996 | |
| Genre: | Drug | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.04.16 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (4)
- 28 Days Later
- Slumdog Millionaire
- Sunshine
- T2 Trainspotting
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.04.16 | Internet | With the trailer for Trainspotting 2 hitting and actually looking pretty good, I found myself in a mood to revisit the first one. It's still good although this time around I really noticed how there was not much narrative to speak of. The scenes kind of float on their own for the most part rather than being led by any strong plot. Perhaps that's due to the adaptation? I've never read the book but if it was more of a memoir style then I guess that explains things. But yeah, also each scene - boom boom boom boom - really kills. There's not terribly much filler here at all. Some stuff seems a bit tame now whereas twenty years ago it was extreme... also I think this time I picked up more dialogue than ever before (who knows why, the accents are still crazy strong). I also never realized/connected the dots that Kevin McKidd was Tommy. I guess I'm used to seeing him older and with shorter hair. All in all I still enjoyed it although the whole film is so familiar that it felt more like revisiting a favorite album than rediscovering a faded gem, which is weird because it feels like I haven't seen this in quite some time... and I just looked it up on here and see that it's been 10 years. Wow. See, this is where this site really starts to pay off. What surprises me here isn't that it's been 10 years but how much I remember it despite the time. I mean it's not like I could've recited the thing from start to end but there were no parts of the film that I had forgotten about... I wonder if the movies I saw in my teens are just as heavily imprinted in my brain as the music i listened to. I wonder if the 90s are just going to be "my thing" for the rest of my life because nothing else sticks quite as well in the memory banks. makes you think. |
| 08.20.06 | Alamo Downtown | So... because of scheduling restrictions, Irvine Welsh popped in for a book signing and a screening of Trainspotting right in the middle of our Lovecraft Sunday. It was cool though... Andy the Lovecraft guy (who just sold me an audiobook CD recording he did of Jeffery Combs reading Herbert West: Re-Animator and a book he wrote cataloguing all the Lovecraft movies up to this year ("Brian, Thank you for supporting the festival. Any friend of Lovecraft's is a friend of mine! Cheers, Andrew")) cleared his stuff off the table so BookPeople could set up Irvine Welsh stuff, hand out his new book which lots of us bought included in our ticket price, and make room for Welsh himself to sign ("To Brian," that's about all I can make out). After that he got up and rather than talk about the book he read a passage from late in the book where a guy whose put a hex on another guy to take all his hangovers visits a white witch to try and take it off. The scene, a grotesque display of language describing his payment to the elderly morbidly obese witch in the form of sexual gratification, rang out in his lilting Scottish accent as waiters ran the rows delivering hot nachos and steaming pizza to people who may or may not still be hungry by that time. It was pretty awesome and actually reminded me a lot of Chuck Palahniuk reading Guts to people. The Alamo or BookPeople or whoever's in charge of getting these authors in town should really go after Chucky P for his next book and show Fight Club. It'd be awesome to get him down here. The movie, of course, is really superb. It's one of those perfectly-crafted movies which end up defining a period in my life not because I was a junkie or anything but just because I remember when it came out how everyone had to see it and it was an eye-opener for me in several ways. Much like Clerks.. how everyone in school was like "you gotta rent this movie, Clerks..." and singing the Berserker song all the time and stuff... I remember people had to go down into DC to see Trainspotting, and most of us didn't see it till video... and there was talk of subtitling the whole movie so us Americans could understand it... and it was like a year after Pulp Fiction... just a really exciting time for movies... and I'm sure these films got a whole generation of people into film school. But aside from all that, it's a great movie. |
