Trainspotting

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TRAINSPOTTING

Director: Danny Boyle
Year: 1996

Starring:
Ewan Mcgregor
Jonny Lee Miller
Robert Carlyle

Rating:

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Well with Danny Boyle releasing his new movie 127 Hours i decided to re-watch Trainspotting. Trainspotting i last watched a long time ago and i couldn't really remember a thing about the movie because the last time i watched it i was only a young lad.

Trainspotting is a movie about a group of friends that don't have job's and just sit around all day taking heroin and other drugs, there just the lowest of the low really. The story follows Mark Renton played by Ewan Mcgregor as he attemps to get him self clean and off drugs and how the drugs effect his personal life with his friends, family and his love life.



Well after re-watching Trainspotting all these years later i found my self really enjoying this movie, the story was fantastic, the acting is all spot on, and the movie is full of great scenes and some awesome soundtracks. Trainspotting really digs in deep into the life of a smackhead and the movie offers some really shocking moments that really drag you in and down with the characters. The cast in the movie are brilliant, Robert Carlyle playing
Francis "Franco" Begbie is a fantastic character played really well by Carlyle and Kelly Macdonald playing Diane had me thinking yeah she is hot (then the bombshell dropped hahaha) all in all the cast are all fantastic. Trainspotting really depends on its story alone, there are no big action scenes, no gun fights, no big explosions it just had its story and characters and Danny Boyle did a fantastic job with this movie.



Well Trainspotting is a fantastic movie really glad i decided to re-watch this now its made me excited to see what Danny Boyle has to offer in his new movie thats just hit the big screen 127 Hours. Fantastic movie, great cast, great story, and its a movie that just takes you along for the ride with its characters.

lol i dont know how but i seem to of plus rep myself here. sorry

I'm glad you decided to give Trainspotting another look... it is a brilliant film and has a place in my top 100... I actually laughed at the toilet scene, which according to some of my friends, makes me a little/lot on the weird side...

I believe a few of MoFos have written other reviews on Trainspotting that you might enjoy... you should do a search...

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A great movie, thanks for review

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Just bought Trainspotting and might give it a look today.

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"George, this is a little too much for me. Escaped convicts, fugitive sex... I've got a cockfight to focus on."

what did you think..

I didn't like Trainspotting the first time I saw (parts of) it. But I watched it a year or two ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I don't care for the things the main characters do but Ewan McGregor is so likable and makes you interested. There are plenty of things I'd change about it but I feel the same about this as I do Boogie Nights. You can tell the director put a lot into them and when it goes right, it goes really right.

This is a film I had overlooked for a long time. I thought it was just some crap film that I enjoyed in the 90s when it was a passing fad. In fact I'm not even sure if I enjoyed it then. But it’s much more than that anyway. Yes, the sets are naff, and so is the photography; it’s just generally a cheap look, perhaps the sort of thing you might expect from a 6th form college project. But that initial impression is misleading, because there’s much more to it than that. The dialogue for the most part is unexceptional, but then what can you expect from a film about people with unexceptional lives?
And there have to be caveats to the statement that the dialogue is weak. Renton’s narration is often far from that, not least his celebrated “choose life” monologue, but also some of his on screen dialogue, including the speech about the English being wankers and the Scottish worse because they are effectively ruled by wankers. These parts are carefully and skilfully written, and demonstrate that the largely inane exchanges between the characters are not representative of a paucity of skills in the scriptwriters.
And if much of the dialogue seems unexceptional, the characters themselves, in spite of being from unexceptional backgrounds, and arguably having unexceptional lives, are not. In fact they are highly memorable. I won't forget Begby as long as I live. Or Spud for that matter. Or Renton.
And the production has strengths too. The film is snappily edited. It flows nicely. It tells a proper story. Like 90 minutes of someone telling you the exciting events of their life, but illustrated with the pictures to prove it.
There are iconic scenes, such as the walk in the Highlands, and there are moments of real emotion for example Spud singing Two Little Boys at Tommy’s funeral, where you can sense the emotion, and the feeling of respect from the cast even though the song is being sung about a fictional character. Perhaps because they know that this is more than a film about fictional characters, it’s a film about an era, about their own lives as much as their characters’. Moments of elation too, not least because it is a film afterall largely focusing on drug use and depicting amongst other things the associated highs and lows.
There’s something that I haven’t mentioned. Yes, it’s that soundtrack. Something else about this film is that it is an iconic representation of the period. I don’t know about the rest of the world as I hadn’t travelled in 1996, but the 90s in the UK, is just as you experience it in Trainspotting. Part of that’s reflected in some of the filming, including some documentary type shots of London, and also images of nurses and similar which I suspect were played by non actors and somehow just give a real sense of 90s people. But the main part of that representation of the period, is in the music, and in particular the uplifting dance tracks. It’s more than a soundtrack though and more even than a score; the songs become part of the grammar of the film; part of the dialogue, and part of the mix or editing, the transition between scenes. They are the real life of the film.
Trainspotting will be something for us old farts to cling on to, to reminisce on, as we slip towards the ether. At the time, the 90s felt like it didn’t have an identity. But it did, even if a lot of it might have been crap. It was still our time, whether we made best use of it or not. And there’s probably no piece of creative work which captures it better than Trainspotting.

Trainspotting is brilliant

Thanks for review!

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Priscilla Rodriguez

I'm not really a fan of Dany Boyle. His stuff seems to date very quickly. I'm scared to rewatch 'The Beach' for this reason.

Shallow Grave was quite good on a rewatch, but Trainspotting, hmmm highly stylized and a one trick pony. Did the world really need Trainspotting 2? I haven't watched it and have no real intention to find out what happens.