Trainspotting

That poster.

Ahhh - revisiting an old classic.  £2.99 in HMV actually - you cannae go wrong.

Napoleon, I believe, said that if you want to understand a man you should consider what the world was like when he was 22.  Same goes for women too, of course, and I was 22 when Trainspotting came oot... er I mean out.  Although I was a man then.  Anyway, that's complicated - the fact is that this film basically represents the distilled essence of 90s zeitgeist.

It was a great time for films, music, everything.  But then, I was that age. 

Stacked up, cracked up 22, pyscho for sex and glue, shaking our bits to the hits...

Now I am 39 and Trainspotting has aged pretty darn well I must say.  And, yes, I have too... though I say so myself...  but then I never did drugs anything other than vicariously.

All these years later, the stars of the film have pretty much all gone on to have amazing careers and become the new establishment.  Not surprising - they were the faces of the revolution, or at least the most recent revolution.  This way of telling stories was very new to us at the time - although the dancing, playful, surreal narrative was nothing new really.  Even contemporaneously, Trainspotting could be seen as a companion piece to the Tarantino movies - in terms of confidence and panache. 

And the imagery, music and style of Trainspotting had no less of an impact than the pulp fictions of a certain ex-video store employee.

That whole thing of characters doing something, then being held in freeze frame while their name appears on the screen.  That's everywhere now.  And Ewan Macgregor's winkie - that's all over the cinema screen these days.  Trainspotting is where it all started. 

Of the fine performances, surely Robert Carlyle as the psychopathic Begbie must be singled out.  Without a great physical presence, he manages to fill the screen as a roaring, ultra-violent ogre.  One of the most terrifying characters in cinema.  When the 'friends' all sit around drinking after their drug deal, and Begbie makes a few jokes and smiles - Jesus, the relief of tension...  it's palpable.  Then, of course, he glesses some cunt.

The whole thing has a beautifully cheap, gritty, grimy, documentary, TV type feel.  In fact the freeze frames and voice overs remind me, for some reason, of an 80s documentary about the consequences of nuclear war, which would be the forerunner of Threads.  Don't go changing, Trainspotting, don't go and get remade and jazzed up - we love you just the way you are.

I read the book recently - always the wrong way round to see a film, then read the book.  Your visualisation is scuppered.  But I did really enjoy the book, which is written in dialect and requires some decoding by the uninitiated - rather like A Clockwork Orange.  Anyway, I now know something about Trainspotting that I didn't know before - it is a good, faithful adaptation of the book - if necessarily truncated.

But then Irvine Welsh was obviously closely involved - and in fact makes a Hitchcockian cameo appearance as Renton's dealer. 

Nothing more to say really - if you haven't ever seen this film, where were you?  Go to HMV tomorrow - it's only £2.99.