Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Portland, Oregon, 1971. Bob Hughes is the charismatic leader of a peculiar quartet, formed by his wife, Dianne, and another couple, Rick and Nadine, who skillfully steal from drugstores and hospital medicine cabinets in order to appease their insatiable need for drugs. But neither fun nor luck last forever.
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What critics compared Drugstore Cowboy to
In portraying the cycle of addiction -- using drugs, trying to get clean, then giving in again -- Trainspotting recalls Drugstore Cowboy and The Basketball Diaries.
Trainspotting is that rare movie ( Drugstore Cowboy is another) that owns up to the euphoria of drugs as well as their risks.
As "Drugstore Cowboy" did, "Trainspotting" has the audacity to suggest the pleasures of junk.
Think "Drugstore Cowboy" with a deep burr and a joy de vivre that makes adolescent nihilism positively enticing.
Distante de otras congéneres más dramáticas sobre drogadicción como el surrealismo ante una realidad difícil de distinguir en El almuerzo desnudo (Naked Lunch, 1991) pero un tanto similar a la meditabunda Drugstore Cowboy (1989), el humor negro y escatológico en Trainspotting convergen en un ambiente crudo, “fiestero” y permisivo en el uso de las drogas, recorriendo sus vaivenes para después guiar al lado negativo, a la desgracia en su entorno y a la aspereza en sus consecuencias.
"Is Tamara there?" asks the young woman at the door, who in the dim light resembles the Heather Graham of Drugstore Cowboy.
It stands bravely alongside Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy as one of the few American films that dares to ask what it is that drives society in the direction of self-medication rather than simply pointing out the collective monkey on our back.
Rogan is his usual self here, but Franco is a revelation, showing an unexpected knack for spaced-out comedy the way Matt Dillon did in "Drugstore Cowboy."
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He made the clips for Prodigy's Smack my b*&^% up and Madonna's Ray of light, and is clearly a fan of earlier junkie movies like Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, especially Darren Aronofsky's almost unbearable Requiem For A Dream.
His latest, Fight Club, is a similarly dark -- if laceratingly funny -- tale of disenfranchised, desensitized young men who unite under the principle that (to paraphrase Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy) there's nothing so life-affirming as having the shit beaten out of you.
In rare cases that irony is underlined, as in Drugstore Cowboy (1989), in which the title character (Matt Dillon) stops using drugs and seems suddenly smaller and more vulnerable–and easy prey for the freaks he had previously dominated.
Bones and All is Near Dark first, then Drugstore Cowboy and, of course, Ravenous in its gleeful carnage and delightful black humour.
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The vampires are like the nomadic young junkies in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy , hungry for their next fix and ready to lie, cheat, steal or kill to get it.
Here the film looks grim and gritty, like Drugstore Cowboy, and it doesn't come off funny.