Trainspotting (1996)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Heroin addict Mark Renton stumbles through bad ideas and sobriety attempts with his unreliable friends --Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Tommy. He also has an underage girlfriend, Diane, along for the ride. After cleaning up and moving from Edinburgh to London, Mark finds he can't escape the life he left behind as Begbie and Sick Boy come knocking.
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What critics say influenced Trainspotting
That, in fact, is what truly sets the film apart from its most obvious inspiration, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).
In the film, Renton becomes the dominant figure, and he's the most distressing symbol of antiheroic nihilism since Malcolm McDowell starred in "A Clockwork Orange."
Besides smack and excrement, this punk manifesto contains a helping each of sex and bad language (delivered in a brogue that begs our full attention), an abundance of snotty energy, and, in deference to A Clockwork Orange , a little of the ol' ultraviolence.
"Trainspotting" reads like a cross between Colin MacInnes' "Absolute Beginners" and "A Clockwork Orange."
Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, had his actors prepare by watching older movies: Goodfellas, The Hustler, The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange.
This movie, with its Coen Brothers/Martin Scorsese camera angles and its scintillating rock underscore by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and others, is, in some ways, a direct descendant of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "A Hard Day's Night."
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.
Trainspotting is a modern-day movie about the experiences of some unrepentant Scottish junkies, yet in its opening moments, Trainspotting spiritually resembles nothing so much as the Beatles' careening burst of adrenaline-charged “devil-may-care” in their introductory movies, A Hard Day's Night and Help!
It's a guttersnipe variation on the opening of "A Hard Day's Night," where the Beatles are pursued by their fans.
This movie, with its Coen Brothers/Martin Scorsese camera angles and its scintillating rock underscore by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and others, is, in some ways, a direct descendant of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "A Hard Day's Night."
Trainspotting kicks off to the frenzied rhythm of Iggy Pop 's "Lust for Life," the camera hurtling down an Edinburgh street as Renton and his mates make off with a handful of stolen goods.
Renton's speech begins to move to the dual rhythms of his hurtle along the pavement and Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," which hammers out on the soundtrack.
Two young men are hurtling down a street as Iggy Pop's incantatory ode to survival, “Lust for Life,” blasts through the theatre's speakers.
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"Trainspotting" reads like a cross between Colin MacInnes' "Absolute Beginners" and "A Clockwork Orange."
Essentially, "Trainspotting" is to "Braveheart" what "Lord of the Flies" was to "Swiss Family Robinson."
We are meant to detest them, but the subversive power of both films (a similar thing occurs in "The Wild Bunch") is that we secretly adore their freedom from fear.
Miramax Films, the distributor that saturated the market with ads for The Crying Game in 1992- 93 and Pulp Fiction in '94, has struck again.
Pulp Fiction gave us gangsters and con-artists; Trainspotting gives us drug addicts.
Also, the film's constant profanity, graphic drug use (most being injected intravenously), explicit sex scenes and some nauseatingly vulgar gags sometimes make "Pulp Fiction" look like an exercise in restraint.
"Trainspotting" is the most hyped, most celebrated non-studio film since "Pulp Fiction."
Like that movie, or Sid and Nancy (or Pulp Fiction), it offers transgressive kicks served up without apology or judgment ? the spectacle of unregenerate thrill junkies high on self-destructive bravado.
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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.
The Hughes Brothers followed up their excellent debut, 1993's searing Menace II Society, with this ambitious, uneven, but nonetheless entertaining urban drama.