great_badir
Posts: 4206
Joined: 6/10/2005
From: A breaking rope bridge in the middle of the jungle
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Trainspotting, Danny Boyle (1996)
When Trainspotting came out in 1996 I was 17, naturally passing myself off as 18. I was in the last year of my A levels with a whole year off ahead of me before looking for work. I'd passed my driving test and bought a car (a G-reg post box red Ford Escort, 1.3 five door hatch which had done 143000 miles and is still the most reliable, efficient and cheap to run car I've ever owned) and I was in my first wave of proper independence. At the same time, pretty much every film geek on the planet was getting moist at the prospect of the Star Wars trilogy being re-released on the big screen (they were yet to know of the full horrors that awaited them), whilst the "professional” film world was alight with fawning praise over a hot new film, from a hot new director, based on a hot new novel and featuring a hot new cast. It was cool, it was edgy, it had a corking soundtrack, it was gritty, it was controversial, it was true to life and it had one of the most "terrifyingly realistic” screen villains/anti-heros of all time. More than that, it was BRITISH. It was the toast of an otherwise disappointing Cannes (despite not being shown in competition, most of the Cannes jury and attending critics agreed it blew the competing films out of the water) and American critics and audiences ate it up to such a degree that Bob Dole made a speech LIVE ON US TELLY about his concerns over this horrible little thing from that small village over the water turning every single American man, woman and child into a hopeless criminal sex addicted drug fiend. Even Kenneth Turan, notoriously wary of films coming out of the hype machine, thought it was the best and rawest thing he'd seen for years. Danny Boyle, Irvine Welsh, the cast of Trainspotting and Iggy Pop became the very best and most highly regarded in their respective fields and it started a whole new movement of film making, music, fashion and social mixing.
So I duly went to the cinema to see it, along with everyone else. Including the Star Wars geeks.
Ten minutes in I hated it. Thirty minutes in I couldn't wait for it to be over. One hour in and it seemed like I'd been in that dark screen for ages. By the end, as the credits rolled, I decided it was the worst film I had ever seen. It remains so to this day. And yes, I have seen it more than once.
So why do I hate it so much, this now-regarded-as-a-masterpiece little independent, low budget Brit flick? What madness had I developed? Why was I going so far against the general grain? Because it perfectly encapsulates and demonstrates everything that was so mind numbingly awful about nineties "kewl Britannia”, especially for someone like me who was stuck, culturally speaking, in the seventies. The Chumbawumba Brit-pop generation will, I'm convinced, one day be the embarrassing trough of my contemporary now 30-somethings everywhere – politicians getting down with the kids and using words like "cool” and "guys” in official conversation, endless streams of plastic teen pop and fill-the-mould sound-alike grumpy youngsters with ATTITUDE singing out of tune, Prince Charles kissing a Spice Girl, the new wave of much-better-than-when-they-tried-it-in-the-80s (yeah, right) yoof television, and when individuality actually meant following the crowd and being like everyone else, cos if you weren't you were a square. Give me fucking strength. For me, Trainspotting was the figurehead poster boy of all of this and in its relatively brief running time did little other than alienate me from the modern world. Danny Boyle's frenetic MTV style direction (then hailed as brilliant and the way forward – obviously this was before MTV-style direction called to mind Michael Bay and little else) annoyed me massively – let's chuck in every quirky angle we can come up with and frame it with as many different colours as we can get – like some Ritalin addicted teenager (pun intended) being given a camera and some film. The writing was all "creative swearing” (oohh, how very clever) and how, apparently, we youngsters wished we all talked if we didn't already talk that way. All fast and clever, like. The story propels with characters that are by turns stupid, annoying, deserving of everything they get, and that I didn't care two shits for. And the twitchy acting, oh-so realistic that it is. Which brings me onto Begbie. By now I think most members of this forum who know a little about me are quite aware of how much I hate over acting, especially when the subject of the over acting is doing a saliva spewing, mugging panto villain – Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and the like. Basically, OTT performances in films where everyone else is playing it small and low key (by the same token, and recalling another thread, Rafe Spall is the reason that the otherwise brilliant The Shadow Line has a few notches taken off that brilliance) – they fit as well as OJ's glove. Trainspotting has Begbie who, so I'm told, is absolutely pant-shittingly scarily real. Sorry, but no – Robert Carlyle is a fine actor to be sure (his turn as Albie Kinsella in early episodes of Cracker was FAR more scary and FAR more realistic), but his unhinged turn as Begbie is a primo example of just the type of screen "villain" (although he's not really a villain) who scares me the least and, if anything, annoys me to the max – sneering, SHOUTING, sweaty and greasy, heavy drinking, wearing a wife beater vest etc. So he must be scary. Right?
Time was when it did have one redeeming feature for me - I used to find the bed sheet scene hilarious, lowest common denominator slapstick that it is, and I'm not above some braindead silliness (it's easier for me to list the Chevy Chase films I DON'T like). But even that doesn't raise a smile with me any more, and hasn't done for years. Because now it's just another part of a film that I can't stand, from a director who I can't stand (Sunshine is okay, but as for the rest…).
You might even say that that scene is a very good representation of what I think of the whole film.
< Message edited by great_badir -- 19/5/2011 11:07:29 PM >
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