Movie Review: Trainspotting

Director: Danny Boyle

Writers: John Hodge, Irvine Welsh

Stars: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller

Verdict: Brilliant

With the long belated sequel being released we thought we’d take a crack at one of the most important British films of the 90s, (there weren’t many), and one of my personal favourites; Trainspotting.

Trainspotting follows the story of Mark ‘Rentboy’ Renton in 90s Edinburgh trying his level best to give up heroin amongst friends who really, don’t help. This includes Sick Boy, Spud, Swanney, Tommy, and Begbie, most of which are introduced to us in a lovely, now iconic football montage.

I think it’s things like that football montages that help form the genius of Trainspotting. I said in my Don’t Breathe review, (here), about how in Trainspotting the genius of it is that the characters aren’t just heroin addict wasters, a quality probably inherited from the Irvine Welsh novel which I still havn’t read but it was Danny Boyle, (Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later…), who made the observation. The characters of this film are funny, eloquent, they know a lot about Sean Connery, and they’re crap at football. Trainspotting does have some incredible cinematic sequences but at the heart of it are characters who are, self admitedly bad people, but not completely, and not irredeemably.

Considering how ill experienced most of the cast were it is incredible quite how well played they all are as well. Ewen Bremmer, (Snatch, Black Hawk Down), who plays Spud, is an extraordinarily underrated actor and he is definitely not Spud in real life, if you see him in interviews he is much more intelligent and confident and eloquent. He really goes for it in this film, and he’s extraordiarily funny, that sequence with the dirty sheets is quite something. As soon as you see Johnny Lee Miller’s, (Elementary), Sick Boy on screen with his muscular neck and his schock of blonde hair he is an immediately imposing figure, this mixture of cheeky chap, and almost Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men or Ben Mendelsohn from Rogue One. He has this sort of perreneial bad guy, wriath of impending doom sense about him some times. Although Begbie played by Robert Carlyle, (28 Weeks Later, The Full Monty), is probably the more showy performance, and defintiely the scarier one, Sick Boy is actually probably the more destructive influence in Renton’s life. 

I heard Danny Leigh say that Danny Boyle always directs like he’s on his 7th can of Red Bull, and there are many sequences like that in Trainspotting, but the best thing is when he lets silence rest on screen. There’s one scene in a pub that’s one of the best scenes I’ve seen in a long time. What people do forget though is that although, for example The Worst Toilet In Scotland scene, even though that scene goes about as far as it can down the rabbit hole it comes out into something ethereal and funny and beautiful. Like the overdose sequence becomes something surreal and wonderful and melancholic whereas a different director would just make it horrible. There’s actually a lovely story about a sound editor who showed a producer the first cut of that scene set to Perfect Day by Lou Reed and the producer said ‘it’s wonderful, don’t show Danny because we can’t afford the song’ and it was actually David Bowie of all people who saw Shallow Grave and loved it and convicned Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to let Danny Boyle use their songs. 

The thing is about trainspotting is, to quote Mark Kermode, at Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony we could have divers coming out of fountained toilets and babies with their heads turned round the wrong way crawling over ceilings and we’d all go, yeah it’s Trainspotting, but we’d forget quite how striking and horrible and incredible those sequences were the first time. They just happened to have passed into the general public conciousness now. It’s also incredible that such a high brow film makes such low brow humour work because it does have a bit of a pop sensibility. It’s probably the most mainstream surrealist peice you’ll ever see. 

The film isn’t perfect, the film does feel a bit split in half and as a Londoner the introduction-to-London montage is, frankly, laughable in it’s pastiche but maybe it’s meant to be. After all Renton goes to London to get away from crippling heroin addiction so he would maybe idealise it in the manner of someone who’s never been there; before he sees it can be just as seedy as anywhere else. It can also be at times, over edited, but for a purpose, because a lot of scenes are absolutely perfectly edited. In the end whatever problems Trainspotting has, which are few, you can’t deny the film’s cultural impact, a modern classic, there’s nothing quite like it, and it actually adapts it’s sourse material better than most, streamlining the story, maintaining the qualities of the book, and adding plenty of cinematic verve. 

LIFF – Movie Review: Train to Busan

Director: Sang-ho Yeon

Writer: Sang-ho Yeon

Stars: Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Yu-mi Jeong

Verdict: Really, really good fun

I saw Train to Busan, a Korean action/horror/thriller in maybe the perfect circumstances. The Leeds International Film Festival were doing a day of horror films at the town hall, I’d been to go see the excellent I Am Not a Serial Killer earlier in the day, (review here), and this was the last showing of the day. The crowd was fantastic, they jumped, laughed and clapped at the end, it was a joy. The film itself is no I Am Not a Serial Killer but then again very few things are. 

The film follows a man taking his very alienated daughter on the titular train to Busan to see her mother on her birthday just when there’s a breakout of zombies. That’s pretty much all the plot you need to know.

The film has heritage in a whole litany of recent and older cinema. It has that ‘something goes wrong and a confined space becomes a microcosm  of society’ thing that one could see in works like Snowpiercer and High-Rise. It has that real claustrophobic sense of zombies/antagonists in a confined space that you could get from 10 Cloverfield Lane, some Romero films like Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead, or even the last act of Shaun of the Dead, and it has this sort of burning analysis of our contemporary condition that I’m reliably informed this year’s Swiss Army Man has. The zombies themselves seem like a perfect meeting of the very western history of zombies, especially modern incarnations like 28 Days Later… and World War Z, and the eastern mythology of horror monsters as found in Ring and Ju-on: The Grudge, I mean the zombies do look fantastic, I really genuinely love the look of them. It has slightly different things to say about humanity in a sort of Performance, ‘this-is-now’ way than Swiss Army Man, although it does have hints of a similar satire of how we communicate with people these days, I mean it may be product placement but all the phones seem like monstrous huge creations imposing themselves over the frames because phones have just gotten so ridiculously big, although that might be reading into it a bit. What the film seems much more interested in is some incredible commentary on things like the refugee crisis, the way the media manipulates public opinion, the way big business has a hand in the way the media and government are run, and our modern economic situation, and it handles all of these very complicated and quite dense issues in a way that’s really easy, comprehensible and accessible; and that deserves so much applause. Especially given what’s actually happened between me seeing this film and the review going out these themes have never seemed so prescient. I will forever love the film I think just for that, because it is just incredible. Towards the beginning it does tend to smack you over the head a bit but the real genius lies in the third act when they near the final carriage of the train. There is a confrontation at the beginning of the third act that ties all these themes up in a neat little bow, nearly literally on screen. 

I also really like the fact that despite heady political themes the film doesn’t take itself so seriously. It’s really funny and the rest of the audience and I laughed a lot. It does tend to forget that towards the end of the second act as the situation worsens but the film has very much endeared you to it through this comedy before then. 

However, the film isn’t perfect, in terms of horror it’s very thrilling but when you want the pay off of lovely exploitation violence the film doesn’t quite go for it the way I would have wanted, and if it was for the sake of suggestion that would be fine, but it really looks like it’s because of budgetary restraints for their effects. There is CGI, but only where it would be legitimately dangerous to extras to do it any other way, but it does show and it does take you out of the moment. The film is also a bit scrappy, and that’s normally not a negative in horror films but when the film pitches itself as this big action/thriller it is a problem. Also, the score is kind of shit, sorry. 

That being said, the film is a very engaging, if not particularly scary, zombie action thriller with a great deal of intelligent satire.  The great thing about 28 Weeks Later, actually one of the first things I ever reviewed on this blog, is that, maybe unlike something like I, Daniel Blake, it’s a great big political film that’s not preaching to the choir, which is really a unique power horror films hold I think. Genre films tend to have a devoted audience just for that genre and horror is no different, which is great because it means you can heap on the political subtext, (although here it actually comes across more like a surtext), and I think Train to Busan has that same benefit as 28 Weeks Later, it has a whole lot of brains and whole lot of brawn, and it’s really good fun to boot. 

Review: 28 Weeks Later

28 WEEKS LATER, (aka TWENTY EIGHT WEEKS LATER), Robert Carlyle, 2007. TM & Copyright ©Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved./courtesy Everett Collection

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Screenwriters: Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Enrique López Lavigne, Jesús Olmo,  Alex Garland

Stars: Jeremy Renner, Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Mackintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots

Verdict: Better than it realististically had any right to be

I have a very vivid memory of first watching 28 Days Later… , I didn’t know who Danny Boyle was, I’d never seen Trainspotting, (Danny Boyle is also responsible for such works as Millions, 127 Hours, and the London Olympics ceremonies, yes, he’s directed the Queen), although I’d seen my friend’s poster of the now infamous ‘Choose Life’ monologue, which I myself have performed for drama requirements. At this point I was never really that into film, but 28 Days Later, was, and remains, one of the best horror movies I’d ever seen, and one of the best films I’d ever seen, full stop. So let’s just say I had a lot of hype going in to 28 Weeks Later, which comes to us courtesy of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who’s well, not done much else unfortunately. 

28 Weeks Later is a very different beast to the original, it tells the story of a would-be-tragic-hero Robert Carlyle, (Trainspotting, The Full Monty, Riff-Raff), who is the caretaker of one of the buildings in a safe zone, set up by a US led NATO force, in the Isle of Dogs. His children come home, the first children ever to be let back into the country, just as they discover something that could either save, or damn the community. It also follows some of the NATO officers in the fallout to this. What I like about it is that it’s a low key, high-octane thriller of a horror movie, with actually an awful lot of subtext. It’s well acted, kinetically directed, and a lot of fun.

Where you go with sequels I think, in terms of finding the balance between honouring the old and finding one’s own feet, I think can be easily accomplished in maintaining the cinematic language and universe of the original. If one was to look at the transition from Alien to Aliens (we will come back to this so pay attention), or even to Alien 3, they’re all very different films, made by different directors, with different distinct styles, and they all find they’re own unique ground, (whatever else may be said of the three-quel), but they are all, definitely part of the same universe, which is why it works as a franchise. Now if you were to look at the Star Wars prequels, the CGI backgrounds and whizz-bang action sequences are completely at a disconnect with the revolutionary practical effects, kitch-y charm, and memorable, dialogue focused fight scenes or the original trilogy. 28 Weeks Later, definitely finds its own feet, whilst remaining true to the source. For one, it’s shot on 16mm, which is different to the Canon XL1 used in the original, it is used for a different purpose which I will come back to, but it’s similar, and gritty enough to maintain continuity, and the zombies *ahem*, ‘rage infected humans’, are exactly the same, and just as visceral and thrilling. 

I was surprised at just how many people in the movie went on, or already were, people who I really like as actors, Jeremy Renner is really great in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Idris Elba, (Luther, Zootropolis, The Jungle Book), is one of the most in vogue actors you could find at the moment, and he’s really good as the stock-US-general figure here, and that’s all he really needs to be and he does it really well. I was really surprised to see Rose Byrne who in my mind is inseparable from Bad Neighbours, although she has done horror work since in Insidious. There are child actors, who quickly become the main focus of the movie in Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots. Mackintosh, I’m gonna get him out the way now he’s absolutely terrible, I mean really truly awful, it’s not surprise he’s done nowt since, but Poots is really, really great. She’s incredibly naturalistic, powerful, and believable, and I’m really pleased to note her prolific nature since. 

But that’s not what you come for with 28 Weeks Later. It’s really good fun, it’s visceral, full of hoards of zombies running through things, it has one of the most memorable opening sequences of any horror film ever and I thought we were half an hour in before checking my watch and realising there were only 20 minutes left! It’s high octane thrilling stuff, and if your there for some genre exploitation you get that in spades, in fact there was one scene that reminded me of Braindead!, in it’s almost comically OTT violence and gore. It does however have a lot to say, and it’s conveyed very well, it was taking me a while to figure out exactly what button the cinematography was pushing because it definitely was doing that, at one point I thought it was a particularly gorey episode of ‘The Empty Child‘ era Doctor Who. I started picking up on themes of American foreign policy, the Iraq war, exceptionalism. Then it hit me, the film was reminding me of television news footage of western forces in Iraq an Afghanistan. Indeed there are certain key sequences that I think quite knowingly made me think of Apocalypse Now. What it does very well is look at the way America invades other countries, and asks you if you would be uncomfortable with the dehumanising nature, the detached way people think about ‘other’ countries, if it was London? The fact this equates terrorist ideologies with a zombie virus is very interesting but slightly beside the point.

I also felt a slight meta commentary about sequels in general, how a low key piece, made by an idie, maybe non-american director, like Alien, or Monsters, can have America come in, stuff it with money and guns and we end up with Monsters: Dark Continent. 28 Weeks Later doesn’t fall into this trap and remains, a smaller scale, just as exciting, thematically rich, exciting little B movie that might even rival the original, depending what day you ask me.