It Took Pure Talent

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2016)

This movie was positively mind-blowing, a favorite in my circle of
friends after it came out. Even the soundtrack hit on so many things we
all knew and loved, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Underworld. It pulled us in
from the opening scene with a great monologue and the old school
thumping of everyone's favorite punk rocker.
When it came out we loved it. It was brutal, it was funny, it was
tragic, we hadn't seen anything like it.
But we were 16 when it came out and living in Chicagoland. We were a
long way from the source and had never heard of Irvine Welsh. It wasn't
until a few years later, when we finally got a Borders in our area that
we would find out how monumental a movie this was.
When we did, we found Welsh, we found the book the movie was based on
and that somehow made the film all the better.
"Loosely interpreted" would be a very fair thing to call it, but that
isn't a shame, that isn't a negative.
The source material was as mind-blowing as it was frustrating. Each
chapter narrated by a different character and each one written in a
Scottish accent.
You longed for Sick Boy's chapters, you could tear his apart in the
blink of an eye, but Spud, Spud it took a month to translate that
accent into anything near comprehensible.
There are more characters and, if you take the time to work through the
accents, the book is a far greater prize than the film.
But when you read the novel, when you review the source material, you
are stuck wondering how on earth could they ever turn a novel like
Trainspotting into a movie? Yet they did. They not only turned it into
a film, they turned it into a great film, a beautiful and funny look
into the lives of addicts that is as tragic as it is hysterical.
They beat the odds with Trainspotting. Rarely, if ever, do you
encounter such a brilliant translation of a novel that seems so
monumentally difficult to turn from prose to film.