Tour De Force Anti-Heroin Opus

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2013)

You'll have to have a cast-iron stomach and few inhibitions to truly enjoy this tour-De-force anti-heroin melodrama. "Shallow Grave" director Danny Boyle and co-scenarist John Hodge distilled Irvine Welsh's atmosphere Scottish novel about the perils of addiction. This shameless consumers nightmare satire depicts the addiction that several people share, among them Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller), and Spud (Ewen Bremner) as well as their non-junkie friends, particularly Francis Begbie (Robert Caryle) in Edinburgh, Scotland. Half-funny, half-tragic, "Trainspotting" isn't a movie that you will forget. Some of its memorable scenes verge on the surreal. Renton plunges into the worst toilet in Scotland to retrieve two opium suppositories. Later, when Renton is going cold turkey on heroin, he imagines that Begbie is under the sheets with him and that a dead baby is crawling across the ceiling. In another scene, Mark shoots heroine and imagines that he has sunk through the carpet; the heroin dealer Mother Superior hauls his body into the street and summons a cab to take him to the hospital. Throughout these scenes, Mark's perspective is looking up and out of a box with carpet on both sides. Interestingly enough, Renton's room at his parents' house is plastered with wallpaper of locomotives. Robert Caryle plays the one character who doesn't thrive on heroine. Instead of heroine, Begbie gets off on "his own sensory addiction." He likes to brandish his knife, boast loudly, and start fights. He amounts to the U.K. equivalent o Robert De Niro. Another Danny Boyle classic!