Trainspotting (DVD)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Reasons For Purchasing: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I first saw the film Trainspotting after hearing so much controversy about it on television, from reading about it in the newspapers and from everyone talking about it around me at the time. It was all everyone was talking about on it's release in 1996 and of course I just had to see it for myself to see what all the hype was about. Well I went to the pictures to watch this film and was quite shocked by this outrageously, yet brilliant tale of five Scottish drug users. It really was a hard-hitting film, but was put across like nothing I had ever really seen before. I think I liked it so much ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room Danny Boyle shot to fame with two hot hits in a very short time - Shallow Grave in 1994, and one of his best films in 1996, Trainspotting, a harrowing, darkly funny look at drug addiction with some insanely good performances, chiefly from Ewan McGregor in the lead role. It's this kind of filmmaking that allowed Boyle to hone his craft and finally ascend to Oscar glory with his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire. The film opens as we meet a bunch of lads in Edinburgh, led by Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor). His friends are Spud (Ewen Bremner), a socially inept syocphant, Sick Boy (Johnny Lee ...  Read the complete review

Trainspotting is a film from the mid-1990's, and is both grim and fascinating. Sadly, it was the film chosen by my now-husband for our first proper date at the cinema back in 1996. How romantic (not)! The story, originally a book by the great author Irvine Walsh, follows a group of apparent no-hopers living in the Edinburgh drug scene, and tells the tale of what happens to them all. Most of the characters are not particularly likeable, save for maybe Ewan McGregors character, Renton. Robert Carlisle makes an early film appearance as the truly terrifying psychopath Begbie, who none of the group really want hanging around them ...  Read the complete review

I remember the controvesy surrounding this film when it came out at the cinema in 1996. I was 16 at the time and I got my dad to rent the film out from the video shop for me and my friends to watch. It was THE film of 1996, everyone in my social circle was talking about it. This film is like marmite: you really either love it or you hate it! I have to say I fall on the side of loving it, though there are certain parts of the film that i find very difficult to watch! The first of these occurs near the beginning of the film where Renton (played by Ewan McGregor in one of his earliest big screen roles) has dropped some heroin suppositories into a ...  Read the complete review

Trainspotting comes to the screen under the capable hand of the same writer-producer-director combination that debuted with the equally superb Shallow Grave. Whilst it may soften some of the harsher edges of Irvine Welsh's graphic and somewhat shambolic novel, it certainly never shies away from the main issues. Welsh presented his characters as not being duped by pushers and dealer but rather to choose drugs over the sheer boredom and banality of modern life and the film runs with this concept too. It follows Renton and a band of scabby druggies, junkies, thieves, cheats, liar, psychos,...etc. whom he calls friends in a series of almost 'day in the life ...  Read the complete review