"Trainspotting" (18) - Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Three of today's four new releases are dominated by drug addicted characters, and the fourth features a drugs baron as its villain. The most unorthodox approach to the theme is taken by the audacious and startling Trainspotting, an adroit adaptation of Irvine Welsh's scabrous cult novel and an emotional rollercoaster from glee and exhilaration through to shock and horror.
The dizzying, breakneck pace of Trainspotting is set in the opening scene as the camera - and a pair of store detectives - chases the movie's anti hero and one of his mates through the streets of Edinburgh while Iggy Pop's Lust For Life pumps up the adrenalin on the soundtrack. What follows is an astonishing audio visual experience as director Danny Boyle takes us deep into the world of Scottish heroin junkies, some hopelessly addicted, others attempting to control or break their habit.
The central character is Mark Renton (a seriously slimmed down Ewan McGregor), a junkie who manages to kick the habit only to be drawn back into it. His friends are the amiable but hopeless addict, Spud (Ewan Bremner); the violent alcoholic, Begbie (Robert Carlyle); the James Bond obsessed womaniser, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and the ingenuous hill walker, Tommy( Kevin McKidd) whose refusal to take drugs collapses fatally. Renton shares Margaret Thatcher's view that there is no such thing as society - though for very different reasons - and he and his mates exist in a netherworld of petty crime and heroin binges that is portrayed with a rare frankness.
Firmly eschewing the social realism approach which British employed to explore such themes, Trainspotting employs a remarkably bold visual style to form a movie that is, by turns, shocking, chillingly unsettling, blackly humorous, bursting with energy and startlingly surreal. Fuelled by sharp, rapid fire dialogue and vividly played by an exemplary young cast, this is a Clockwork Orange for the 1990s - a reference most explicitly evoked in the anti hero's voice over narration and in the set constructed for the movie's nightclub sequence.
The second movie from the Shallow Grave team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge, Trainspotting marks an immense leap from that very promising but rather over praised first feature. It neither preaches about nor glamorises drugs, although one character dies a heroin addict and another undergoes a harrowing cold turkey treatment. The movie's visceral charge is heightened by the impeccably chosen soundtrack that drives it along and features, among others, Pulp, Blur, Elastica, Leftfield, New Order - and Lou Reed, whose Perfect Day has never been used to such ironic effect.
"The Basketball Diaries" (members and guests only)
An altogether more conventional depiction of addiction than Trainspotting, Scott Kalvert's film of The Basketball Diaries finally brings to the screen New York poet and musician Jim Carroll's autobiographical memoirs of his descent into drug taking as a teenager in the 1960s. In several failed attempts to film Carroll's book, the central role was intended for, among others, Matt Dillon, who ventured into similar territory for the much grittier Drugstore Cowboy, and River Phoenix, whose own ventures into real life drug taking prematurely ended his life.
The role of Carroll was finally played by the gifted, baby faced Leonardo Di Caprio and it is his terrific performance which elevates The Basketball Diaries above the sheer familiarity of its scenario. Unwisely updated from its Sixties setting to an unspecified recent past, the film follows Carroll's descent from sniffing cleaning fluid to heroin addiction. The film views him as a fatherless, tormented soul brutally beaten by a Catholic priest at school and propositioned by the school's leering basketball coach (Bruno Kirby). Before getting deeper into drugs, his only interests in life appear to be basketball, masturbating naked on the roof by night, and getting into petty crime with his friends.
Jim Carroll's own writings, as quoted in the film, register as merely dated today, and Carroll himself endorses the movie by making a cameo appearance for a motormouth monologue. Scott Kalvert a music video director on his cinema debut, work best with the actors, who include Mark Walberg (formerly Marky Mark) as Carroll's foul mouthed friend who encourages his drug habit, and Lorraine Bracco as Carroll's despairing mother - who features in the movie's strongest scene, as she forces herself to close the door on her pleading junkie son. But it is the magnetic DiCaprio who lights up the film in a vivid, intelligent performance.
"Casino" (18) Savoy, Virgin Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
We are in very familiar Martin Scorsese territory with Casino all too familiar to anyone who's seen and admired his superb 1990 gangster epic, GoodFellas. The setting of Casino may be different - Las Vegas in the 1970s as the Mafia scheme to take over - but the team and the themes are substantially the same as GoodFellas, with Scorsese working once again from a screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi which deals, with the rise and tall of criminal kingpins played once again by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and minimal distinction is drawn between the psychotic sadists played by Pesci in the two films.
The violence is even more gruesome, however, and very largely gratuitous - never more so than when Pesci squeezes a victim's head in a vice. The screenplay is littered with expletives competing to be heard against the jukebox of golden oldies incessantly pumped out on the soundtrack - and against the excessive rapid fire narration supplied by both De Niro and Pesci.
In all technical respects, Casino is as accomplished as we have come to expect from the master that is Scorsese: the precise attention to detail, the lavish production design, the hyperactive camerawork of Robert Richardson, the razor sharp editing. Unfortunately, the slender predictable and repetitive narrative singularly fails to sustain the movie's self indulgent and seemingly interminable three hour running time.
A nattily dressed De Niro is on form, but Pesci gratingly overacts, and the film's outstanding performance comes from the underestimated Sharon Stone. Seizing upon the potential of her most complex and demanding role to date, she brings a vivid vulnerability and intensity to the part of the insecure, heavy drinking and drug taking hustler who marries the De Niro character, and her Oscar nomination last week is well earned.
"Desperado" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Having attracted a great deal of attention with the how low was my budget publicity blitz surrounding his first feature, El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez was bankrolled by Columbia Pictures for his second movie, Desperado, and he clearly relished the resources available to him for this flamboyant action movie which is as much a remake of as it is a sequel to El Mariachi.
A piercing eyed, long maned Antonio Banderas takes on the role of the mariachi - the travelling musician with a guitar case full of artillery in Desperado, in which he seeks vengeance on the Mexican drug baron (Joquim de Almeida) who killed his girlfriend. The mariachi leaves a trail of blood in his wake as Rodriguez orchestrates a succession of elaborately staged, bloody action sequences that are heavily influenced by John Woo and Sam Peckinpah.
As the bookstore owner who gets involved with the mariachi, Salma Hayek displays a striking screen presence, which is as much as any actor can hope to do with this underwritten material, and as the mariachi's best friend, the ubiquitous Steve Buscemi is amusingly deadpan. In a cameo as a wisecracking geek, the over exposed Quentin Tarantino again makes one wonder why he doesn't stay behind the camera and get on with directing his next movie.
Accompanied by a vigorous Los Lobos score, Desperado sinks in the lulls between its stylised action set pieces and frequently dips into self parody. The more audacious and unlikely the action scenes, the more amusing they are, and as an exercise in over the top self indulgence, it all seems quite mild in comparison with Michael Jackson's ludicrously self deluded performance at the Brit Awards in London this week.
