Trainspotting

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. 

Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wonder who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. 

Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

"Trainspotting" is perhaps one of the best adaptations from a novel made by the film industry, but for the wrong reason: the process of translation of words into images is a success not because it is an accurate reflection of the book but, on the contrary, because it departs enough from it to be a totally different experience without taking away the feeling that novel and movie are related.

The fact is that many original stories present in the book did not make it to the movie, good stories and great characters. However Hodge, the writer, got it right. The fact is that he and the director Danny Boyle managed, with a very difficult decision, to save a movie that could have been a great disaster.

A chaotic, disjointed film going to many places but not getting to any, outlining many characters but not completing them. The fact is that all this is quite strange, because everything that could have made ​​the film sink into insignificance is what makes the book a classic and its author a living myth.

The film succeeds in using memorable and thoughtful sequences, in the spirits that Irving Welsh, author of the novel, intended when he wrote his characters and their stories.

In the paragraphs by Welsh, Renton is a character who talks in short sentences, through a bitter and dry prose. In the movie, Renton is an easy going and haggard guy who only speaks when he has to. In both cases, the character is crystal clear like the worst toilet in Edinburgh.

Of course, the movie is about young heroin addicts, for whom the drug is a culture and a philosophy. Nothing happens until near the end of the story. But that nothing is moving at full speed and it crashes them, kills babies and makes them scream while detoxifying on a bed.

"Trainspotting" works with a tecnique called "recording angel", which means writing without judgment, make any judgment to take place only in the mind of the viewer.

"Trainspotting" has been heavily criticized for glorifying the world of heroin. I think anyone who thinks that this is so is deeply wrong, but so is anyone who thinks otherwise.

"Trainspotting" saves us the usual and useless moral preeching, because its work is only to show, to appeal to an intelligent spectator, who knows the film industry and that the most important thing of a film is to tell a good story.

Director: Danny Boyle

Writers: Irvine Welsh (novel), John Hodge (screenplay)

Stars: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller