Trainspotting (cult Classic)

This is the third movie in the series of cult classic movies. Click the label to find the other two reviews.)


This is the first cult classic review of a movie I had scene before I watched it to do the review of it. Also, I watched it over the course of 3 days in class, so my perspective may be a little different. I have always believed Danny Boyle to be an overrated director. He has an interesting visual style and creates a few great shots, but as a story teller he is weak and lacks focus. He and Guy Ritchie have that in common. This was the movie that broke Boyle into the big time. It also launched the career of Ewan McGregor.

Is Trainspotting a movie glamorizing drugs or is it a cautionary tale in the same vein as Requiem for a Dream? Does it really matter? Are movies supposed to take sides on an issue? Sure they can, but is that the point of a movie- to take a side? Trainspotting follows the lives of a bunch of British Junkies. That is the basic idea of the story. McGregor plays Renton, a man who "chooses" heroin because it is easy. Addiction to heroin means you only have one worry- finding heroin. You are not worried about all the other little things in life. You just need to find money to get high. You rob stores if you have to, but you get the drugs. Renton tries to quit a few times, but he keeps the same friends and that spells disaster.

However, like any Danny Boyle movie it is not about plot, it is about the visuals. And in that department this movie definitely succeeds. It succeeds in grossing us out, tripping us out, scaring us and making us laugh. The use of quick cuts give us the impression of what it is like to be high while making us laugh at a scene where a heroin user is trying to get a real job. When Renton is going through withdrawals we get a very visually disorienting scene with a fake baby crawling on the ceiling and quick images of other characters. Boyle does an incredible job of creating a drugged out environment and all of the actors, especially McGregor play their roles within these visuals. They seem to know that Boyle is unsure of what to do with them but they trust he will make it up to them with editing and camera angles, especially the POV shot of Renton after he overdoses.

Trainspotting touches briefly on the HIV epidemic that flooded the drug scene in the Nineties as Tommy catches it. The interesting thing about Tommy is that he was the friend who did not do drugs or drink. He was a clean living guy until his girlfriend broke up with him. he heard Renton talk about how the high from heroin was like multiplying your best orgasm by 1,000 and you still weren't there. He believed him and got hooked. His "friends" kind of ditch him because as everyone knows, a druggie is not a reliable friend. This is a movie 100% about addiction. Everyone in the movie is addicted to something- drugs, alcohol, fighting, working out, sex. It seems to think we are all addicted to something. Life is nothing but an addiction and the time between addictions. In the words of Renton:

Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead to the day you die.

Final Grade: B+

Donnie Darko (Cult Classic Review)

I have never met anyone who has seen Donnie Darko who had a negative review of it. I have heard it was confusing, but excellent. Everyone who sees it seems to have an affinity for it and that always intrigued me. Until now though, I hadn't really had a desire to see it. A few years ago I caught about 15 minutes of the middle of the movie and wasn't impressed, so I never thought about checking it out. However, after mid-terms last week I had some down time and decided to finally give Donnie Darko a shot.

Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhall) is not your typical teenager- he sleep walks, sees a shrink, oh and he is seeing a 6ft tall bunny rabbit. His sleep walking and following the giant bunny lead Donnie out one night and it turns out to be lucky because that night the engine dropped out of an airplane and the engine dropped through his roof and on to his bed. It would have killed him. Because he was spared, he thought he should start listening to the giant bunny who tells Donnie that the world is going to end soon unless he does the things the bunny tell him to do. The things he is supposed to do involve, arson, wielding axes and things like that. Darko is often picked on, but he finds respite from it all in the form of Gretchen Ross(Jena Malone). Gretchen is a girl with a bad family history and the two make an odd pair but they work because of their oddities. Donnie becomes sure that the giant bunny is from the future and he becomes interested in time travel and his science teacher Kenneth Monnitoff(Noah Wyle) gives him a book called The Philosophy of TIme Travel and soon the screen is lit up with passages from the book trying to explain the significance of each character and what needs to happen to keep the world from exploding. In a side plot, Jim Cunningham(Patrick Swayse) is a motivational speaker who believes all human emotion boils down to only two things- love and fear. His story comes to a fairly obvious, but bad ending.

When this movie was over I was very confused, but I was drawn to it. A day later I was still confused, but I was thinking about it. It is now five days later and I am still interested in the movie. I want to discuss it endlessly with anyone who has seen it and has a better working knowledge of it. I want to delve into it and figure it all out, but I don't have the time. Instead I have my own conjectures about what was really going on. Then, I go on-line and realize everyone has conjectures and maybe that is the point. Director Richard Kelly created a very surreal, disturbing, dark, scary, sometimes funny, pseudo intellectual world with possible time travel and possible fourth dimensions. There are little things that may or may not be important later in the movie and everything appears connected, but you have to really have time to figure it all out. If you don't have the time you get to just sit and wonder in the back of your mind if the world really ended in the world of Donnie Darko.

I am not going to bore anyone with my theory on what is going on in Donnie Darko, but I will say that it is a very interesting and entertaining movie. There are some remarkable visuals (Donnie trying to hit the bunny through the mirror for starters) and there is a lot of philosophizing about good and evil and the role of fate in life. There is also a lot of nonsense and thing sin there that seem to be there just so the director can smirk about how clever he is. The acting is fairly strong all the way around but this movie lives or dies by Gyllenhall and he keeps the movie alive with a dark, brooding, tortured, layered, some times funny performance of the ultimate emo kid.

I cannot recommend this movie to anyone, but I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys mind bending movies or just dark deep movies. I am sure subsequent viewings will enhance my pleasure as I start to pick up the littler things, or maybe more viewings will turn me off to it. I do not know, but I know it is still with me and I like that. I like that with as many movies as I watch, there are still movies that keep me wondering; movies that keep me guessing. Richard Kelly is definitely one to watch.

Final Grade- A-

The Boondock Saints (Cult Classic review)

A good definition of a "Cult Classic" is nearly impossible to find. Not everyone agrees on what makes a cult classic. A cult classic can be a great film that was lost on the mainstream or it can be a terrible film that has some redeeming or fun qualities. The one thing that makes a cult classic though is that it is loved by a relatively small, yet rabid, group of people. Movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or True Romance epitomize the idea of a cult classic. The 1990's brought us two directors who have essentially made a living on cult classics- Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. Where we see Smith's influence in the movies of Judd Apatow, Tarantino influenced an entire generation of filmmakers. Pulp Fiction is arguably the most influential movie to be released since the mid-nineties (You could argue for The Matrix) and every year there are movies that borrow from elements of Pulp Fiction. In 1999 a movie was released by a writer/director named Troy Duffy and that movie was The Boondock Saints. One of the Weinsteins called Duffy "The next Quentin Tarantino" and an ego was born. The ego blackballed Duffy in Hollywood and we are left with only this movie. The Boondock Saints lives on as a cult classic, probably somewhat due to the director sabotaging his own career, but does it really deserve the title? Did he deserve the title?

Set in Boston, The Boondock Saints follows to brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus) who unexpectedly gain fame when they kill two men in self defense. The two dead men were Russian mobsters and drug dealers who had taken over the Boston streets, much to the chagrin of the citizens of that area. After turning themselves in to the police and an F.B.I agent by the name of Paul Smecker(Willem Dafoe), the brothers are released but praised as saints in the community. With the guns and money from the two dead guys, the brothers bank roll it for more guns, ropes, and assorted weapons and decide it is their calling from God to murder bad guys. F.B.I genius Smecker stays in Boston to solve the cases of all these bad guys being murdered. Of course, it never occurs to him that these brothers can do it because after all, the two brothers don't appear to know how to be skilled assassins. Oh snap, except they somehow are very effective at killing and not getting killed!! Never fear though, I mean they are killing bad guys, so when the F.B.I guy finds out it is them, he thinks they are doing good and decides to help them and his best way to accomplish that is to dress up like a female hooker!! Ending with one of the more ridiculous climaxes I have seen in a movie, The Boondock Saints somehow goes down in cinematic history.

If you refer back to the beginning of this review where I called Pulp Fiction the most influential movie to be released since the nineties, allow me to explain why that is. Movies like The Boondock Saints would not exist if Tarantino had no paved the way. Duffy is so blatantly ripping off Tarantino, Tarantino deserved a writing and directing credit for this movie. We see the crimes in a series of broken down flashbacks in a lame attempt to bend time the way Pulp Fiction did so well. The script is a very low grade, rip off of screenplays like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects. However, Duffy does show some promise in regards to his directorial eye and his way with the camera, especially in the scene that takes place in 3 catholic confessional booths. I enjoyed those overhead shots a lot, but for the most part it really does play like a direct-to-video take on those great crime dramas my generation loves so very much. And maybe that is the problem: Duffy was trying so hard to make a cool movie that it looks like a movie that is trying too hard to be cool. People light up cigarettes at the same time, the slow motion gun battles come off looking cheesy, the dialog trite and even the music is nauseatingly corny. Cool movies just exist; they are supposed to happen by accident almost. The minute you set out to make a cool movie, you have already lost the battle.

The two leads speak in broken now-you-hear-them-now-you-don't Irish accents, but nowhere in the movie did I catch that they were actually from Ireland, just the Irish heavy Boston and last I check not all Irish Catholics from Boston speak in Irish accents. That is just one of the many lame things featured inside Saints. Defoe's gay F.B.I agent often takes to the streets to conduct a full on orchestra as he sweeps crime scenes or relives one of the crimes committed by the boys. I am not sure if this was an attempt at humor or an attempt to be hip and edgy, but either way it falls flat as I was starting to reach for the remote to speed through all of that garbage. Maybe this movie falls into the category of so-bad-its-good, but the rabid cult like fans don't seem to think so. These people really believe it is a great original cinematic work, but when Stephen Dorff even passed on starring in your movie, how good can it really be?