Trainspotting

A lot of hype has preceded Trainspotting in my personal experience. For years now, it's come up routinely when people mention messed up or disturbing movies, and it also seems like the go-to "drugs will fuck you up" movie after Requiem for a Dream. I get that. The movie certainly depicts the ugly side of heroin addiction, and even its surreal hallucination scenes are more odd than inspiring. An early scene really set the tone for the movie, where Ewan McGregor shits some suppositories out into the world's most disgusting public toilet, then literally dives in after them, his heroin withdrawal symptoms overpowering the very basic human urge not to end up covered in shit water. The scene is cringe-worthy and borderline goofy, but you get the vibe that this isn't a rare enough occurrence in the real world. Nor, of course, is the dead baby imagery. Yeah, it turns out if you do nothing but hard drugs all day long, your baby is going to die in its crib and turn all blue and... yeesh.

But as powerful and dark as certain moments in Trainspotting were, the movie itself was a little too loose and light on its feet for me to compare it to Requiem for a Dream. Like, despite the dead babies and the guys covered in shit with no ambition in life, it felt just a little too silly to treat with the same gravitas as Aronofsky's fourfold heartbreaker. Instead, the movie I most readily compared to Trainspotting is a movie I haven't thought of in years or seen in at least a decade - SLC Punk. I can't quite figure out why I've made that connection, but I made it all the same, and couldn't shake it once I had. Must be the similarities in tone and editing; the movies lack a common actor, writer, director, or anything else between them as far as I'm aware,

Anyway, Trainspotting was solid, but it was no Requiem for a Dream.