This Movie Bucketlist list is my longest that I’ve done so far, although it’s basically just every movie that’s on my Watchlist and on Netflix. Trainspotting has been recommended to me on Netflix for years, and at 94 minutes it’s a cake walk compared to some of my other films.
Ewan McGregor stars as Renton in this British dark comedy drama about a group of heroin addicts living on the fringe of society. They are con artists, burglars, and drug dealers trying to get by, constantly forcing us to question the habits of both established society as well as counterculture.
The film opens with Renton trying to cut himself off from heroine, locking himself in a hotel room and preparing for the worst. This plan eventually fails, and he becomes entangled with a teenage school girl named Diana, played by Kelly MacDonald (the voice of Merida in Brave).
Renton and his friends enjoy their vices, and regularly get themselves in trouble trying to get them. When Renton is caught stealing from a bookstore, he enters a drug rehabilitation program to avoid jail time and ends up locked in his childhood bedroom and forced to experience all of the withdrawal symptoms. But it actually works!
Renton moves to London, but his criminally-inclined friends follow him there and things get a little crazy.
The story is certainly dark, with HIV plots, death, and serious explorations of the difficulties of drug addition. Renton reiterates that he wants to be a “good person,” but his situation and even his decisions rarely reinforce that attitude. He straddles the line between staying loyal to his friends and keeping himself safe from destructive behaviors.
The style of the film is also very entertaining, regularly dipping into the surreal in order to uniquely portray the absurd lifestyle of a heroin addict.
The film is worth a watch, as many people consider it to be one of the greatest Scottish films of all time (and yes, it is incredibly difficult to understand what the characters are saying a majority of the time). The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, and IMDb 250 ranks it at #156. It was also directed by Danny Boyle, who went on to win the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.
This is the trailer for the film “The Impossible” which is in theaters now. I actually just got back from it so I’m writing this while I’m in “the movie mood.” It’s a state of being where you can still feel the emotions that a movie you just saw created in you and you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s probably not a very objective way to write a film review, but here goes.
“The Impossible” is a disaster drama by director Juan Antonio Bayona (2007’s “The Orphanage”). The film was released in Spain in October 2012, but it wasn’t released in the United States until January 4th, 2013. With the Academy Award nominations being announced tomorrow, and my obsession with award show season growing by the minute (it’s actually becoming a problem), I am so excited for this film to do well both commercially and critically.
Because of my experience with the trailer, I knew the film had very little time to actually introduce the pre-tsunami Bennet family. There’s Maria and Henry, the parents, and sons Lucas, Thomas, and Simon. Henry is some kind of businessman in Japan, and Maria was a doctor before she had her kids and Henry got a job a Japan. The film makes the family clearly British, even though the family the film is about is Spanish. Bayona said that he wanted to make the film as universal as possible by not specifying the nationality of the Bennet family. So the family is British. Who doesn’t love British accents?
Because Taylor Swift and Harry Styles just broke up. Anyway, the story is extremely moving in a much more “in your face” way than Les Miz was. Maria (played by Naomi Watts) and the oldest son, Lucas, find each other early on, and they have to deal with serious injuries as well as the decision to go to a hospital instead of looking for the rest of their family. Meanwhile, Henry (Ewan McGregor) finds his two younger sons, and the three of them struggle with finding help or looking for their loved ones. But their plot is definitely secondary to the moving and powerful tale of the mother and her son. I saw the film with my mom, which was basically the equivalent of a mother and daughter seeing “Brave” together. But also throw in the fact that no teenage boy wants to cry in front of his mom.
The film deals with compassion, familial love, and human nature in a way that is surprisingly accessible to someone who has never dealt with anything near this scale. Along with that, it captures both the mass hysteria and the humanistic companionship that comes with surviving a tragedy like this one. There’s an especially touching scene where Lucas and his mother are wandering through the wreckage, and they hear a boy crying. Lucas argues that they need to get to higher ground, but Maria makes a case for why they have to save him. She posits “what if it were Thomas or Simon?” even though she knows it isn’t. They end up saving him and in the end we see the boy reunited with his family. Meanwhile I’m like
I can’t say it enough. The film is seriously powerful. Naomi Watts certainly deserved her Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama, and I think Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland (who played the oldest son Lucas) deserved one as well. There’s something about the way Tom Holland handles his character that is really moving, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him soon again.
There’s a scene where Ewan McGregor’s character is taken to a shelter after spending all night looking for his wife and son, and he is sitting around a group of survivors telling their stories. A man gives Henry a phone to call his kids’ grandfather, and he tells him that him and his two sons are alright, but that he can’t find his wife and son. He hangs up because he breaks down, and the group forces him to call the grandfather back (at a time where cellphone battery is more valuable than everyone’s material possessions combined) to tell them that he will keep looking for his loved ones. It’s emotional and heartbreaking and there wasn’t a person in the theater not sniffling.
I have to give the award for “most heartbreaking scene” to when Maria first emerges from the water. It takes her a moment to realize what has happened, and she then breaks down. The full force of the water rushing past her is nothing compared to the thought of her having lost her family. She cries out and every audience member understood what it was like to be confronted with being truly alone in such a devastating way.
I highly recommend that anyone with a functioning heart goes to see this film. I know that awards season consists of the meteor shower of intense emotional films, where comedies are few and far between, but this movie is truly inspiring. I’ll admit it, by the end I looked like this.
