Boyle is insanely consistent. Can't think of another director with safer hands IMHO.

djchump wrote:

Boyle is insanely consistent. Can't think of another director with safer hands IMHO.

I'd say the opposite. He's done a whole range of good, average and crap stuff.

Not IMHO. I've really enjoyed all his stuff that I've seen, and can't think of a director that's handled the range of subjects and genres that Boyle has taken on.

JonB wrote:

djchump wrote:

Boyle is insanely consistent. Can't think of another director with safer hands IMHO.

I'd say the opposite. He's done a whole range of good, average and crap stuff.

Has he done anything bad since slumdog?

I watched Trance the other night. It didn't really do it for me, one of Boyle's weakest.

If anything, there should be more excuses to perv on Rosario Dawson.

Can't stop thinking about T2 and how much I enjoyed it - so many classic moments and images.

djchump wrote:

Oh my days:



And Serafinowicz putting in a solid turn as well

That looks fun, but 'starts' February the 10th? How long is this film?

No, Jobs was great.

Beach... Not so much. But not a disaster. Always right that McGregor would have been a much better fit for it.

JonB wrote:

mistercrayon wrote:

Boyle is insanely consistent. Can't think of another director with safer hands IMHO.

I'd say the opposite. He's done a whole range of good, average and crap stuff.

Has he done anything bad since slumdog?

Steve Jobs? There was also The Beach earlier. 

Perhaps there's not much real crap, but quite a lot that's just not particularly good, or easily forgettable bar some of the stylistic touches he adds.

Steve Jobs was ace!

I quite like the beach. The novel had a weird chapter on street fighter 2.

Cosby wrote:

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Manchester by the Sea.  Wholehearted recommendation from me, I loved it from start to finish.

Me too. Thought it was excellent in pretty much every aspect. Affleck was outstanding but a cracking supporting cast too.

Spoiler:

The Broderick cameo really surprised me, can't remember the last thing I saw him in.

Oh shit so it was, I had to stop playing the 'aargh, who's that??' game and go back to concentrating on the film.

Looking back on Boyle's filmography, there are a few films there which are exceptional for the writing and the acting, but not necessarily for the direction. Trainspotting was different, though. I won't ever disagree that it's a very well directed film.

I'm just home from having watched Trainspotting 2. It's perhaps worth framing what I have to say by pointing out that I was very wary of it beforehand. Also, I haven't read Trainspotting since the first time in 1994 or 1995, and I've never read anything else by Irvine Welsh, so I don't know how much of what I have to say about the film should be levelled at the books.

It's not a bad film, not by any means. This is mostly down to the performances of the four male leads, but Ewen Bremner and Robert Carlisle in particular. How the latter manages to be an even more terrifying screen presence than before is impressive. Spud is as annoyingly feckless yet endearing as before. In fairness, Jonny Lee Miller is convincing as the most-(only-?)changed Sick Boy, and Ewan McGregor resurrects the Renton-flavoured version of himself as well as he can in any role.

As a film about how little your life can move forward in twenty years, it works very well. I was younger than these characters when I first saw the film and I'm obviously still younger than them now, although that age gap feels insignificant twenty years down the road. I share those feelings of losing track on a world that was once my oyster and I now find harder to understand. Flashes of nostalgia reminding me of the very best moments of the best days of our lives. This film will resonate with anyone who has experienced that, and will resonate the most with those for whom the pop-cultural references most closely match their own tastes and lifestyles.

My main concern about the film before I saw it was the number of call-backs to the original film. Given the tone and one of the themes, they have their place. Unfortunately, though, I didn't think they all worked very well. For the most part they felt like Danny Boyle was having his own crisis, and it didn't feel like an intentional commentary on the characters or the viewer. It just felt a bit sad and, again, not in an intentional way. One of the most telling tricks is the use of freeze frame which was used intelligently in the original - to identify a character or allow the insertion of a footnote or flashback important to the setting of the current scene - and is now dropped in with no reason or purpose. It's like Danny Boyle has remembered a thing he did in the last film and just used it at random intervals throughout.

With the exception of one brief minute (to avoid spoilers, I'll just say that it's when Renton first visits Spud's flat) the film totally lacks the exciting, inventive imagery that the first film had in spades.

The story is utter bobbins. Not only that, but it is 'resolved' in such a rush, like a school kid finishing a short story before the bell goes. Narrative strands are introduced and dropped; Sick Boy is the most interesting character development between the two films, but his revenge story is introduced and is fritttered away to nothing. There is zero character development within the film; we think we see a change of sorts for Begby, but no, that gets chucked away for the sake of the ending. It feels like the bit of the film that was an interesting story got left on the cutting room floor.

Which brings us to Spud. When I first read Trainspotting, I assumed that Mark Renton was an autobiographical character. Having later seen Irvine Welsh, it's clear that he's actually Spud (although Renton is still probably a projection). While the idea that the apparently dim-witted fool is the one with insight could have been an interesting (if clichéd) sub-plot, the way it is turned into the most secondary-school-level-creative-writing-class cliché is frankly embarrassing. If that's the fault of the books, it should've been changed or left out entirely. It's just poor film-making.

It's not a bad film, not by any means, but it's not a particularly good one, either. It pulls the same old Danny Boyle trick of using a soundtrack to pick you up at various points, and similarly ending on a track that lifts you and has you walking out of the cinema with a skewed perception of what you just saw.

It doesn't piss on the memory of Trainspotting the way that Little White Lies review suggested, but nor does it do enough to justify its own existence. I'm left feeling ambivalent about it; I don't really care that it exists. Much like the characters it begins to have something interesting to say about, it is little more than a slightly pathetic echo of its former self.

Nice to hear The Rubbernandits in the soundtrack, btw, even if the reason is a little unflattering.

Director generally doesn't control casting and scripting. They'll likely be a part of it, but more likely the producers to thank.