Manchester By The Sea

(M) ★★★★

Director: Kenneth Lonergan.

Cast: Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, C.J. Wilson, Kyle Chandler, Michelle Williams, Gretchen Mol.

Definitely not a film about a coastal shop selling bed linen.

When films claim big awards for their actors as opposed to the film itself, the film tends to live on in the shadow of the actor.

As great as you might think The Revenant is (personally I thought it was overblown and pretentious), it will forever be the film Leonardo DiCaprio finally (and deservedly) won the best actor Oscar for. As good as The Theory Of Everything and Lincoln are, they revolve in the memory around their shining stars Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Day Lewis. Ditto for Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side and Charlize Theron in Monster (in fact, do you hear these last two films talked about at all these days except in reference to their Oscar-winning actresses?).

Manchester By The Sea is likely to suffer the same fate. It is a solid, beautiful and poignant film, but it lives and dies on the strength of Casey Affleck's restrained Oscar-winning role. Affleck's turn alone is the thing that elevates it to greatness, despite it having so many great elements, and as such, it will be remembered for his performance.

Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a socially awkward recluse who is drawn back to his hometown (the titular Massachusetts seaport) following the death of his brother Joe Chandler (played by Kyle Chandler - I had to spell that one out so it didn't seem like a mistake).

The return not only finds Lee grappling with being named as guardian for his teenage nephew Patrick (Hedges), but also struggling with issues from his past that have left him an unwieldy, pent-up, shell of a man.

Lonergan's film is an exploration of grief that offers no pithy solutions or platitudes, instead portraying it as a never-ending, never-mending faultline that runs through your life from the fateful moment onwards. It's a gut-punching, heartbreaking movie, with Affleck's Lee in the epicentre. He has serious loss in his life he has never properly dealt with and it festers in him like a cancer, bursting out at inappropriate moments and in inappropriate ways. He has been running from it and his return to Manchester-by-the-Sea means it is going to hit him head on.

Affleck's performance captures these ideas perfectly. It's not showy or actorly but rather naturalistic, understated and subdued, drawing you into Lee's world completely. The film's narrative is similarly underplayed. It poses a mystery early on, and after it exposes it, the hook is in seeing how the characters, particularly Lee, deal with it now he's back in town.

Hedges is good in support, and combined with the strong script makes Patrick a real teen, determined to continue with his day-to-day life but still deeply unsettled by the loss of his father. The rest of the supporting cast is also powerful - the under-rated Kyle Chandler is excellent in his role, which is limited to flashbacks, Williams is fantastic as Lee's ex-wife, and Mol is great in her handful of scenes, one of which includes a neat cameo from Matthew Broderick.

The slow-burn pace and quiet tone of the film will annoy some, but more off-putting are some overly dramatic musical choices and the occasional weird patch of dialogue. For the most part, the script is spot-on, but every so often a line sticks out. Similarly the soundtrack choices sometimes make themselves too pronounced. As for the pacing, it must be argued it is perfect for the subject matter, and the film unravels at exactly the tempo it should.

Minor gripes aside, Lonergan has tackled his subject with sensitivity and beauty (the backdrop of a north-eastern US winter is stark but pretty), and with Affleck in the driver's seat he has found a perfect role for the under-appreciated actor.

REWIND REVIEW: Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale (RIP Murray Ball)

(PG) ★★★★

Director: Murray Ball.

Cast: (voices of) John Clarke, Peter Rowley, Rawiri Paratene, Fiona Samuel, Peter Hayden, Dorothy McKegg, Billy T. James, Brian Sergent, Marshall Napier, Michael Haigh.

Pets should rarely be kept in the fridge.

America had Charles M Schulz and Peanuts, France had Goscinny & Uderzo and Asterix, and New Zealand had Murray Ball and Footrot Flats.

As representations of their respective nations, each is telling. Peanuts was a good cross-section of American post-war society when it began in the 1950s, ranging from the ultimate example of "nice guys finish last" in its downtrodden hero Charlie Brown through to the dumb bully Lucy, who is constantly keeping the everyman down.

Meanwhile Asterix emerged less than 15 years after WWII, as France was continuing to reclaim its identity and rebuild, having suffered the indignity of the invading Nazis. Hence it throws back to a time when a group of "indomitable Gauls" hold out against the all-conquering Romans.

And New Zealand had Wal Footrot and Dog. In the wit of Ball and his characters lay a prime example of rural Kiwi (and Aussie for that matter) humour. New Zealand farming was predominantly more modern than Ball depicted it to be circa 1980, but it spoke to a certain romanticism for the land, and in a country with a population the size of NZ's, it seemed just about everyone had relatives who lived on a farm, so almost everyone had an understanding of what Ball was banging on about. Like Australia, New Zealand rode on the sheep's back, and Footrot Flats was a proud portrayal of the strugglers who shore that back in between weekends of playing rugby (or footy or cricket) and heading into town for fish and chips.

When Ball's comic strip hit the silver screen, every man and his dog (ahem) turned out to see it in New Zealand (it was a box office hit in Australia too). Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale was the first Kiwi feature-length animated film and held the record for being the most successful local movie at the NZ box office from 1986 through to 1994's Once Were Warriors.

Some of this success is down to its all-ages appeal - families drove long distances to see this film, making rare trips to town for it. Much of its humour is of the slapstick variety, whether it be a goose's attempts to bite Wal "on the prickle" (actually his butt, despite what you might be thinking) or Dog's attempts at heroism. It's all very Looney Tunes in places, right down to the unnecessary "comedy" sound effects.

As well as being kid-friendly (although there are plenty of terrifying things about the Murphy farm, notably the crocopigs and the rat leader Vernon), it had a fair bit for the grown-ups. Wal's dream sequence about becoming an All Black features some choice moments, while his ill-fated date with Cheeky Hobson is great and includes a weird moment where Wal pries baked beans from out of Cheeky's bosom. In spite of (or because of) its weird moments, it's funny for all ages. It should also be noted that John Clarke was an inspired choice to voice Wal Footrot, who wasn't a million miles away from his iconic NZ cross-media character Fred Dagg. Clarke joked at the time that the casting call was out of himself, John Gielgud and Meryl Streep, but he got the role because he had a shorter commute.

As director, Ball was reportedly meticulous, ensuring the animators got his style just right. His perfectionist streak paid off because the film looks like his comic strips come to life, with the added bonus of Richard Zaloudek's sublime backdrops, which give the film a surrealist edge due to their impressionistic qualities.

Equally surreal is Dave Dobbyn's score. Dobbyn, who took on the gig after Tim Finn turned it down, excels as much as he stumbles. Parts of the score haven't aged well, worst of all being a couple of songs that turn the cartoon into a musical (the tracks Let's Get Canine and Vernon The Vermin). But beyond those are the absolute gold of You Oughta Be In Love and, of course, this:

This was my little brother's favourite movie growing up and rewatching it 30 years on, it's not hard to see why. As farmer's sons, it spoke to our sense of reality - there's nothing Disneyfied or sanitised here. Dog eats dags, is nearly shat on by a sheep, and almost drowns in the sheep dip, all within the first few minutes. This was real farming, but it was a cartoon.

It has aged badly in places, but Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale is a wonderful snapshot of what the comics captured and why Murray Ball was not only a national hero in NZ, but also an icon to farming communities all around Australia. For all it's slapstick silliness, it's a fantastically pacy and enjoyable piece of rural '80s nostalgia.

Kong: Skull Island

(M) ★★★

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts.

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Terry Notary, John C. Reilly, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell, John Ortiz, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Thomas Mann, Jing Tian.

David Attenborough's Planet Earth II is packed with surprises.

Like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and Batman, King Kong never dies - he just gets rebooted every once in a while, ready to be wheeled out once again for a new generation.

We're going to be seeing a lot more of the 100-foot-tall ape in the future as Skull Island is the second film in Legendary Entertainment's "Monsterverse", the first being Gareth Edwards' excellent Godzilla from 2014 (Godzilla: King Of The Monsters comes out in 2019, followed by Godzilla Vs Kong in 2020).

These are CG-heavy multi-million dollar Hollywood versions of the stodgy old Toho Studios monster movies of the '50s, '60s and '70s, which cost under a quarter of a million dollars and featured men in rubber suits smashing miniature sets. These will be big-budget bonanza that will probably make Pacific Rim even more look like the pile of crap it was.

Vogt-Roberts' Kong reboot has more in common with the Toho films than the 1933 King Kong original, and the 1976 and 2005 remakes for that matter. There is no New York showdown, no climbing the Empire State Building, and only a minimal amount of the "beauty and the beast" motif that played out in those versions. This one goes to the jungle and stays in the jungle - capturing Kong is out of the question. Skull Island is all about survival.

Set in the final days of the Vietnam War (cue obligatory Creedence Clearwater Revival-heavy soundtrack), Bill Randa (Goodman) leads a team to explore the freshly discovered titular land mass under the guise of mapping and exploring it before the Russians do. Among his team are a tracker (Hiddleston), a photographer (Larson), a geologist (Hawkins), various other faceless scientists, and a helicopter squadron-worth of soldiers led by the battle-hungry Lieutenant Colonel Packard (Jackson).

There are plenty of surprises in store for them on Skull Island, including Kong, but he will be the least of their worries.

Taking little but the great ape from Cooper and Wallace's brilliant 1933 original, Skull Island styles itself as more of a war film, like some kind of wacky Apocalypse Now with a skyscraper-height simian thrown in for good measure instead of an overweight Marlon Brando. It's packed with explosions, gunplay, beast-on-beast battles, and one particularly eerie shoot-out sequence set in a gas-shrouded animal graveyard.

But is it any good? The short answer is kinda. The longer answer is Skull Island is a slightly infuriating mix of different shades of dumb - there's plenty of dumb fun, which is great, but there are also some groan-inducing, forehead-slapping moments of dumb too, most of which are in the script department.

It works best when it embraces the insanity of it all, such as seeing Jackson stare down Kong amid a burning lagoon of napalm, or any of the moments featuring Reilly's slightly bonkers castaway Marlow, or any of a number of inventive deaths the island's inhabitants throw at the hapless humans.

Stuck in the middle of this enjoyable idiocy is Hiddleston's steel-jawed hunter and Larson's anti-war photographer, both of whom are too serious by far. They get the majority of the terrible lines - at one point Hiddleston says, completely straight-faced, "Does any man really ever come back from war?", which would be fine in a gritty war drama but not mere minutes after running away from a giant monkey or some kind of skull-headed snake thing. It's when the film shifts between Hiddleston's gravitas and Reilly and Jackson's absurd insanity that the magic is lost and it goes from dumb fun to just plain dumb.

Reilly is the pick of the quality cast, his usual oddball inclinations more than welcome. Jackson is also good because he gets what Skull Island should be - in fact, he could have gone even further over the top as the army man who goes all Captain Ahab on Kong (you get the feeling he's only a few moments of fury away from yelling at someone to "get this motherfucking ape of this motherfucking plain!"). Goodman also understands how nuts it all is, adding a nice level of wild-eyed twitchiness to his mission instigator Randa.

Aside from Hiddleston and Larson being the serious pair in the middle of a silly storm, the biggest problem with the cast is there's too many of them. While you need cannon fodder (or Kong fodder), too many characters hang around (and even survive) for no good reason. Hawkins is only there for exposition and could have been cut, while Jing Tian adds absolutely nothing except for probably appeasing the Chinese co-financiers.

What it overcompensates for with the cast, it makes up for in looks. The cinematography and effects are worthy of its mammoth US$185 million budget. A few obvious CG sets aside, there are some eye-catching sequences (the gas-shrouded graveyard sequence and the fiery showdown between Packard and Kong in particular) and the creatures of Skull Island are wonderfully realised.

Kong in particular looks the goods. Less realistic than Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson's 2005 big gorilla, this version is an upright-walking missing link brought to life by Terry Notary's motion-capture work and billions of pixels. And unlike Edwards' Godzilla, Skull Island doesn't keep its star attraction under wraps for too long, which takes some of the mystery out of proceedings but gets the audience barracking for Kong from early on.

Ultimately, this is not a patch on 2014's Godzilla (stick around post-credits for the obligatory hint at the next mega kaiju showdown), nor is it as good as Peter Jackson's King Kong. But it's kinda fun and kinda dumb, and works more often than not.

Logan

(MA15+) ★★★★

Director: James Mangold.

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Dafne Keen, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Richard E. Grant, Stephen Merchant, Eriq La Salle, Elizabeth Rodriguez.

"You've got some red on you."

Given this is supposedly Hugh Jackman's last outing as Logan AKA Wolverine, it's worth remembering how close we came to having someone else in the role.

In an alternate universe, Mission: Impossible 2 didn't run over schedule and Dougray Scott retained the role of the clawed mutant, potentially delaying (or completely erasing) Jackman's big break (in that same universe Stuart Townsend is Aragorn and Tom Cruise is Iron Man).

We'll never know what Scott would have made of the role, but it's hard to argue against the idea that we would have been robbed of one of the great marriages of comic book character and actor - surely Jackman's Wolverine is up there with Heath Ledger's Joker and Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark.

While eternally grateful for Jackman's belated casting, the films Wolverine has appeared in have been a mixed bag. We've had two good original X-Men films and one bad, two good X-Men prequels (with Wolverine only getting a cameo in one) and one average one (with a slightly longer cameo), and one terrible Wolverine spin-off movie and one predominantly okay one.

Thankfully, finally, just in time for Jackman to hang up the adamantium claws, we get a bona fide great Wolverine movie. Much has been made of Logan's MA15+ rating, and the fact it's an "adult" superhero movie somewhat in the footsteps of Deadpool. This is indeed a contributing factor to Logan's excellence - no more bloodless violence dished out by a bladed rage monster. There will be blood, promised Jackman, and he and Mangold deliver.

But splashings of claret (and the dropping of f-bombs) aside, this is an adult superhero movie because it treats its characters seriously and with respect. It has little to do with the Old Man Logan comic that fans may have been expecting but instead crafts a sensible story about a man running out of time, and with nowhere left to run, who finds he may be the only hope someone else has. This is The Dark Knight of the X-Men universe. It's sombre and serious but not in a daft or OTT way a la Batman Vs Superman.

The story is set in the year 2029, where Logan is one of only a handful of mutants left. A shadow of the invulnerable beast he once was, he spends his nights driving limos and his days caring for the ailing Professor X (Stewart) with help from fellow surviving mutant Caliban (Merchant).

Into this tedious existence comes Laura, a young girl with remarkable powers and a whole host of bad guys on her trail. Against his own better judgement, Logan and Professor X hit the road in the hopes of getting Laura to safety while avoiding getting killed.

The film is a road movie and a one-last-job actioner but at its core, Logan is about death and the fact that it catches up with everyone. And when it does catch up with you, much like in the Johnny Cash song When The Man Comes Around which plays over the credits, the question will be posed as to what your life has been worth. Logan is about Wolverine getting one last shot at something close to redemption, as much as it's about the filmmakers ensuring Jackman gets the Wolvie film he deserves. It's redemption all round.

The big talking point for fans is the violence because of how it shapes the tone of Logan, making it more in line with the darker aspects of the character. It's visceral and initially alarming to see this much-loved mutant stick his blades through someone's head, given how bloodless and tame his previous appearances have been, but it's necessary. After all, as previously mentioned, this is about death, and right from the opening confrontation we understand just how high the stakes are in Logan.

It might sound bizarre to say this for those of you who dismiss superhero movies as "just superhero movies", but this is one of Jackman's best performances. He knows the character like the back of his bespiked hand, so the joy is in seeing him take Wolverine into new directions - more vulnerable, angrier, nihilistic, and more dangerous than ever before.

Stewart is also excellent as the 90-year-old version of Professor X. He has always given his all for these films, and doesn't disappoint here. Merchant is solid in the role of Caliban, but the show-stealer is Keen as Laura. Her character is a terrified and mystified ball of rage and Keen handles the physicality and emotional sides with equal aplomb.

Good villains are hard to come by in superhero films and most of the baddies here won't leave an imprint on your memory. Grant's Xander Rice is merely a catalyst and Holbrook's Donald Pierce is mouthy and okay, but it is the film's physical threat - an unlikely but welcome twist - who is the most interesting.

The smaller size and scale of the film is a refreshing change from the things-falling-from-the-sky-style superhero movie we've been seeing a lot of lately (Suicide Squad, Dr Strange, Age Of Ultron, Avengers etc...). It suits the character, creates a welcome tone and style to the film, and adds to the intimacy and punch of it all.

It's also beautifully shot, excellently scored, but there are flaws, mostly of the plotting variety. There are a whole bunch of super-powered individuals here that rarely use their powers and some characters with surprising skill sets given their backgrounds. These particular plot holes become increasingly frustrating by the film's end.

These issues aside, Logan is the Wolverine movie fans have longed for, but more importantly it's the Wolverine movie Jackman deserved.

(For the record, I doubt this will be Jackman's last time donning the claws. The rise of Deadpool makes it seem incredibly likely that a Wolverine cameo (or, Stan Lee willing, a team-up movie) will happen. If anyone can get Jackman to strap on the claws once more, it's Ryan Reynolds. Please, someone, anyone, make this happen.)

The technical brilliance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit

WHO Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my all-time favourite films. I'm talking top 10. Easy.

At some point, but not today, I'm going to write a review that nails down all my feelings about this incredible piece of film noir which just so happens to star a talking animated rabbit.

At some other point, I might even post the script I wrote for a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel. It's called Who Stole Roger Rabbit and I talk about it in this podcast (my bit is from 16:30, but you should listen to the whole thing).

But this is the not the time nor the place for those things. Instead, I want to share this awesome video that shows some of the technical brilliance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

 

Everyone should bump the lamp once in a while.

That video was made by kaptainkristian, who has an amazing YouTube channel.

You can support his creative endeavours via his Patreon page.

T2 Trainspotting

(R) 3.5 out of 5

Director: Danny Boyle.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Anjela Nedyalkova, Kelly Macdonald.

Choose life. Choose upside-down deer projections on your wall.

Sick Boy (Miller) defines nostalgia as being "a tourist in your own youth" in a particularly meta moment in this 20-years-later sequel of the cult classic.

T2 Trainspotting (why is it called that? Why not just Trainspotting 2?) relishes that definition, holding a mirror up to itself and its audience, then proceeding to do a massive line of coke off said mirror.

With any belated sequel, the initial reaction is one of tempered excitement. It's kind of like a high school reunion - won't it be great to see the old gang again and find out what they've been up to? Then you realise it will never live up to either your expectations or your glory days and you'll probably just end up disappointed and pining for your youth. Ah, high school....

T2 is all those things. You're excited at first, but it can't live up to the original and then you're kind of disappointed. Having said all that, T2 is the best it could possibly be and when shorn of that nostalgic tourism as much as is possible considering how much the film is wrapped around and dependent on its predecessor, it's actually better than it has any right to be.

As mentioned, this is 20 years on from Renton (McGregor) screwing over his so-called mates for the grand sum of 16,000 quid. Sick Boy is running a patron-less pub in between pimping and scamming, Begbie (Carlyle) is in prison, and Spud (Bremner) is still a junkie.

And then back to Edinburgh comes Renton, fresh from a heart attack, looking to figure out where it all went wrong and still wondering how exactly one chooses life.

Despite being laden with references to the original, T2 is smart enough to avoid outright attempts at replication. There's the obligatory heroin scene, but thankfully this is a one-off. The characters have largely grown up and moved on, or perhaps more correctly, they've gotten older and the world has changed around them. The main theme is no longer addiction - this time it's about ageing. Renton's heart attack makes him question his place in the world, and while the other main players are less self-aware, his return sets them on new paths, for better or worse.

It's the characters that make this worthwhile, not necessarily the story or Boyle's directorial tics or tricks. Getting the gang back together again is done in a natural way and how the characters have changed (or not) is believable. Everyone is exactly where you expect them to be. In Begbie, this time around, the story has something the first film didn't have - a villain - while the mending of Renton and Sick Boy's relationship is interesting - they're first reunion in 20 years is an hilarious highlight.

The new character Veronika, played by Bulgarian actress Anjela Nedyalkova, doesn't get a huge amount to do, but does help demonstrate how dumb everyone around her is. It would have been nice to see more of Macdonald's Diane, but it would have stretched the natural order of the sequel's world.

Everyone's heart is in the right place for this. Boyle probably got asked about this sequel more than anything else over the past decade or so, but T2 doesn't smack of a cash grab. It's reverent toward the original - in one of the best scenes, Spud, Renton and Sick Boy return to the spot where Tommy attempted to take them on a walk and get in touch with their Scottishness. Not only do they pay tribute to their fallen comrade, but Renton and Sick Boy reflect on the horrible repercussions their actions have had.

In the original, these guys were bad people doing bad things, but they were young and it was fun. This time around, they're trying to figure out what comes next, what they leave behind, and what it's all about - themes that will speak to a lot of people.

But T2 lives too heavily in the shadow of its parent, which is one of the greatest films of the '90s, to be truly great on its own. While it's a good path to retread, the footsteps are too big to follow. All in all, T2 is an adequate companion piece to a far more definitive tome.

REWIND REVIEW: Trainspotting

(R) ★★★★★

Director: Danny Boyle.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald.

Spud (Bremner), Tommy (McKidd), Renton (McGregor) and Sick Boy (Miller)

head into the great outdoors in Trainspotting.

THERE'S no doubt Trainspotting is a remarkable film. The Scots themselves voted it their greatest movie of all time, while the BBC rated it #10 in its list of the best British movies ever.

But the film is even more incredible when you check out the source material. Irvine Welsh's 1993 tome is a collection of (sometimes vaguely) interlinked short stories covering about eight main characters and as many different points of view, and features entire sections written in 'phonetic Scottish' and containing inner monologues with Sean Connery. Of all the heroes in turning it into a film, screenwriter John Hodge is the most unheralded and yet perhaps the best on ground.

His script is razor-sharp. Even allowing for Boyle's directorial flights of fancy that blend fact and fantasy in fascinating ways, the whole thing clocks in around the 90-minute mark but covers a vast amount of ground, cramming in plenty of the book's good stuff while teasing a surprisingly gripping narrative and several excellent character arcs out of its material. Addiction, in all its permutations, is dealt with so deftly and succinctly at times that several viewings are required to take it all in. It's a masterclass in efficiency, condensing Welsh's wanderings into a compact story of four friends in Edinburgh, three of whom are addicted to heroin, with the fourth addicted to rage.

The '90s was a great time for drug films. From the party drugs of The Acid House (another Irvine Welsh book) and Go, to fellow heroin stories like The Basketball Diaries, to the toking and tripping of Dazed & Confused, Half Baked and Friday, through the nihilistic booze saga of Leaving Las Vegas, to the go-hard-or-go-home glory of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, each served its function. They could make us laugh or cry, depending on their tack.

None of them - not even the crippling 2000 film Requiem For A Dream - are as amazing as Trainspotting when it comes to exploring addiction. Boyle's bouncy dramedy rides the highs and lows by being funnier than it should be yet more harrowing, by being sicker and filthier yet more stylish. But its secret weapon is that its addictive element is the most disturbing. It's not heroin - it's friends.

Renton's (McGregor) inability to say "no" to his mates is as detrimental as his skag problem. Just when he thinks he's out, they pull him back in, leading to the film's denouement (which the entire sequel revolves around). His friends trusting him is also their undoing. And then there's Begbie (Carlyle). Being friends with Begbie is as dangerous as smack. Spud (Bremner) is accidentally stabbed by the psychopath, Renton is threatened with being neutered, and anyone within a 20-yard radius of the moustachioed menace is mere seconds from getting glassed.

If it's not Begbie's violence putting people in jeopardy then it's Sick Boy's (Miller) scheming. But even a butterfly wing-flap in this group has horrific consequences. The ill-fated Tommy's (McKidd) downward spiral is cause by Renton and a seemingly innocuous theft. Then there's the death of the baby, which is among the most traumatic, gut-wrenching things ever committed to celluloid. It's foreshadowed in the earliest moments of the movie, but repeat viewings don't make it any easier to handle.

None of this would work without its stars. The five who appeared on the poster - McGregor, Bremner, Carlyle, Miller and screen debutante Macdonald - would all go on to stellar careers and deservedly so. Each is outstanding; in fact, arguments could be made that all five have never been better. But spare a thought for Kevin McKidd, who has the worst/best of the character arcs as poor Tommy, but didn't make it onto the poster. His career, while still successful, never reached the heights of his co-stars. If only that poster went up to #6.

Then there's Boyle. Across his prodigious career, even acknowledging his Oscar-attracting Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours, or his brilliant genre pieces 28 Days Later and Sunshine, Trainspotting remains his best film. It's lightning in a bottle; an energetic cultural touchstone that comes along once in a career. It hits the ground running - quite literally - to the bombastic beat of Iggy Pop's Lust For Life and McGregor's ironic "Choose Life" speech, and that is just the first of a string of iconic moments littered throughout.

The worst toilet in Scotland. The OD sequence, with its red-carpeted tomb view, soundtracked by Lou Reed's Perfect Day. Spud's nighttime accident. The baby on the ceiling. These horrifying scenes not only stick with you, but they've edged their way into pop culture, as has the colour scheme and style of the aforementioned poster, and the brilliant soundtrack (would Underworld still be a thing if not for the success of Born Slippy .NUXX?).

Sometimes no bog roll is the least of your worries.

There are other great moments that stand out on repeat viewings. Fresh from his OD, Renton's parents offer and share cigarettes - one of the subtle reminders of the prevalence of addiction. Similarly, Begbie's early lecture on the dangers of drugs while drinking and smoking heavily is typical of the film's black humour, set up right from the start. Also in that category is Spud's job interview (a great display of Bremner's skills), the air rifle scene in the park, and the details of Tommy's death, which conclude with an unexpected punchline that you'll hate yourself for laughing at.

But one of the best moments comes in the middle of the second act, at the top of Tommy's downward spiral, when he encourages his mates Spud, Renton and Sick Boy to join him for a walk in the wilds. Renton, after being told by Tommy that such a walk should make him proud to be Scottish, launches into a marvellous diatribe that sums up his thoughts on his homeland:

“It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete assholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!”

And yet the Scots still voted for this as their greatest film of all time. That's saying something.