I didn’t watch this film all the way through. I got to the bit where Detective Sergeant, Bruce Robertson, (James McAvoy) of Lothian Police force looks in the mirror and sees the image of a pig. Pig, filth, black comedy. Gettit? I turned the telly over and watched the end of the Liverpool game. That was exciting. The truth is I don’t know what truth is. But I don’t really need to see the end of the film to know what happens. Writers have a tendency to write the same thing over and over and over again. Some of them get rather good at it. They win prizes, they win awards, they become rich. Irvine Welsh is I guess a rich man (compared to me most men are rich, those that aren’t tend to shop at the foodbank). This film had four different blocks of producers flashing up on screen flinging money at the same old, same old shite.
Let’s go back to Trainspotting. ‘The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he was trembling…Ah tried to keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.’
Drug taking [tick]
Violence [tick]
Sex [tick]
Black comedy, what the fuck does that mean, yah stupid radge cunt? Just fuck off out of my face [visage] or I’ll stick the heid on yeh.
There was something gallus about Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh knows his music and he knows his drugs and he knows he’s slightly dyslexic and he knows he’ll not get published because nobody publishes shite in the common argot of arsehole from the lowest place on the planet, a junkies arse.
So Mark Renton/Rentboy has got his hit, but it’s not injectable form he’d hoped, but an opium suppsitory. Anyone that had seen the film knows what happens to Ewan MacGregor next. ‘Ah whip oaf my keks and sit on the wet porcelain shunky. An empty my guts, feeling as if everything; bowel, stomach, intestines, spleen, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs and fucking brains are aw falling through my arsehole intae the bowl.’
It’s not often that the film is better than the book. Ben Hur is an epic example of that. I’d guess Trainspotting the film is better because Irvine Welsh wasn’t the screenwriter. In Filth, there’s a little in-joke the Chief Inspector doesn’t do any police work because he’s too busy in his office writing screen plays. Gettit? Shite.
Trainspotting was a phenomena and cash cow. Ewan McGregor got to fucking play with lightsabers in Star Wars and the force was with him and to a lesser extent Robbie Carlyle is Begbie and Kelly McDonald is Kelly McDonald. Peter Mullan was a bit part player in the film but no plastic bronze medal, Hollywood for him too. Closer to home Spud, Ewen Bremmer, got to play a cop in Line of Duty. Gail, Shirley Henderson, seems to be in every Irvine Welsh production since then. In Filth, she’s not so much an object of lust, but an object of dirty phone calls from Detective Sergeant Robinson that has been called into to deal with the dirty phone calls, and dear old Shirley Henderson, who plays the same slightly deranged character in each play/film/movie is called to revel in the lust and take the sting out of it by rolling in the dirty with the dirty cunt that’s phoning her and thereby unmanning the man. Gettit. Shite. I’ve not mentioned Sick Boy yet, Jonny Lee Miller. Sick Boy in Trainspotting ‘It seemed, for women, that fucking was just something you did wi Sick Boy, like talking of drinking tea wi other punters’. Sick Boy was played by Jonny Lee Miller. And as we all know his cast off, and former spouse was Angelina Jolie. What a brilliant piece of casting by Danny Boyle. But it was Trainspotting rather than the critically acclaimed Shallow Grave that made his reputation.
Now we’re getting a Trainspotting 2. Shite. Back to Filth. No, I’ll not bother. You watch it if you want. But if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
odonnellgrunting 