"...Choose Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, a 1,000 other ways to spread your bile across others you've never met, hoping that somebody cares..."
"Human interaction is nothing more than data, choose watching history redirect itself, settle for less and keep a brave face on it, choose losing the ones you love as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them and you can see that one day in the future, all will be gone, choose your future, choose life," Mark Renton said.
The movie character Renton, portrayed by Ewan McGregor is the focal character in the movies "Trainspotting," and "T2, Trainspotting."
The first movie, "Trainspotting" hit the masses in 1996. "T2," the sequel came to theaters in March of this year, and to DVD on June 27.
"Trainspotting," the first movie is labeled a comedy, which in many ways is true, but it's also a very intense view of heroin addiction. "Trainspotting" in my opinion got its title because of track marks, (needle) bruises where the addict injects themselves. The above quote by Renton is from "T2," the sequel.
'Choose Life' was an anti drug use slogan from the 1980s, which novelist Irvine Welsh and screen writer John Hodge vastly embellished upon. In the first movie, Renton (McGregor) is a hard core heroin addict and his voice-overs for 'Choose Life' immediately seized my attention.
"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family...Choose a big TV, cars, washing machine. Choose good health, dental insurance, a starter home, choose your friends...Choose rotting away at the end of it all...nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future, choose life. I chose not to choose life, and the reasons, there are no reasons, who needs reasons when you've got heroin?" Renton said.
If you watch the movie "Trainspotting" and want to try heroin, there is something seriously wrong with you. "Trainspotting" is definitely an anti drug movie, especially when Renton is coming down from a long binge from the vicious drug.
As Neil Young wrote and sang, "I've seen the needle and the damage done..."
In the first movie, Renton, his two best friends and a woman awake from a heroin binge and the woman's infant badly daughter is dead from crib death. I still cry when the father of the child weeps profusely as he's looking down upon his dead infant daughter. The father is also in the second movie, both the character and actor.
If your still reading, you realize "Trainspotting" is not solely a comedy, yet the movie has its hilarious moments. Spud, one of Renton's friends, also in the sequel, has a job interview while under the influence of speed, (meth), and I still laugh out loud when I see that 1996 movie clip.
Both movies, 21 years apart feature the same four main charters, as well as the same actors portraying the roles. In the first movie, Renton, Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy; Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) and Begbie (Kevin McKidd) amass $16,000 English pounds via a drug deal, and one of the characters rips everyone else off and flees.
"T2," has some drug use in it, but it's much different from the first movie which pleasantly surprised me. In the sequel, the former friends who have not seen each other for 20 years end up meeting again, and one of them is plotting to kill the one who stole all the money from the drug deal 20 years prior.
Great writing, acting and awesome dialogue in both movies, and the main women in both movies are subtly gorgeous. (Kelly Macdonald & Anjela Nedyalkova) Kelly Macdonald was Renton's lover in the first movie, and she has a cameo in "T2."
