REVIEW - T2 TRAINSPOTTING (DANNY BOYLE)

The brazen, boisterous impulsivity of youth comes crawling back to the screen, wearied by age if not maturity. What lust for life remains may only be a lust for a life long since lived, the heady intensity of its highs and lows now supplanted by poignancy and regret for them. T2 Trainspotting arrives bang on time, the distance between it and its predecessor sufficient to meaningfully distinguish between the two - this film and 1996's Trainspotting exist in genuinely different times, and have genuinely different comments to make. There's perverse joy to be wrought out of a nostalgia trip into past perverse joys, though as organic as these sensations might be, and as faithfully depicted, they're inescapably muted. The real, substantial joys of T2 are in the perpetuation of that same energy that engendered those of old, and it's thus that the eternal innovator, Danny Boyle, spins a success out of a conceptually suspect sequel. He seeks to engender new highs and lows from cloth sourced from past, present and the furthest, dankest corners of warped imagination. There are overt nods to that nostalgia, though T2 goes through nostalgia altogether and out the other end, but everything about this film is overt, including the sheer, simple entertainment value it near-constantly insists on supplying. Boyle has always been an audience-attentive filmmaker, and always at his best when he has put their interests first. As ever before, this ramshackle construction falls apart so swiftly when provoked by plot necessity, and director and writer John Hodge alike yet again prove themselves apparently incapable of resolving any particular plot with any particular skill. But they've done the right work in the right places otherwise, and T2 is thus an exemplary follow-up to a bona fide classic, against all the odds.

FIRST TRAILER FOR T2: TRAINSPOTTING

The title sucks, meaning pretty fucking little apart from a probably-unwitting, entirely bizarre and entirely inapt homage to Terminator 2. But the trailer rocks, as does the film from which this 21-years-later sequel follows on. Trainspotting is precisely the kind of film whose sequel should be set this far in the future, rather than a few months down the road, and with Danny Boyle, John Hodge, the old cast members, and the new addition of Anthony Dod Mantle on cinematography, one's right to expect damn good things from T2: Trainspotting, if the above trailer and first proper look at the film is to be trusted. Out in the UK and Ireland on the 27th of January and in the US on the 3rd of March. Choose T2!

REVIEW - THE PROGRAM (STEPHEN FREARS)

A biopic that's not quite a biopic, more a snapshot of a sequence in one man's life. It's the kind of story that makes for the finest of biopics, though such a conventional stance on this story is the kind that makes it little more than, alas, just another biopic. The Program moves forward with the speed of the most doped-up of cyclists, but with a staid simplicity that's a questionable fit for this most doped-up of cyclists, its subject Lance Armstrong. Ben Foster nails the man's demonic determination, but not the chillingly crazed expression in his eyes, that which makes Armstrong at once so transparent and yet so unknowable. Stephen Frears' film ought to simmer with that same crazed volatility, whereas it merely simmers with the threat of storming into life, peering deep into this madman's soul. The issue with The Program is just that - it plainly isn't deep enough, and it's thus wrong to regard it as Frears' film. Writer John Hodge floats fascinating ideas, verifiable truth all of it, and then skips ahead to the next, failing to establish the magnitude of any of these events. It's a flat depiction, all fact and no fuss; Frears is a brilliantly perceptive director with a straightforward style, and if The Program possesses any of the spirit it should, it's his doing, but the success of his style is so dependent on the quality of the script he's working from that even his strong work can't stir up much life in this film. It ends up just another biopic, when it's clearly not supposed to be.

TRAILER #2 FOR THE PROGRAM

Ahead of its premiere today (the 13th of September) at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, here's the second trailer for The Program. The film about the process behind unmasking cyclist Lance Armstrong as a doping cheat is directed by Stephen Frears and written by John Hodge. Alongside a TIFF screening, it also has a British premiere at LFF on the slate next month; a UK theatrical release is due on the 16th of October. Here's a link to the first trailer.