deals with a controversial subject in a perfect manner with an excellent cast, great visuals, and a racing sountrack.

Do not embarass yourself by not owning this. Even if you have never bought a DVD. Stop. Choose Trainspotting. Choose the definitive DVD.

The adaptation of the novel by Irvine Welsh, this is the alternately amusing and disturbing story of a heroin addict from Edinburgh called Renton. He is desperate to kick the habit and finally manages to get clean by moving away to London. However Renton's friends Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie turn up on his doorstep and try to drag him back to a life of drugs and crime. Will he choose life or self-destruction?..

Review

The film that effectively launched the star careers of Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller, Trainspotting is a hard, barbed picaresque, culled from the bestseller by Irvine Welsh and thrown down against the heroin hinterlands of Edinburgh. Directed with abandon by Danny Boyle, it conspires to be at once a hip youth flick and a grim cautionary fable.
McGregor, Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner play a slouching trio of Scottish junkies, Carlyle their narcotic-eschewing but hard-drinking and generally psychotic mate Begbie. In Boyle's hands, their lives unfold in a rush of euphoric highs, blow-out overdoses and agonising withdrawals (all cued to a vogueish pop soundtrack). Throughout it all, John Hodge's screenplay strikes a delicate balance between acknowledging the inherent pleasures of drug use and spotlighting its eventual consequences. In Trainspotting's world view, it all comes down to a choice between the dangerous Day-Glo highs of the addict and the grey, grinding consumerism of the everyday Joe. "Choose life", quips the film's narrator (McGregor) in a monologue that was to become a mantra. "Choose a job, choose a starter home... But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?"

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