Cat's Away 2: The spotting of many trains

This is the third night of Cat's Away 2, the second time in the past two months I'm marathoning movies while my wife is out of town.

The "sticker shock," so to speak, of checking the runnimng time of Silence only after Monday evening had crept past the 8:30 mark got me more interested in checking the running times of my planned Tuesday night double feature: Trainspotting and T2 Trainspotting.

While the total minutes for the original left me breathing a sigh of relief -- a very reasonable 94 -- the sequel kind of gut-punched me, clocking in at 113 minutes. Making for a total of 207 minutes, which is just shy of three-and-a-half hours. Ah, 1996. I miss the days when movies didn't have to be bloated and could do everything they needed to do in an hour-and-a-half.

Yet despite the knowledge of a viewing task that was nearly an hour longer than the one I undertook the night before, which I barely got through, I did not deviate from my plan of picking up T2 at the Hoyts kiosk at lunch on Tuesday.

Did I start any earlier?

Not much.

In fact, it was 8:33 when I started the original Trainspotting -- just seven minutes before my actual start time of 8:40 for Silence. And it almost didn't happen.

See, I had always been planning to watch my never-watched BluRay copy of Trainspotting, purchased back in the U.S. I'd gotten it shortly after my most recent viewing of the film in 2011, which reinforced my love for it in a big way. I brought it with me to Australia because I knew we had access to region-free BluRay/DVD players here, which would play our American DVDs. And so far it has been playing them -- most of them.

Trainspotting was about the fourth I've encountered that would not play due to a region mismatch. Suddenly, the whole double feature was in doubt.

Fortunately, quick thinker that I am, I checked to see if it was playing on one of our two streaming services, Stan and Netflix. Stan was the first I tried, and lo and behold, there it was.

My third viewing of Trainspotting reinforced even further my love for it. As I was watching I couldn't help taking notes on numerous little details I appreciated, which I will rattle through as quickly as I can:

1) I love how the first hit of heroin we see Mark Renton take is so overwhelming that he's collapsed onto his back before he's even exhaled the smoke from the drag he took before he took the hit. That's some good shit.

2) I certainly knew who Peter Mullan was when I watched Trainspotting in 2011 -- after all, he's Sid in Children of Men. But I didn't notice myself noticing that he's in this movie until this viewing.

3) The toilet dive is still my favorite. I love how it escapes into pristine waters and beautiful music as he swims down to get the suppositories.

4) I love the little detail that Renton's hand gets hit by a thrown mug during the riot Begbie starts in the pup after tossing his mug from the balcony. Renton is in the balcony, meaning he'd likely be clear of collateral damage, but that mug hits his hand anyway. It's a good, possibly unintended metaphor for the collateral damage of heroin use.

5) I liked Spud's little talk about his girlfriend's position on why they are waiting to have sex. He says there relationship is "principally going to be defined as physical" going forward, which is why she wants to start it more chastely. That's as good a description of the reasons for withholding sex at the start of a relationship as I've ever heard.

6) I sometimes forget how much light comedy there is in this movie. I tend to think of it as defined by things like the horror of the baby's death -- which was as horrible as it always is -- but it's a really funny movie. There's even a fair bit of gross out comedy, as with the episode with Spud's soiled sheets.

7) I was reminded that Renton stealing Tommy's sex tape sets in motion a chain of consequences that results in Tommy's death. And Renton never owns it. For a protagonist, he sure is oblivious to the hurt he causes in the world.

8) I had forgotten from previous viewings how much Renton's parents try to do right by him. I tend to think of Trainspotting as a world where the adults make no more impression than the adults in Peanuts, with their tuba-sounding voices. But I'm wrong about that.

9) One funny thing I noticed is that Renton is reading a book called "Monty," or with the word "Monty" on the front, and his open book is partially eclipsing a shot of Begbie. Robert Carlyle would star in a movie called The Full Monty just a year later.

Unfortunately, the good vibes soured when I started watching the sequel, which is frustratingly not called Trainspotting 2, or even T2: Trainspotting, but T2 Trainspotting, without the colon. I don’t know if they were trying to invoke the Terminator series or not, but whatever they were doing toward whatever end doesn’t work, and you just have a silly looking title.

The moment I started watching this, I realized how anachronistic it felt to see these characters outside of their original moment of glory. That may be the film’s point, but it bums me out. Certainly, this film is not going for keeping its characters in a state of arrested development from when we first saw them 21 years ago. That’s a logical strategy in a sequel, even a delayed sequel – yeah, you might touch on issues of aging, but you want the same essential dynamics and character traits to exist, or else you can’t be sure the film will be a hit. T2 doesn’t really seem to care about being a hit, but it doesn’t commit to developing these characters into something fully different and unexpected, either. It’s a bit of a study in half measures, as it seems to show a curious amount of indecision about whether to repudiate the past and give us something new, or to nostalgically, sentimentally recreate it.

The sentimental part of T2 really threw me. Over the years I’ve been struggling with whether to consider the word “sentimental” a negative term, and have often conflated it with “nostalgic,” which is not necessarily the same thing. I love nostalgia and I am sometimes sentimental about that nostalgia, and I do think of myself as a sentimental person. But this type of sentimentality really doesn’t work for me. It’s a real tone changer. Even when the original Trainspotting is horrifying us, it’s also fun – it’s kind of the definition of a movie that’s fun even though it is not always “fun,” if you follow me. The sequel is never really fun, and that’s in part because it gets pretty lugubrious over some of its plot developments. Boyle makes what I think is really a misguided decision by showing us dialogue-free flashback imagery of the friends as children, something we never even saw in the first film. The only reason I can think of is to do the extra work of making us care for these characters.

The fundamental misunderstanding is that we do care for these characters, without that – in fact, without knowing much of their back story at all. Trainspotting pulls off the trick of having us love these guys even though we don’t know that much about how they came to this moment in time, and even though they are often doing things that are reprehensible, either actively so or passively so. We only know or care about what we know or care about in that moment -- so in a way, the film is actually having the same effect on us as heroin has on them. Everything is in the now. Consequences don't matter. 

I suppose Boyle would say his point is that when the heroin stops, as it does for most of these characters, what you're left with is the consequences you were able to delay confronting before now. So, we do see how these characters grow (or don't grow), change (or don't change). And we may not like some of the things that happen to them. We didn't like some of the things that happened to them when we originally saw them, but they made sense in the context of that world. Now that it's a different world, it may make less sense, or seem less preordained. But I kind of liked how the fact that the baby had died, or that Renton inadvertently killed his friend Tommy, were never really pondered in the original. That we have to address these openly in the dialogue this time around, and linger on them, is an unwelcome cold bucket of water in the face -- but more importantly, does not feel true to something essential about the original.

I guess it kind of goes back to how we rarely want to see what happens to characters after their "happily ever after." When a movie ends happily for characters, we know that doesn't mean guaranteed happiness for the rest of their days. There's still sickness, death, betrayal, loss of love, failure, all the other things that complicate any "happy ending" in any life. Things certainly didn't end happy for most, if any, of the characters in the first film, but I still don't want to see what happened to them after that. Because T2 exists, I had to.

I also thought the film was a bit of a failure in its design details. The choices to replace the iconic songs of the original were, to use a fairly generic term, "lame." The soundtrack was one of the film's true weaknesses, as it continued to fail me over and over again. Perhaps it too was meant to be the "lame, grown up" version of that score from the original, but it doesn't work for the same reason that the other decisions all feel flat. I guess, just because some of these choices may have been intentional doesn't mean I like them any better.

Okay, I feel like I've got more to say but this post has stretched on all day, and now I need to start Wednesday's movie -- which has more than a three-hour running time just by itself. 

My Renton moment

Tough times will show you what a man is truly made of, how far a man will truly go.

For me, that was fishing a $2 coin out of the toilet on Saturday afternoon. A $2 coin that wasn't even mine.

Yes indeed, I was reminded a bit of Trainspotting this past weekend when I took my son to the potty at a cafe called Grub, on a beautiful spring afternoon in Melbourne. We selected a stall out of about four options, and lo and behold, shining brightly at the bottom of this particular toilet, was this:

Yes indeed, that coin is worth two whole dollars here in Australia. It's the smaller of two gold-colored coins, the other being the $1 coin, and it is in fact the most valuable of all Australian coins, there being none with greater street value.

I figured, "What's a little toilet water to keep that coin from being in my back pocket?"

So a quick splash of the hand later, it was.

You may recall that in Danny Boyle's seminal Trainspotting, the character Renton (Ewan McGregor) does his own toilet dive -- literally -- for a lost valuable, in this case a couple opium suppositories that get accidentally evacuated while he's doing his business. Of course, this is what Renton's so-called "worst toilet in Scotland" looks like:

While the porcelain monster I was staring down on Saturday was more like this:

Nonetheless, most people would be shocked by what I did. I know my wife was. Still, I probably would have done it even for the $1 coin.

It's not that we are really mired in "tough times," per se, as I teased in my opening line. But I feel like even a year into our Australian adventure, we are still financially recovering from the transition, a reality of the fact that we're only getting 60% of my wife's salary until January (when she goes back full time) and we're now paying for two children to attend daycare (one four days a week, one three). My own salary is lower than in the States (and I didn't start earning it until midway through March) and we had to buy a bunch of things over again here (though were fortunate to have a number of others gifted to us). We'd actually finally be back in positive territory, more or less, except we're likely to drop close to ten grand on a trip to the U.S. in November, which will plunge us right back into debt.

So yeah, I'm going to do an easy, painless, clean-water toilet dive for a $2 coin.

You could argue that it's hardly the most absurd thing I've ever done for a coin, especially since it took all of two seconds. There was the time earlier this year when I walked all over a mall to find the location of the Woolworth's grocery store, just so I could return the shopping cart I'd found that had a dollar coin stuck in it. (You rent your shopping cart at a lot of grocery stores here, by sticking in a $1 or $2 coin that releases the cart from the cart in front of it. If you never return the cart to its home, you forfeit the coin.)

My wife prefers the story back in the U.S., when I was crossing the street and went back into the middle to pick up a penny I'd passed, when there was a car coming. I wasn't close to being hit by the car, but for my wife, it was closer than a penny should have warranted. I have no choice but to agree with that.

But a penny saved is a penny earned, and so too is a $2 coin fished from a public toilet. 

Misnomer: The Rise of Trevor Benton

On Monday night, I was taking my break from baseball by watching more baseball. Not only did I watch the Home Run Derby from start to finish, but then I watched them recap it on Sportscenter. This was all background to other stuff I was doing, but it still struck me as funny that I didn't use my three-day respite for any of the other pastimes I find compelling. A sad commentary on my enslavement to the sport.

I believe it was during Sportscenter that they played one of those interstitial messages -- you know, "Sportscenter is brought to you by such-and-such." In this case, it was "Sportscenter is brought to you by G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra."

I chuckled. And as I always do in situations like this, I thought of Trevor Benton.

If you're less anal than I am, you may not have noticed anything wrong with what the announcer said. But I did. He added an extra "the" that does not actually appear in the title. The true title is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, without the second "the." And though it shouldn't make that much difference, those of us who are anal grammarians know that it does. Without the definite article, "Cobra" signifies what it's supposed to signify: the name of an evil organization bent on world domination, led by Cobra Commander, Destro and some laboratory Frankenstein supervillain whose name I can't remember. With the definite article, however, "the Cobra" sounds like some kind of giant snake -- and since cobras are actually capable of elevating the front halves of their bodies, "rise" has a humorously literal meaning.

So where does Trevor Benton come into all this?

Well, Trevor Benton is a kid I went to school with. That's not his real name, but it's close enough. Although I haven't seen him in almost 20 years, I really liked Trevor Benton -- he was a funny and genuinely nice guy. And he therefore does not deserve to be made fun of, as I'm about to do.

But a single incident involving Trevor Benton caused him to live on in infamy in my group of friends. It was a totally innocuous incident, you'll agree, but as totally innocuous incidents often do, it stuck to him.

So what did Trevor do?

He got the name of a movie wrong.

I remember the morning quite well. For the fall of my freshman year in high school, I used to start each morning in the cafeteria of a building on campus called D House. For some reason (I really don't recall) I was arriving at school a half-hour or so before my first class, and I would sit in the cafeteria with Trevor and this guy named Bill. We shot the shit, like freshmen in high school did at the time.

One morning, Trevor said, "I really want to see that movie Push Momma Off the Train."

The rest, as they say, is history.

Needless to say, I recounted this story to a number of other friends. And it took hold. If you got the name of a movie wrong, it came to be known as an act of Bentonizing.

In the nearly 22 years since Throw Momma From the Train hit theaters, I have certainly heard numerous other Bentonizations of movie titles. Sadly, old age now prevents me from remembering many of them. I do remember a time when an airline pilot (the perfect guy to make a Bentonization) said we would be seeing Bridget Jones Diary 2: The Edge of Reasoning (actual title: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason). I also remember when my friend Pres once referred to the movie as Trainspotters. That gave me a good laugh -- though not to his face. I kept it private and then shared it with like-minded friends later on. (And in the retelling with one particular friend, the story has become apocryphal -- we now say that Pres called it Carspotters instead of Trainspotters).

Is the difference between Trainspotting and Trainspotters really that important? Of course it isn't. Which is why Pres is no more an idiot for his slip of the tongue than poor Trevor was for his. (And that's probably why we had to change the story to make it more obviously wrong and more obviously humorous.)

But there is something undeniably funny about it. It's like that old game Operator, where you whisper a phrase in your friend's ear, then he/she whispers to his/her neighbor, and so on, and so forth, until it gets back to the start of the circle, and the phrase has transmogrified into something totally different. It's a failure to properly assimilate information given to you -- even if you mostly got it right.

The reason why it strikes a film buff like me as funny is precisely because movies are as important to me as they are. Titles imprint themselves on my brain when I first hear them, often because I know that they will later on mean something to me. But that doesn't mean I'm perfect, either -- just maybe that I don't "try out" a title in conversation until I've got it down. When I first saw the trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, I'm pretty sure I did not remember the exact adjectives or nouns in the title. And I probably used some approximation of the title just to indicate which movie I was talking about -- the same way Trevor knew that someone's mother was being hurled off a locomotive, but did not remember the exact form that hurling took.

Heck, just earlier this year at the Super Bowl party I attended, I referred to Angels & Demons as Gods & Monsters -- though I was pretty drunk at the time. And then there are movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, whose title was often intentionally botched even by those who knew the correct sequence of the words, simply as a means of critiquing what they considered to be a needlessly complicated title.

But the point in this whole thing is not to be superior, even though I do admit, from time to time, to indulging in some unjustified superiority over titles and their accuracy. The point is that getting a movie title wrong can simply be funny in and of itself, in a vacuum, without context. It was for this reason that friends and I brainstormed other potential Bentonizations, even if they never really existed. One of them was, "I really want to see that movie Gigantic," referring to the film about the sinking ship starring Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. I suppose it's not that far removed from the kind of critique of old people we deliver when we say things like "I'm going to go look it up on the worldwide interwebs," or when Marge Simpson talks about "Bill Crosby and David Letterson." The joke is, "Here is what someone who is clueless would say."

I don't want to pick on Trevor or Pres or any other civilian (including myself) who gets a movie title wrong. But, conversely, it is really fun to pick on professionals, people in and around the movie business, who are guilty of the same thing. Either they should know better, or if it's a prerecorded piece, as in the Rise of the Cobra sponsorship spot, they should do enough research to make sure they have it right.

And so it was that I let out a loud howl as I was driving past the cheap movie theater a couple miles from my house earlier this year. I've told you about this theater before -- this theater is king of the Bentonizations. It's where we saw Autralia (the S was dropped on the ticket stub) and where I saw Baby's Mama.

So what was playing on this particular night when I drove by?

He Is Just Not That Into You.

Trevor Benton would be proud.