Last night's watch: T2 Trainspotting.
The OG Trainspotting was one of only a handful of things I was deadass banned from watching as a kid, I guess because it was kind of culturally ubiquitous at the time and my parents were worried full exposure would make me into an incorrigible heroin fiend at the tender age of 13 or whatever. Needless to say, I did eventually see it in my late teens/early 20s, and it definitely did not in any way endear me to taking illicit substances, or in fact make much of an impact on me other than a brief feeling of, "Aw yeah. That was a bit of all right, ey."
Which is to say I didn't have a lot of nostalgic baggage going into T2, which is probably why I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It's definitely a different breed of film; older and more melancholic, but it's also deeply sentimental and at times incredibly beautiful. It's had a lot of the original's rough and nihilistic edges knocked off, in the way age tends to do to people and that, I suspect, a certain type of person who was looking for a rehash of the original would be put off by. It's also a lot less morally grey; the message here is pretty clear (drugs fuck you up, poverty fucks you up, time comes for us all and at the end of the day your friends and your family are all you have), and pretty much everyone gets what coming to them in ways that don't leave anyone hopeless or utterly ruined. Which makes it quite hopeful and humanist.
In other words, it definitely is a film for the adult versions of the once-edgy kids who were blasting "Born Slippy" in the mid-90s. And, y'know. That's fine.
Oh and, one other thing: I watched this with subtitles, as everyone does nowadays, and it kept bugging me that they didn't always match the spoken dialogue. It took me way too long into the film to realize that's because I was, obviously, watching with English subtitles and they were "translating" all the slang. Which... lol wut.
@alis what why????
@Satsuma@glitch.cat.family I guess it's kind of the difference between subtitles and, like, closed captions? But yeah it was weird realizing I was watching English being translated into... more different English, I guess so, like, Americans could understanding what knobbing someone meant???
(To be fair, there was I think one line near the end that I probably wouldn't have been able to work out 100% from context. But, like... yeah. Weird.)
@alis i all admit some of my bafflement comes from being somewhat anti that kind of translating even when it is between distinct languages. very much team “please call weiqi weiqi instead of saying chess”
but also irritating in a like, assuming people who are Deaf/HoH/otherwise need subs require culture to be americanized feels kinda…infantilizing? if people who don’t need subs can be trusted to watch a movie where they might miss a couple culturally specific jones without throwing a tantrum surely we can too?
@Satsuma@glitch.cat.family Oh, 100%. I can maybe see the point if it’s to help people who are ESL (and who can’t access subtitles in their native language for whatever reason) but as a general rule… yeah. It’s super, like. Linguistically imperialist? And infantilising (looking at you, YouTube captions that censor swearing).