So this movie has been recommended to me by numerous people over the years and I finally decided to watch it. I’m not the biggest fan Ewan McGregor, but I did like his acting in this movie. There’s also a young Kellie Macdonald and I am a huge fan of hers, she didn’t have a very big role in this though.
The movie follows the main character commonly referred to as Rent and his life as a Heroin addict and his adventures with his fellow junkie friends. An early scene catches your attention if you think things have been progressing slowly, Rent has to use “the worst toilet in Scotland” and the scene is pretty disgusting and appalling but it turns into a hallucination, so you kind of quickly get over the shock, but it was well done. I thought the drug effects weren’t portrayed very well, but that’s ok, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to focus on special effects for a movie like this. We see rent make a lot of bad decisions, but eventually gets clean with the help of his loving and enabling parents. He then is doing pretty well for himself as he’s distanced himself from the bad influences, but they come barging back into his new life and cause him to relapse and get involved in a drug deal that surprisingly doesn’t go wrong. Rent then screws his friends over as they’ve screwed up his new life and we see him walking towards us as the sun sets and the movie ends.
I thought the pacing of the movie was well done, and I really liked the 90s House music that accompanied a lot of the scenes. Not much to be seen of interesting camera angles and the colors were average, but I did like how the club scenes were shot and when Rent had his final overdose. The final withdrawal scenes were also really good and pretty accurate in the way it was portrayed. Although this movie deals with some heavy topics and has some depressing things in it, the humor that is there made me laugh and so did a lot of the situations that Rent and his friends end up in. I also enjoyed the ending and was happy with it and how it mirrored the very beginning of the movie, I’m a sucker for things like that.
I give it a 7.5/10 (Word count: 402)
Baphomet's Theatre 