Kingpin

The ads for Kingpin make it look extremely cruddy — within farting distance of Police Academy 3. On the other hand, it’s gotten some raves; no less an authority than Roger Ebert awarded it three-and-a-half stars. (What drugs did Ebert take that made Kingpin “a very funny movie, and sometimes even funnier than that”?) The truth lies somewhere in between. Kingpin doesn’t suck; it has some solid laughs. It also throws many gutter balls.

The movie gets off to a great start, actually. It opens in 1969, briefly introduces us to budding bowler Roy Munson, then flashes forward to 1979, when Roy (Woody Harrelson) has just clinched the Iowa state bowling championship. The directors, Peter and Bobby Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber), crank up the disco and linger on Roy’s bell-bottoms. Usually I groan at this retro stuff — the ’70s were a dumb decade best forgotten — but the Farrellys get an exultant rhythm going, and the glitzy ’70s seem the perfect backdrop for a bottle rocket like Roy.

Roy soon crashes. He falls in with a slimy rival bowler, Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray, sporting two of the ugliest hairpieces in recent memory). Ernie gets Roy to run a scam on some gullible bowlers, who glimpse Roy’s championship ring and realize he’s a ringer. They shove his hand into a ball return, and it’s played for laughs. What is this, Natural Born Killers? From then on, the Farrellys go for pitiless frat-boy humor that makes National Lampoon look like The Brady Bunch.

Cut to 1996. (What is this, an epic?) Roy, now a pathetic drunk with a rubber hand, meets an Amish natural named Ishmael (Randy Quaid). Ishmael bowls 270, which sounds great until he explains that he bowls fifteen frames. Still, Roy sees Ishmael’s potential, and for a while Kingpin gets some mileage out of their unlikely bond. There are a couple of classic gross-outs involving Roy and farm animals. Don’t even ask.

But then the movie hits the road and, oddly, loses its momentum. To save the Amish farm, Roy and Ishmael must enter a tournament in Reno to win half a million dollars. Along the way, they meet a stunner named Claudia (Vanessa Angel), whose character changes according to the whims of scripters Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan. Is she a waif or an ass-kicking vixen? A con artist or a kind stranger who wants to help the guys? Good luck figuring her out; I doubt the Farrellys (or the actress herself) ever did.

Kingpin has a meandering midsection, with far too much cruel emphasis on Roy’s hideous landlady, who keeps coming back to haunt him. The Farrellys also can’t get enough of Vanessa Angel’s curves, and when she’s not around in the Reno scenes, they zero in on countless bimbos. You don’t expect comedies like this to bow to feminism, but past a certain point the movie seems to be playing to the Jenny McCarthy fans in the audience. Then there’s the climax, which avoids clichés yet is unsatisfying anyway. The cast is game (the film could have used a lot more of Murray), but Kingpin ends up with a seven-ten split between hilariously tasteless and just plain distasteful.

Trainspotting

Trainspotting — the book, the movie, the soundtrack, the multimedia phenom (next comes the CD-ROM, no doubt) — has been likened to A Clockwork Orange, which also made hay with British youth by being scandalous and “evil” in the eyes of grown-ups. The book, at least, merits the comparison. Irvine Welsh’s anecdotal novel is alive with musical prose: “Ah went to take a shot. It took us ages tae find a good vein. Ma boys don’t live as close tae the surface as maist people’s. When it came, ah savored the hit …. Take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin miles off the pace.” Welsh’s genius, like Anthony Burgess’ in A Clockwork Orange, was to sustain an alien dialect that first distances you from the squalor and then, as you pick up more of the native tongue, makes you feel like an insider for understanding words like “tolchock” or “radge.” The prose sucks you in, makes you an honorary droog or junkie.

The movie Trainspotting inevitably loses much of Welsh’s linguistic power. But director Danny Boyle, like Stanley Kubrick before him, tries the equivalent effect with images. When the hero — Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a spirited Edinburgh junkie — must sift through appalling toilet water in search of placebo suppositories, Boyle has him sink into the toilet and swim through an inky blue void. The result, both lyrical and repellently literal, is a moment Kubrick might envy. Scene for scene, Trainspotting isn’t in the same league as Clockwork; its dramatic arc is similar (Renton, like Alex, gradually reforms), but Boyle doesn’t seduce us into complicity with violence. The movie’s scariest character, the barroom brawler Begbie (Robert Carlyle), strikes like a Scottish twister and is clearly seen as the border between good dirty fun and a bad scene. Begbie would thrash all four of Kubrick’s droogs.

As rude and scatalogical as Trainspotting often is, it represents a leap in maturity for Boyle and his scripter John Hodge, who broke through in 1994 with the nasty Hitchcockian doodle Shallow Grave. That effort was so cold and remorseless it made Blood Simple look like Forrest Gump, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, as if Begbie had directed it. Trainspotting is lighter and more compassionate; among its deeper merits is that it proves a movie doesn’t have to be mean to be fresh.

Trainspotting, the title, refers to a meaningless activity meant to lend the illusion of structure to an aimless existence. It’s Welsh’s metaphor for the addictive rituals of heroin. Most of the young protagonists shoot up, but the movie isn’t really about heroin — the drug could just as easily be moloko-plus or mugwump juice. It’s about the irony of youth being so averse to societal cages — “Choose life, choose a family, choose a job” — that they forge their own chains. Ewan McGregor, whom I found insufferable in Shallow Grave, is much better here; his Renton, confiding in us through sardonic narration, is a serviceable heir to Malcolm McDowell’s sly-fox Alex. We like the little fucker, and we wish him well. Trainspotting may only be the art-house flavor of the month, but McGregor and Boyle make it tasty.