Happy-Go-Lucky Trainspotting With Bruce Lee

I Am Bruce Lee (2012): written and directed by Pete McCormack: Enjoyable Spike TV documentary has way, way too many talking heads from MMA, specifically UFC. Nonetheless, Bruce Lee himself is dynamite, as is his story. As a bonus for Canadians, many of the interview clips of Lee in the early 1970's come from the same CBC interview show, hosted by Canadian legend Pierre Burton. It's a team-up for the ages! Lightly recommended.

T2 Trainspotting (2017): adapted by John Hodge from the Irvine Welsh novels Porno and Trainspotting; directed by Danny Boyle; starring Ewan McGregor (Renton/ Rent Boy), Robert Carlyle (Begbie/ Begbie's Father), Ewen Bremner (Spud), Jonny Lee Miller (Simon/ Sick Boy), and Anjela Nedyalkova (Veronika): If you haven't seen and loved the original Trainspotting, don't bother. T2 is as reliant on familiarity with another movie or movies as Infinity War. 

Is it any good? Well, it takes a long time to get going. And Ewen Bremner's Sick Boy steals the show 20 years on. Jonny Lee Miller's Elementary-level of buffness seems completely anomalous in this context, and his Scottish accent comes and goes. Ewan McGregor is fine. The soundtrack, one of the original's super-high points, disappoints throughout.

Nonetheless, I felt a certain melancholy about the passing of time. Robert Carlyle's Begbie remains a marvel of seriocomic monstrosity. And a sequence in which McGregor and Miller invent a song on the fly for a hall full of Protestant Royalists is a comic gem. Lightly recommended.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008): written and directed by Mike Leigh; starring Sally Hawkins (Poppy), Alexis Zegerman (Zoe), Andrea Riseborough (Dawn), Kate O'Flynn (Suzy), and Eddie Marsan (Scott): Sally Hawkins radiates a deceptively simple-seeming goodness in this Mike Leigh film. 

Hawkins plays Poppy, a 30-something elementary school teacher in Chelsea, and we follow her life for about three weeks. There's no strong plot thread here -- this is three weeks in the life, and that's dramatic enough without necessarily offering a traditional level of closure at the end. Really, the driving engine of the plot is Poppy's decision to take driving lessons. 

I'd bet serious money that Guilermo del Toro had Happy-Go-Lucky in mind when he cast Hawkins in The Shape of Water. If you're bored with traditional Hollywood narratives, give this one a try. All the actors are believable and charming, possibly because Leigh workshops these movies the way some plays are work-shopped, prior to filming anything. 

Eddie Marsan is superb as the closest thing the movie has to an antagonist, with Leigh investing enough characterization in Marsan's driving instructor for us to feel flashes of sorrow and pity for him throughout. But his character also acts to show that Poppy is much smarter and more self-aware than her bubbly behaviour occasionally makes her seem. Highly recommended.