9/13/2023 0 Comments Voice over narration![]() Appropriately, Boyle starts Trainspottingwith that initial headrush – the film starting on an audience-pleasing sprint before gradually peeling back the layers of a young man’s addiction, McGregor’s narration leading us by the hand every step of the way. Because if there were no upsides to taking heroin, why would anyone bother? With the highs, of course, come the crushing, degrading lows. Instead, they’ve embraced a drug culture and everything that goes with it Boyle presents that culture in all its exhilaration and horror. The office job, the white goods, the bouts of DIY at the weekend. The ironic use of that song fits perfectly with the theme of this opening voice-over, delivered by a young Ewan McGregor: Trainspottingis about a generation of young men and women who, rightly or wrongly, reject the pre-packaged version of life offered to them by mainstream society and media. Taken almost word-for-word from Irvin Welsh’s novel, it’s given profound urgency by Danny Boyle’s direction and the use of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” on the soundtrack. Trainspottingwas just about inescapable in the late ’90s, and this storming open is one of the reasons why. The opening voice over gives us a hint of the intelligence and humanity behind Carlito’s outward swagger and machismo as a result, we empathise with him before the story’s even begun.ĭirector Brian De Palma keeps his drama-thriller moving at such an irresistible pace that we almost forget that the whole thing’s told in flashback when we move back to the beginning for a closing narration, the result is truly heart-wrenching. ![]() Al Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, an ex-con determined to go straight – but his old life as a gangster has an irresistible gravitational pull. Don’t take me to no hospital, please…”Īn example of how beautiful narration can be when coupled with a lush score. “Somebody’s pulling me close to the ground… I can sense, but I can’t see. All of them are examples of a screenwriting device used beautifully. Some are long, straddling the narrative almost from beginning to end others consist of only a handful of lines. Here’s a highly personal – and by no means definitive – list of effective, powerful or poignant voice-over moments in recent movies. If they draw attention to themselves at all, it’s because their writing sings in our heads for days after the movie’s finished. The best voice-overs, on the other hand, flow beautifully into the fabric of the story. In an otherwise striking film with plenty to appreciate about it, Oblivion’s opening monologue sticks out like one of those floating pyramids in terms of setting a scene in a hurry, it gets the job done, but it’s a far less elegant solution than using visuals or action to get audiences up to speed. ![]() In the 2013 sci-fi film Oblivion, for instance, Tom Cruise winds up providing us with a lengthy exposition dump to explain where the film’s set, why the Earth’s a mess and what those strange pyramid-shaped objects are floating in the sky. We’ve all seen at least one movie where narration is simply a means to an end: a way of getting across a huge slab of story in a few lines of dialogue. Used poorly, a voice-over becomes a crutch. The scene’s also an illustration of the uneasy relationship the screenwriter can have with narration: used well, it can provide movie moments that are insightful, poetic and profoundly moving. It’s an example of the quirky, hall-of-mirrors kind of humour that courses through Adaptation, which is – here comes that word again – a fictionalized account of Kaufman’s thwarted attempt to adapt a best-selling novel into a screenplay.
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