Last Days

I'm here to defend this brilliant film from those who have labelled it a bad watch. It's true that last Days isn't a film for everyone, nirvana fans are best to stay well away as the sight of their icon in a dress might send a shiver down their spines, but those who are willing to simply be with the character of Blake, body and mind, for 90 mins are in for something special. I've never been a big fan of Gus Van Sant's and this looked like his most pretentious project yet, but beyond the events the films based on and all the conspiracy theories that come with it Van Sant has chosen to just tell a story of a lonely isolated man. As Blake, Michael Pitt is fantastic, with little or nothing to say he has to rely on his mannerisms and facial expressions throughout most of the film and he does so with ease and brilliance. The stand out moment has to be 'Death To Birth'. Pitt's great song fits so well into the film you would think he wrote it about Cobain, (and he probably did) it's a scene you'll wanna watch over and you'll find yourself singing the song when the movie's finished. So not for everyone but a spiritual journey none the less, make sure it's late and your alone, put it on, you know your right.

Although this film is very much intended to be based of off the "Final Days" of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain, its strengths lie in the haunting and relentless misery of protagonist Blake.

The fact that Blake is intended to be a pretty direct allegory for Cobain is largely irrelevant to the mood and feel of the film. You could go into this film not even knowing who Cobain was and it wouldn't change your experience with it. Blake is a very depressed musician on his last legs who has pretty much entirely given up on life. That's all you really need to know. Although there are references to Cobain life and death, they feel mostly superfluous and don't really add anything to the film.

Final Day is ultimately a film successful in its understanding and presentation of depression and isolation but not as a film depicting the last days of Kurt Cobain. You will be disappointed if you go into this film expecting a good Cobain/Nirvana film.

Last days This is the final instalment of Gus van sant's trilogy of the disenfranchised and the alienated human condition. It began with 'Gerry' dealing with two guys trapped in a desert with no way of finding civilisation again and continued with 'elephant' dealing loosely with the columbine school killings. Last days is loosely based on the life of Kurt Cobain the late nirvana singer. Last days is really gelephant a mix of the first two films. Similar themes like repetition and the same story told from different characters perspectives are lifted straight out of elephant and the endless, hopeless tracking shots of despair are taken out of Gerry. Here the main character Blake is lost, unlike the two central characters in Gerry who are lost in the desert without hope, Blake is lost in his own head seemingly without hope. We meet Blake in the title of the film, his last days, being destroyed by drugs (although we never see him take anything harder than a cigarette) and emotional vampires who pretend to be his friends sucking the life out of him coupled with the pressure of fame and impending 86 date tours, Blake is quite simply falling apart. Here though it is a beautifully subtle take on madness, gone are the visions you see in films like 'Jacobs ladder' replaced with a clever underscore of sounds of doors opening and closing and mutterings and oddities. It's as if as you travel round with Blake you too can here the doors of insanity opening in his head, you too struggle to make out all the sounds. It's gently handled but eerily effective in linking you in with Blake's mindset. Elsewhere he stumbles and crawls round trying to function in the face of increasing paranoia and his drug addled inability to perform even the simplest of tasks. With record executives, band members, his manager and a private investigator all on his trail doing little for his state of mind Blake only seems comfortable when making music. This is also the only thing he can do with any sense of achievement, this could be down to the fact that it is second nature or the fact that he is a musical genius. The film also has an amazing sense of space, the landscapes around the mansion, the emptiness of its rooms and the vacuous nature of the hangers on to Blake's coat tails. With some amazing scenes, look out for the Venus in furs scene and the amazingly shot and framed acoustic song performed by Blake in the studio with probably one of the best little pieces of improvisation I've ever seen, this is a brilliant and touching portrayal of a great man left to fall to pieces by those who should have helped him stay together. Although different in its approach it deals with madness in a way not seen since Polanski's 'repulsion' and ultimately it is a film that stays with you long after the final chilling shot.

Gus Van Sant does a remarkable job with this film - "Last Days." Nothing much happens, there is not a lot of dialogue but what we see, experience, is the slow demise of an individual into oblivion. We are observers, albeit at a distance. The urge maybe there to intervene; deliberately evoked by the structure of Van Sant's film. We want to say: 'You do not have to go on like this. We can help.' The structure is like a memory recalled. We keep going over it, adding bits as we do to try to make more sense, but never arriving at a definitive version. We especially hope that when the advertising salesman calls to the house and Blake lets him in,that he will engage with the man and forget his morose preoccupations. But the gulf between the two is unbridgeable. The nadir of the film is when Blake, left alone by his friends in the rehearsal room, starts to play on his guitar. His voice echoes his inner anguish, rising from a low to a high and then back to a low. He even manages to break a string on the guitar, but dexterously pulls the string while continuing the song. How could such music come out of such gloom? This is the paradox of creativity -- of trying to give form to ideas, not yet realized. We wait in anticipation, incapable of giving directions. Blake is constantly trying to evade the intrusion of others but cannot transcend his own self, of being in the world. The final intrusion finds him not there; he is dead.

It is ironic that in an era of high-speed communications and hyper-dimensional physics that the children of these creations would choose to express their exacerbations in a primal mumble of modern madness, while sleepwalking through their nightmare.

The Director's low-key, laid back, and standoff style are appropriate, with little dialog using sound and fluid composition to facilitate the ethereal essence of the environment.

A parallel but not a specific profile, the similarities to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain are a worthwhile comparison. Entering the mind and the world of a tortured and talented person is not going to be entertaining, but it is a different, difficult detour to a road to nowhere.

It is a vast, expansive and mostly empty space, an unknowable territory and it smells like spiritual suicide.