Last Days

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.

"Last Days", Gus Van Sant's experimental film loosely inspired by Kurt Cobain's, err, last days, is not one of his best, but it's certainly not the worst (the "Psycho" remake, anyone?). Even though it's not half as poignant as the previous "Elephant", which has similar style, I admire Van Sant for daring to make such a personal, non-commercial film. "Last Days" is slow, hard to watch, "boring" as some people say, but that suits a brave attempt to show some moments of a troubled musician, "Blake" (Michael Pitt, from the wonderful "The Dreamers"), who seems completely lost and away from reality, trying to escape from himself in his house, surrounded by "friends" who are only interested in his money. Nothing "happens", like everybody says, throughout the film, and Van Sant partially succeeds in showing us the big empty inside and around Blake with bitter, raw strength. Pitt's performance is low-key at most, and Ricky Jay ("Magnolia") and Lukas Haas ("Witness"), two criminally underrated actors, don't disappoint in their small roles. We can't say anyone in the cast stands out, though, because this is a movie where the scenery (the house, the forest) is the biggest character, eating Blake up.

"Last Days" didn't engage me enough to make me want to re-watch it, but I didn't regret watching it. Far from being a masterpiece, but worth seeing if you're looking for a different option and are interested in the main subject, of course. This is not a movie for a Kelly Clarkson or Lindsay Lohan fan, but please don't say this is the biggest piece of pretentious crap out there - I'm pretty sure Björk|Matthew Barney's "Drawing Restraint 9" is a lot worse.

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.

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.

Nirvana were big around about the time I was in my teens so I do have a certain amount of cultural involvement in his suicide. By this I'm not claiming anything special, just saying that it was an event I remember from the time rather than since. As such I was quite interested in seeing this film although I did think it would be detailed than it was. Instead it is literally "Blake's" last days in a remote house with a group of friends. We see him in a state of isolation, falling deeper into whatever it is that is eating at him from the inside out. Van Sant has drawn this fall out over 90 minutes where, lets be honest, not a great deal actually happens.

To some viewers this has given the film a tragic and haunting quality that has produced a lot of insight into the man Blake. I am not one of those viewers. It wasn't that I was waiting for the film to do a lot of work for me or spoon-feed me emotions, but I did need more than what was delivered and I confess that the film bored me intensely at some points. Van Sant has written these last days and based them on Kurt Cobain but I would have liked him to have imagined a bit more detail in his character and perhaps done more than delivered some stroppy teenager silently moping around the place until the inevitable happens (and even that is done in a very low key way). It is hard to fault the intimate nature of Van Sant's filming but this is very different from getting into the character and actually benefiting from this degree of perceived intimacy.

Pitt does as he is told and spends most of the film looking through his hair in a sort of creative and tragic way. Without any dialogue to speak of (sorry) this is all he can really do and I found it totally unconvincing and uninteresting – which is a pretty big failing given that he is supposed to be the heart of the film and the reason we have all come along. The rest of the cast are fairly unimportant and it says a lot that the only one that held my interest was Ricky Jay – but that was only because he was Ricky Jay.

Perhaps this will really touch major fans of Cobain but it did nothing for me at all. Silent and surprisingly dull, this badly needed depth and insight as well as a serious and respectful tone.