Les derniers jours

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.