Last Days

"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.

Even though I really like some of Gus Van Sant's older movies (DRUGSTORE COWBOY, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO,...) and I do appreciate the fact that he dares to do something different (in terms of stepping away even further from mainstream cinema) with his more recent work, he more or less lost me with LAST DAYS. I think with this movie, we see a director who's trying just a little bit too hard to be eccentric. I've read some comments of people who liked it a lot and went on and on about the deeper meaning of things. I've read things about this movie being an accurate and truly sad & touching portrayal of the decay of a musical genius. And some people clearly praise this movie because they're fans of Gus Van Sant, completely ignoring the movie's flaws. Well, that's all fine by me, but that's not the way I saw the movie.

When I call LAST DAYS hollow, I'm not saying it's insincere. Not at all, because it really feels like a sincere portrait of a musician bordering on the edge of sanity (and I'm not using the term musical genius, because at not one moment in the movie we get prove that he really is one, we just have to assume it, because he supposedly has a big upcoming tour to go on and a fellow musician asks his opinion on a song he wrote... but hey, that's fine by me). When I say LAST DAYS is hollow, I mean that it's an empty vessel with no contents. When people start saying that it's about being unable to communicate with each other or that it's about friends draining you emotionally or blah blah blah... I just can't help laughing that away. Because not one single person in the movie actually does something. They all just hang around, sleeping, doing nothing, occasionally listening to music... (well okay, Blake has two moments where you can see him making music and singing a song, those were two solid one-shot sequences and I enjoyed them a lot). But apart from that, nothing happens.

And what about Michael Pitt deserving an Oscar for his role as Blake? You got to be kiddin' me! You can see him wearing a dress. You can see him fooling around with a gun. You can see him stumbling around in the house and through the forest. And you can see him eat something in the kitchen. That's it. And what's worse, he always mumbles the few lines he has in a way that it's almost incomprehensible. But I guess that's what you get when you're a burned out junkie. Assuming Blake IS a junkie, that is. Because we never get any evidence or hints as to why he's losing his mind. Everybody thinks: oh, he's into rock'n'roll, so it must be drugs. Has it ever occurred to anyone that, besides being severely anti-social, he might also be suffering from a psychological affection? Like insomnia or autism or whatever? Once again Gus Van Sant doesn't feel the need to enlighten us with more information. No info, no plot... sounds more like a registration than a movie, doesn't it? And then, after the 'movie' is over and we have absolutely learned nothing about our protagonist, Gus Van Sant has the pretension to show us some written text explaining that this movie is based on the last days of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. I mean, if he had the rights to use Kurt's name in the end credits, then surely he could have build some more references to his real life in the plot, no? It just feels pretentious and above all, a smart move to draw public attention to the movie. Because, way before the movie came out, everybody already knew that it supposedly was about the final days of Kurt Cobain. Seriously, if that little text would not have been there at the end of the film, and this movie was just about some unknown musician, I would have considered this to be a much better movie and would certainly have enjoyed it more. It simply would have worked much better for me that way, and I would have rated the movie much higher because of it.

However... I must say this: The cinematography is absolutely beautiful. And the camera-moves and angles are subtle, nicely framed and to the point. In fact, I believe that if you, at any given moment, would take a still of any frame in the movie, you would always have a perfect photograph. One of my favorite shots was when the camera slowly pulls back from the window when we see Blake playing various instruments inside the house. It must have lasted at least 5 minutes or so. Pretty brilliant. Another good thing was that the movie had a consequent unworldly feel to it. And it was also fun seeing Van Sant doing his ELEPHANT-trick again: Showing the same scene from a different point of view later in the movie. Sadly, these were the only things that kept me going through the movie.

So even if I think LAST DAYS was pretty bad for the reasons mentioned above, I'm gonna be extremely mild in my final judgement. I'll add one point for every aspect I liked: The cinematography. Asia Argento running around in her underwear. Kim Gordon was in it. The little music that was in it, was good (Thurston Moore was involved with the music). So there you have it: 4 out of 10 stars.

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.