Last Days (2005)

This movie is pretty bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Gus Van Sant is a guy I really hate because his movie EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES ruined one of the best books I ever read. (Read the book by Tom Robbins, it's amazing.)So I assumed going in that Van Sant meeting Kurt Cobain was going to be a typical Van Sant massacre, a Bambi Meets Godzilla orgy of artistic self-indulgence with Gus doing Kurt "his way." And I was right. But strangely, if you give this movie a chance it's not all that bad. The condescending, one-note story line, (helpless, fragile, beautiful boy dies slowly while drainers, users, liars, and cheats circle like vultures), is rendered poetic and even poignant by the sheer artistry of the camera work and the striking visual images. It's a great achievement, in a way. Gus Van Sant can convey despair better with a single shot of tall grass than another director could with ten pages of dialogue. You have to give him credit, in a way.Lost in all the dreamy doom and damnation, however, is the disturbing sense that Gus really doesn't know much about Kurt Cobain . . . other than that he was a beautiful boy who died. (And therefore the perfect object of desire?) Even though Michael Pitt (later to become a legend as Jimmy Darmody in HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE) gives an incredibly charismatic and nuanced performance, there's nothing here to suggest the dynamic energy of a charismatic and rebellious dynamo who changed the music world forever. Whatever music you hear is only to underline the despair, not the talent.Meanwhile, the outside world, (the squares, the straights, and always and above all the women) are dismissed as irrelevant and grotesque, monsters who just don't love our beautiful boy enough. This is sheer laziness. The cheap shots at Mormons and traveling salesmen would have been stale on a vaudeville stage one hundred years ago. But Van Sant can get away with it, because by God he's a real artist with a dreamy touch. All that art in the service of so much self-indulgence.

......are the only two words that apply to this film. It can only be called a film because that was the medium it was shot in. We will never know what was in Gus Van Sant's mind when he made this movie, and that may be his private joke; because he may very well have had nothing in mind when he made it. The film is a detached view of the last days of a self-indulgent, unaware drug addict, so detached that it might have been shot with a security camera affixed to the wall as it watches a man stumble around, ignore his friends, stumble around, ignore his family, stumble around, listen to a Jehova's Witness try to convert him as he sits there totally tuned out, stumble around, hide from a detective trying to find him, stumble around, wander into a potting shed, stumble around, and die. I have just given you the entire plot of Last Days, but did not give a "spoiler alert", as there is no plot, action or dialog to spoil. If a friend wanted to show you a security video of the last eight hours of a homeless drug addict's life in an alley before he slowly dies in front of you, would you watch it? I actually would, rather than watch this again. Because at least I would be watching a real life and death event, without the suffocating pretentiousness of this film.On top of that, we can't forget that we are watching the pointless and self-indulgent destruction of a millionaire who had far more success than he deserved, was overrated to an embarrassing degree, was more narcissistic than was previously thought humanly possible, and had friends, family and a wife who loved him far more than he deserved. In his own suicide note, Cobain referred to himself as a big baby. At least he was self aware to that degree. His mother after his death said "now he's gone and joined that stupid club". (Referring to the death of Jimmy Hendrix and Joplin by drug overdose, at age 28). His mother had more meaning, depth and insight in her life than her son ever did. Who cares about his life, he wasted it, and who cares about his death, as he didn't care about whoever cared about him? That is the feeling this film leaves in you; though I'm not sure Gus Van Sant cared about any meaning or effect this film had. Finally, who cares about this film? Its subject had no meaning and nothing to say, and neither does this. If you somehow think Kurt Cobain was a "genius" of some kind, and that his death at a young age had some kind of deep meaning, please, please consider a better role model. (And no, Marilyn Manson is not a better role model. At least Cobain wasn't That pathetic.....)

The theme/plot/point of this movie simply doesn't work as some kind of obscure art-flick. Gus Van Sant uses the exact same framework as he did in 'Elephant': Long shots of boring everyday things that everyone does.The very big difference however, is that it worked very well in Elephant. The seemingly trivial shots of everyday happenings worked as a contrast to the disaster that would eventually come in the end. (And this isn't a spoiler because if you're gonna watch Elephant, you know it's about a school shooting.) Showing the young children interact with one another and their families for the entire movie made sense to give off just how unexpected and horrible the event must have felt.In this movie however, it's really just stupid and doesn't make for anything than a really boring film that you regret giving a chance. Absolutely nothing happens during the entire movie and then he dies. That's it. Im not exaggurating either, all we see is long shots of "Cobain" stumbling around looking druggy. He barely ever talks and when he does he just mumbles incoherently, there is no insight into his mind, he just looks doped up and then he suddenly dies. It's really just a terrible terrible disappointment and a failure of cinema."An introspective artist who is buckling under the weight of fame, professional obligations and a mounting feeling of isolation" is a very interesting topic for a movie. The right thing for Van Sant to do would have been to actually include dialogue with psychological insight into the mind of Kurt Cobain and really bring us into his head and what he is going through. It's not IMPOSSIBLE to do that because there are plenty of diaries, biographies and journal entry's that you can draw from to give some kind of a understanding into his problems with fame and himself.But no. Instead he chose to do something that is just wrong on every concievable level. Im not going to say that he chose to do something cheap, because I have more respect for him as an artist than that. I don't think he threw together a shitty movie just for the sake of it. But misguided? Poor judgment of how to treat the subject matter? Completely. 1/10.

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.