Last Days
Starring: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento.
Directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho &
Elephant)
Last Days focuses on the emotional turmoil suffered during the last few days of a musician named Blake. No, Blake is not Kurt Cobain, he is character based upon yet fictionally different to Kurt Cobain.
Watching this film is like watching as a mentally challenged zombie performs day to day activities. Actions include: meandering around the house muttering incoherently, pouring cereal, changing clothes, going to sleep and much more…
On one hand this film is actually “brilliant” in the sense that the director uses a combination of sounds, classical and discordant music, colours, repetition, and analogies to convey the character’s mental state. The disturbed character Blake is also portrayed brilliantly by Michael Pitt. This film clearly portrays what it sought to portray, it’s a question of why would you want to portray that at all? What is the point? This film is so damn boring that when the character walks past and the camera is left staring at a shrubbery for an entire minute, you aren’t thinking “Yes, I identify with the art-house connection between the shrubbery and the character’s mental state, how cool!” Instead you are thinking “Umm… did the director go to lunch and leave the camera on or something…?”
There is just no sympathy developed for this apathetic character that you are presented with. You are not watching a broken genius or a trampled snow flower you are watching a vacuous zombie. This film will not engender your interest in Kurt Cobain, and if you are interested in Kurt Cobain, you will be less interested after seeing this film.
This film is mildly humorous / interesting in a few scenes when you see “normal” people interact with this “zombie,” and you will get to see some random shots of trees and rivers. Regarding technique, acting and effects this film is an art-house masterpiece, but stomped on by the demon of boredom and spat on by the monster of pointlessness.
5/10
Michael Hill
Aside from the fact that more than ten people walked out of the film before it had finished and that the woman next to me spent the better part of the movie catching her head from falling to her chest in an impressive effort to stay awake, Gus Van Sant’s latest offering (part three in his trilogy on death) was, for me, a cinematic experience like no other I’ve had.
Last Days is the story of Blake, a troubled Seattle rocker disillusioned with the demands of fame and truly life itself. The story is based on the final days of Kurt Cobain and though we rarely see his face and even more rarely do we hear his voice, Michael Pitt does a fantastic job of convincing us that suicide sometimes really is the only solution. The film is drudgingly slow, visually bleak and aurally uninviting (except for a remarkable song written and performed by Pitt himself) and sometimes the cinematography focuses on next to nothing for what seems like minutes and I think this could be why Last Days will be, for some, a critical disaster. For others, this movie will be considered untouchable in terms of cinematic exploration and innovation. I tend to fall into the latter category though I must admit that the film is incredibly slow. It breaks convention — when we wait for the opening sequence to reach some sort of culminating adversity and then expect the opening credits to roll and these basic expectations aren’t met, we’re disappointed, confused and don’t know when to stop waiting. In an interview with Margaret Pomeranz on At the Movies, Van Sant said that he thought ‘Kurt was at odds with song structure’ and so his approach to the movie was the best way to express this, ‘by trying to break certain conventions in cinema style’. What we’re left with is atmosphere. I have never experienced being a voyeur in the cinema so much as during this film. The emotion Van Sant conveys by stealing from us the dialogue and action we all crave so much is an atmosphere of inappropriateness in witnessing something so personal. Cinematographer Harris Savides says in the same interview, ‘It was a new way of watching a movie for us….you’re not really being told, by montage, what to think, what to look at. You’re processing things by yourself.’ I’m still processing. I would never recommend this film to the masses of cinemaplex movie-goers but I find I cannot stop talking about it to those who appreciate film as art. Last Days is inventive and evocative and in my opinion, has just raised Van Sant from superb auteur to nothing less than genius.
Heather Taylor Johnson
