User Reviews

Wow! This is one slow moving picture! It's so slow that it makes "2001: A Space Odyssey" look like a Jerry Bruckheimer film! (Don't fret "Odyssey" fans, "2001" is my favorite film of all time!)

Of the three films mentioned, I have only seen this and "Gerry," so I cannot comment on "Elephant." But, I'd say Van Sant's use of slow, low-on-plot strategy is running 1 for 2. "Gerry" worked better for me because it captured the increasing plight of the two travelers.

("Gerry" SPOILER!) But, what made that film pay off was the haunting, beautifully made shot at the end. Panning across the desert and coming to rest on Matt Damon's face, we could see, at the end, what a terrible ordeal his character had been through. (End SPOILER)

I don't think Van Sant's style worked so well with Pitt's Cobain-esquire character here. I think that, if we had seen at least flashes of Pitt's character in better times, we would have gotten a better feel for how far he had fallen. It would have made the film more tragic and made us connect with him better. Without that perspective, we just see him fade away.

So, I am glad that Van Sant is around to make film more interesting. I just don't think his style works all of the time.

Not everyone will love "Last Days." Nonetheless it concludes a minimalist trilogy that does more to build Gus Van Sant's cred as a serious and original filmmaker than anything since "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho." And in its way it's every bit as good as its predecessors, "Gerry" and "Elephant," and like them is HBO-sponsored and exquisitely filmed in a boxlike and claustrophobic small format. The irony is that this career-making role for the young Michael Pitt that "Last Days" contains is one in which he only mumbles and hardly speaks. But he embodies and lives and becomes his role as few actors you will see this year have done. He goes to a dangerous and disturbing place. River Phoenix might have taken the part, but maybe it's a good thing for him he never did.

Pitt channels the dying spirit of Kurt Cobain as he was, isolated in a big house, avoided by people there and avoiding them and almost everyone who came looking or called. Once he picks up the phone when his producer is calling and he listens, but never speaks. Blake (Pitt's character's name) is a shaky, peripatetic Howard Hughes, who goes native in the first sequence, wandering in a daze, walking into the woods, bathing in a river, spending the night by a bonfire of sticks. The mumbling is eerie, it's eavesdropping without insight for us. As he returns to the house, stumbles about, prepares makeshift meals in the kitchen, puts on a dress and brandishes a shotgun, the lack of human interaction brings home as no dialogue-written scenes ever could how isolated and mad he has become.

Since "Last Days" is largely a mood piece -- a splendidly original, dreamlike one -- setting is crucial and the old stone house with its crumbling, paint-peeling walls and mess and sound equipment and instruments and paintings, is a major player, so well represented in the elegant, original cinematography of Harris Sayides that it resembles no place else you've ever been. There are three or four other people in the house -- the action's so chaotic and haphazard you may not quite know who or how many. One's clearly "Asia," Asia Argento, and she's sleeping with "Scott," Scott Green, and there's "Luke," Lucas Haas, tall and gangly in Coke-bottle glasses. Blake sneaks up on Asia and Scott with a shotgun when they're in bed together sleeping. Typically, nothing happens. He doesn't shoot, and they don't notice him. They and other people go out to and return from nightly revels. Blake is… just there.

As in "Elephant" Van Sant's approach is neutral. He does not analyze or explain or judge, and the actors are free to improvise and be themselves. Blake's respected because it's his house, but he's also a kook. Random visitors who're let inside are grotesque and comic: first it's dorky but cute twin Mormon "Elders," then a large well-spoken black man selling a renewal of a Yellow Pages ad from the year before. "How's your day been so far?" he asks as an opener. "Uh….it's another day…." mumbles Blake. He's cooperative in a rote sort of way but there's little indication he knows what he's talking about. There's a detective and a young man who once knew Blake, who escapes them and other people by running outside to the woods again. These two are neither sinister nor funny: they just are. They're just interlopers, like everybody else, into Blake's lost world.

The method in this trilogy has in common that it requires quiet acceptance of the proceedings; that if you give yourself up to its sometimes real time sequences (especially in "Gerry," where Van Sant says they're influenced by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr), they're hypnotic and special, and if you don't, they're just irritating and boring. The experience requires a lot from the viewer. It's hard to describe a movie in which little happens. Nothing turns out to be quite a lot and you might remember that James Joyce wrote a long detailed novel about the events in the life of a little man in a single day in Dublin. It's certainly important that Pitt is deeply in character. If his acting were mannered or theatrical or unfelt, nothing would work. When he finally sings one song, a plangent cry of despair with the refrain, "It's a long lonely journey from death to birth," it's very Cobain, but Pitt's own song and passionate, exciting performance.

There's a kind of climax here, but there's nobody (but us) to witness it. Luke and Scott are up in bed with each other. As in "Elephant," several sequences repeat. Blake seems to be dying repeatedly, as Asia stumbles upon him lying on the floor and he seems to nod out, though you never see him do drugs and maybe it's just the after effect of them from long before. Finally he's gone. We don't see him do that either. His soul quietly climbs naked up out of his supine body, like a Duane Michals photo. Then there's all the police, the ambulance, and the other inhabitants sneak off, as Blake did. It's all a pageant. I felt right at home in it remembering Oregon, Washington, the hippie days of the Sixties: it was there for me. I know it was Grunge Rock and Kurt Cobain, to whom this film is dedicated, died in 1994, at 26. The point is that it feels real. But its relation to real events is tangential. And if you give yourself to it and take it in its own context it's a wonderful film, a beautiful funny-sad experience of doomed-damned youth and a deeply felt meditation on isolation and death.

"Can somebody tell how to get things back, the way they used to be?" – Boyz 2 Men

Though a brave and interesting film by Gus Van Sant, "Last Days" never really works, failing to approach the greatness of his previous effort, "Elephant".

The idea here is to have a suicidal artist (a stand in for Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain) emerge from some self-imposed exile (the forest) and dwell in the various rooms of a mansion before killing himself.

Like Resnais' "Last Year At Marienbad", the mansion represents the past and various memories, which the artist leafs through before his death. It's also a place of thoroughly banal events, the artist prosaically making macaroni and cheese, strumming on his guitar, watching TV and generally sulking about like a pre-speech caveman.

The film works as an exercise in demystification, Van Sant careful not to romanticise the artist, but it works best at conveying the incredible pain and torture this character must have been feeling on the day of his death. One scene in particular, in which the artist listens to the super-cheesy Boyz 2 Men song, "On Bended Knee", resonates well, the lyrics yearning for those happy days before the onset of his depression.

7.5/10 – A recent British film called "Control" did this stuff better, chartering the demise of Joe Division front-man Ian Curtis. Likewise, films like Antonioni's "Red Desert", Tarr's "Damnation" (which Gus Van Sant cites as an influence) and Haynes' "Safe" convey the existential woes of their characters with a sort of toxic elegance. "Last Days" never really approaches the strength of those films. The question then becomes, can a film that accurately portrays suicide and clinical depression work at all? Or should it be unwatchable, suffocating its audience with total despair and noxious futility?

Worth one viewing.

Just terrible! Without doubt the most self indulgent piece of drivel captured on film ever. I understand what Van Sant was trying to say, but the way he gets there is just boring. Beautiful cinematography can only take you so far. If I want to see pretty pictures I can go to a gallery.

And what the hell is it with Van Sant and gratuitous gay scenes. I mean, I love a good gay heavy petting scene, but between this and the Elephant shower scene...it's just a van Sant toss off.

I'm sorry, but I am willing to input to a certain degree to understand and embrace a film - I don't need it all laid out like am episode of CSI, but I'm also expecting the director to direct.

I do hope Gus van Sant is over his mid life crisis, get back to making quality films and get over this need to make very expensive student films.

Here's 97 minutes of your life you'll never get back – an excruciating exercise in watching cinematic paint dry, peel and flake. Blake, Michael Pitt's archetypal Kurt Cobain (not Kurt, but "Kurt", see?) mooches around his decaying mansion, drooling into his smack, crackle 'n' pop and avoiding his leech-like friends – before finally doing the audience a massive favour and blowing his brains out. It's one thing to document ennui, another to render it halfway interesting. I wouldn't film myself picking lint out of my navel for an hour-and-a-half; Van Sant (whose previous outing Elephant was just as sleepy but often very lovely to look at) has just shot the equivalent. "It's a long, long journey from Death to Birth" sings Blake. And an even longer one from curtain rise to credits.