Last Days
SPOILERS!!!!!!
Art house meets grunge. Heroin meets purity. Stillness meets nodding off. Gus Van Sant's latest excusion into the relm of reality based films, Last Days, details a fictional account of Kurt Cobain's final curtain call.
Michael Pitt plays Blake, a reclusive heroin addict rock star on a retreat with his band to rehearse for an upcoming album/tour. Pitt's genious does not souly lay in his remarkable physical resemblance to Kurt Cobain, but in the deminor as Kurt. Pitt's method acting is as strong as Brando's in On the Water Front. The opening five minutes of the film follow Blake on a hike into the woods as he mumbles unintelligable words to himself.
When heroin isn't ever shown, the implication is stong enough to tell the viewer what is going on with Blake. He nods off while watching a Boys 2 Men video, constatnly looks exhausted, and rarely speaks throughout the movie. After pouring a large bowl of Coaco Rice Crispies, Blake pulls out a cigar box. He starts mumbling the word "spoon," possibly the first clear word to seap out of his lips the whole movie. Fans of Kurt know that Blake will use the spoon for what's in the cigar box before eating his cereal, thus the urgency and importance in his voice.
Van Sant's stylistic approach seems to leave the viewer as though they themselves have tied off, tapped a vein, and plunged a needle into their skin. You feel dissoriented and time comes and goes. The order of scences are repeated or reversed from different view points, colors wash out faces to make them appear ghost like. Shots last entire scenes, either not moving, or moving to slowly for the naked eye to understand.
Other than Van Sant's extreme experimental vision of Kurt's Last Days, Nirvana fans will love the attention to detail. Blake eats Kraft Mac n Cheese (kurts favorite food), uses a Boss DS1 Distortion (the only kind Kurt would touch) and even sips on a Barq's root beer just before the end (something only die hard Kurt obsessives like myself would be looking for).
With thurston moore as a music coordinator, where do you go wrong...
but still, i didn't get that whole gay scene in the middle. Are they trying to say Dave Grohl was gay? The charactor didn't need that kinda establishment. It felt as though Van Sant tossed it in to be arty... the one time he over compensates...
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spoon...