Article on Last Days found here Link


Movie reflects on Cobain's demons
06:09 AEST Sun May 15 2005
AAP
AP - Gus Van Sant's new movie is a fictional reflection on how Nirvana rocker Kurt Cobain might have spent the days before his 1994 suicide: Watching TV, wandering through his mansion like a ghost, hiding from everyone who tries to help.

The impressionistic Last Days is competing for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival two years after Van Sant won the honour with Elephant, loosely based on the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

Van Sant blended fact and fiction again in his new film. Inspired by Cobain, the character in Last Days is a famous but lonely musician named Blake, played by Michael Pitt (The Dreamers). Pitt has Cobain's shaggy blonde hair, his stubble, his slouch.

Like Cobain, Blake is fond of macaroni and cheese, scribbles his thoughts in a notebook and sings in a desperate wail. Also like Cobain, he escapes from a detox centre before his final spiral into despair.

Beyond that, most events of the movie come from Van Sant's imagination. Nobody knows how Cobain spent the days before he wrote a suicide note, injected himself with heroin and fired a 20-gauge shotgun into his mouth.

"Those particular days are kind of lost days," Van Sant said. So the movie "was all a poetic exercise".

The film has an understated feel. There are no scenes of Blake taking drugs, and the death scene is off camera. The focus is on small moments: Blake watches a Boyz II Men video, makes pasta, has a surreal dialogue with a door-to-door salesman.

Blake spends much of the movie muttering to himself and has little interaction with others. When hangers-on party at Blake's rundown mansion, dancing to the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs, they all but ignore him. They only times they approach him are to ask for money or favours.

Sonic Youth singer-bassist Kim Gordon plays a record company representative who tries to convince Blake to check into rehab. She has a car waiting, but he ignores her.

"You really can only do so much to help someone," Gordon said. Winning success and fame, "Kurt was kind of removed or alienated by what he thought he wanted, and was kind of entrapped by it."

Van Sant said he has been thinking about the project for nearly a decade. At one stage, he wanted to do a Cobain biopic.

"I sort of entertained that for just a brief moment before I thought it would just turn into a kind of regular biopic that wasn't anything special," he said. "It would have been too much information."

Van Sant isn't sure how Cobain's fans and family will react to the film. He has talked to Courtney Love, Cobain's widow, several times over the years about his project. Van Sant did not share details on their conversations.

The volatile Love, who has had her own drug problems, wasn't with Cobain during his final days, and Van Sant did not cast an equivalent of her.

"There is a voice on the phone that you can think of as Blake's wife if you pushed it in that direction," he said. "But yeah, we were afraid that she was going to sue us."

Don't really know what to think of this.

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"Nothing is Written."

Yeah, we've been hearing about this one for quite awhile now. It's hard to tell much from the press it's been getting, but it sounds interesting as a premise, and it sounds like this one will be very similar to Van Sant's recent oeuvre (Elephant, Gerry)--minimal, minimally explained action, long takes, existential underpinnings.

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”

I'm really looking forward to this movie!

J. Hoberman in The Village Voice again:

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”

In theaters this Friday.

The full American trailer:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/last_days/

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”

Saw this a while back, so thought I would go ahead and comment on it:

Very good movie, but, like Van Sant's last couple of pictures, definately not for everyone. Kind of the third film in an informal trilogy, along with the lost-in-the-desert Gerry and the lost-in-high-school Elephant.

The pacing is very deliberate, and there is very little explicit action or conflict, not a lot of coherent dialogue. Despite these restrictions, Micheal Pitt gives an outstanding performance as Blake (the Cobain-inspired rock star whose name both refers to the poet and acknowledges Johnny Depp's character in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.) without much of what we'd normally consider acting, somehow assembling for mostly mumbled dialogue, long takes, and only a couple of close-ups in an hour and a half a very powerful on-screen presence.

Van Sant's work here is also masterful (he's been on a role since arranging for his ejection from Hollywood following Psycho and Finding Forrester). Here the director again uses the overlapping time structure showing the same incident multiple times from different camera angles he used in Elephant--the influence of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr.

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”