Product: Last Days (2 Disc Special Edition)
Rating: 5.0
Film-Making 101
A few weeks ago I had an interesting experience. Trying to escape my family, I decide to spend the afternoon at the theater, catching up on some of the movies I've missed so far this summer. I began with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt-Angelia Jolie action/comedy, and followed that up with Gus Van Sant's latest, Last Days. Smith had shoot-outs, car chases and fight sequences galore while in Last Days, well, nothing much seemed to happen. Yet one film had me bored to tears (literally!), while the other kept me riveted to my seat. Want to guess which is which?If you don't know the answer, I suggest a little experiment. Rent both films when they're released on DVD (Last Days comes out the 25th of October) and just try sitting through the inane, incoherent Mr. and Mrs. Smith after having just watched what I consider to be the best film of the year so far. That being said, though, I strongly recommend seeing Last Days on the big screen. So much of my appreciation of this film comes from it's photography as Blake, a thinly disguised version of Kurt Cobain (played by Michael Pitt), is swallowed up by the vast, empty space all around him. This is a film about isolation, mood, setting, not story, and that's just what's conveyed in it's telling.Now as anyone familiar with Van Sant's work is sure to tell you, his interest in linear film-making has been waning in recent years, a welcome respite after his two most 'mainstream' films (Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester) failed to live up to the potential of his previous career best, 1991's My Own Private Idaho. And with Last Days, he's finally made his masterpiece, a film for which his two prior efforts are likely to be remembered as dry runs and little more. And as unjust as that may be, you can clearly see a progression from Gerry, a good film, to Elephant, a very good film, to Last Days, a great one and his career pinnacle, much the way as Kurosawa used Kagemusha as a tune up for Ran.The story, in case you're unfamiliar with Cobain's life (as I was prior to seeing this movie), follows a young musician who, after having recently escaped a stint in re-hab, spends his last days wondering his palatial estate, cooking macaroni and cheese, avoiding his hanger-on 'friends,' and composing lonely, morose songs that cling to your memory long after the movie has ended. It's in these scenes that Pitt, a singer himself, proves that he was the ONLY choice for the role. Often under-appreciated (in The Dreamers and Hedwig & the Angry Inch) or overshadowed (particularly by Ryan Gosling's tour-de-force performance in Murder by Numbers), Pitt's finally allowed to shoulder a feature film and proves himself worthy of comparisons to James Dean and River Phoenix.If you're skeptical of that statement, just watch the way Pitt is able to convey so much through body posturing alone. His eyes obscured behind his greasy, golden locks for much of the film (with the exception of one particular scene where he's allowed to stare into the camera for seemingly an eternity), and his dialogue reduced to little more than incoherent mumbling, he still somehow manages to let us into the soul of the character. He's on screen for almost the entirety of the film and rarely shares a scene with any of his co-stars, but despite all these obstacles is still able to flesh out one of the best performances of this or any other year.Of course, much hinges on your opinion of Cobain and his music, though you needn't been a Nirvana junkie to appreciate it. In fact, it wasn't until after seeing this movie that I bought my first CD of his, and in the few weeks since I've managed to consume almost a half dozen books on his life. It takes a rare movie to provoke such an insatiable curiosity in me, an experience which makes this film (oddly enough) incredibly life-affairing.