Product: Last Days (2 Disc Special Edition)
Rating: 4.0
hypnotic...
there are enough reviews here about the plot, but here i will look at the film.beyond the unfortunate scene at the beginning with kurt/blake howling "home on the range" to a campfire, this beautiful film is a meditation on stillness. maybe not for everyone, sure, (patience and a willingness to be taken on this trip are essential to viewing this film). but think of the analogy of stillness, hypnosis, to one in a full heroin fix, (as blake seemingly remains most of the film).the forest scenes are ethereal. the house scenes haunting. the viewer is made to feel the apathy of a junkie by giving and getting nothing from the company or surroundings offered. the most cohesive dialogue, and the films' rare musical scenes, can be the efforts of others, and of blake himself, that actually cut through the din of a sort of doped up white noise that a junkie experiences when high.i found one of the most pleasing scenes to be the simple, poetic choreography in the fix/boyz II men video scene. gus pulls no punches, and shows us, in real time, heroin taking it's haunting effect. in the background, a relatively absurd and melodramatic boyz II men video plays on a tv, (complete with tootie from facts of life in a guest cameo). blake slowly, slowly collapses as we get a fullscreen shot of this mtv nightmare. a comment on the fabricated boy bands that would stay long after nirvana deacesed/disbanded? perhaps. or maybe just a promovie making manipulator, expertly letting us squirm in our seats...perhaps we all should squirm when dealing with heroin, mtv, etc...finally, the soundtrack is divine. without getting into the history of "musiq concrete", this film is unique in the use of a soundtrack to actually function as a environmental device as opposed to the usual narrative device, (think of the tension that , mostly non, scary movies use to supplement the tension they can not provide on screen). it's a beautiful use of john cage theories of ambient noise as music. maybe a bit avant for the typical movie audience. just as nirvana was a bit underground for mainstream, (still i remember seeing nirvana live and there were plently of backwards, baseball cap wearing frat boys having no idea what "in bloom" means).in any case, gus will make you FEEL something with this movie. there is no leave it or take it. let it take you where it will.