Product: Last Days (2 Disc Special Edition)
Rating: 5.0
From LATTER DAYS to LAST DAYS, a voyage in time
After watching the gay romantic comedy LATTER DAYS I became intrigued about the Mormon missionaries and googled up this film, with its similar title it might almost be a sequel to LATTER DAYS. In LAST DAYS, the Mormon elders played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Steve Sandvoss in the first film are here replaced by a cute pair of twins, played by Adam and Andy Friberg. They really bring a lot of conviction to the part, and although the residents of the castle don't respond immediately to their sales talk, they never seem unduly upset. I expect the Mormon pairs who come up to people's doors on their evangelical mission must get a lot of turndowns, but I wonder if it's common for the Church officials to assign two brothers (especially twins) the same Mission? Maybe this is Van Sant's way of saying something about mirroring, the way he was attracted to re-telling the classic Hitchcock film PSYCHO because of its underplot of two sisters, Marion and Vera Crane, with very different personalities, each vying for the same man (Viggo's character) while having to fend off Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. Anyway this mirroring or "twin" aspect of Van Sant's films has long been a commonplace in the critical response to his work. What I liked about LAST DAYS which, I must admit, was a little disappointing if only because the Mormon content was ultimately only a tiny fraction of what seems like an interminable film, is that, even when the Friberg boys say goodbye, their aura remains throughout the remainder of the project.In one sequence a stoned Michael Pitt, wearing a black slip and looking super hot and girlish, freezes up and then collapses in extremely slow motion. His muscles must still ache having to descend on bent knees at the pace of a snail, it's a feat even Martha Graham in 1934 might have found difficult, and yet it is a moment of real beauty, reminiscent of the famous sequence in Hitchcock's TOPAZ when Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor) is shot by John Vernon in the chest and from the ceiling the camera watches her collapse in her red dress, so that the gown seems to be spreading, like a pool of blood, on the marble floors so that the gown seems to be shedding petals like a flower. It certainly seems as though Blake is dying in this sequence but no, a minute later you see him up and about, carrying a shotgun around, no longer wearing a slip, and in general acting super paranoid. I thought he was going to pull a Columbine, but at heart something of the Mormon message must have taken hold on poor Blake.Many have commented on the significance of his name, "Blake," and its echo of the English romantic artist, poet and visionary of the early 19th century. Like William Blake, LAST DAYS' Kurt Cobain-like singer-songwriter finds spiritual depth in the slightest interaction of man and nature. He has a deep, perhaps psychotic understanding of the brevity of time and the insustainability of life. As William Blake wrote,O rose, thou art sick!The invisible wormThat flies in the night,In the howling storm,Has found out thy bedOf crimson joy,And his dark secret loveDoes thy life destroy.The song that Michael Pitt (Blake) composes, "From Death to Birth" reverses this sentiment but uses its same general framework. We remember that Joseph Smith (b 1805) was born in the middle of a great romantic revival not only in this country but abroad, and that the Book of Mormon, "given to him" before he was 25 years old, is in some ways the work of a man younger even than Kurt Cobain himself. Nothing is wasted.