Product: Last Days (2 Disc Special Edition)
Rating: 1.0
Gus Van Sant strikes again
Gus Van Sant has to be one of the least creative directors alive today. He has somehow come to beleive that excruciatingly long periods of nothing somehow amount to dramatic tension or some sort of abstract artistic significance, when actually all that does is create bland, empty movies. I usually really enjoy movies that are stripped down to the bare essentials (Jim Jarmusch?), but Van Sant simplifies his films in ways that are just clumsy and far from interesting (an extended shot of a bush moving in the wind? Come on, man).The movie itself, as you probably can tell by now, is "inspired" by the last days of Kurt Cobain's life. Kurt Cobain apparantly spent his last days wandering through a forest and placing ads in the yellow pages, if you follow Van Sant's account of what happened. There are also extremely forced references to religion and buisness that are not only painfully obvious, but insulting to the viewer, as is the way the eventual suicide is handled. Van also Sant needs to learn some new tricks, because his standard "half an hour of small talk," "random gay couple," and "show the same scene at two or three different points in the movie" tricks are not only expected from anyone who has seen any of his other films, but incredibly lazy on his part.To be fair, Last Days is ever-so-slightly more watchable than his other movies because there is at least a sense that something, sooner or later, might happen. Unfortunately, nothing ever does. Watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD also confirms what I suspected all along, that the whole film was more or less made up as they went along. While all that "experimentation" may have been liberating experience for the actors, it's a painfully dull one for the viewers. There's nothing poetic at all about the film, it's a hack job done by an egotistical director, and actors delusional enough to believe it all adds up to something profound, or at least vaguely artistic. In reality, it works great as a sedative, but completely fails as a decent movie. And how this is supposed to honor or pay tribute to Kurt Cobain is a question that is best left unanswered. Avoid.