Last Days

Last Days was designed to torture me. As a native Seattleite who was an impressionable teenager during the grunge movement and who owns most Nirvana recordings available to the public, I was stoked for months prior to its release. Gus Van Sant’s most recent film, Elephant (about the Columbine incident), was brilliant, and although this is ficiton, it’s well known that Last Days is a thinly veiled description of Kurt Cobain’s life right before his controversial death in 1994. The trailer was promising: dark and hazy and saturated, like Van Sant’s other films reliably are, and featuring a spooky Nirvana rip-off soundtrack. I even saw the film on the Ave, the historical Grunge Boulevard, if you will. I was like a lathered-up Star Wars fan.

First of all, the guy–”Dawson’s Creek” alum Michael Pitt–looked nothing like Kurt Cobain and, judging from my collection of Nirvana footage, acted nothing like him either. I realize, actors are employed to act like the characters, not to look exactly like them, but it was difficult to suspend one’s disbelief. Dude had the blond hair, but he didn’t do his homework. More disappointing, though, was that the bulk of the movie is just Kurt Faux-bain futzing around the house, running through the forest, humming to himself… collapsing on the floor while a Boyz II Men video plays on the TV for three solid minutes… being intentionally strange. There was no story–it was just a pretty collage of images, except it wasn’t pretty. It was a pointless, preening, affected waste of time.

(Also, Van Sant made the protagonist “Blake” and then the Courtney Love character calls on the phone and she’s “Blackie.” Blake and Blackie. Do you get it? Have another kick in the stomach!)

The only merits to be found are when “Blake” sets his bowl of mac and cheese on a snare and it makes a little ba-dum sound, which was hysterical for some reason, and then the song he played was nice and Nirvana-ey. And the cameos from Kim Gordon and Harmony Korine were slightly thrilling. These little gems, however, were totally canceled out by the stupid, agonizing finale, where “Blake’s” body is shown sprawled in the infamous greenhouse pose and then his naked soul climbs an INIVISBLE LADDER TO HEAVEN.

I feel kind of violated. Why make a film of a famous story, if you’re not going to include the story? Van Sant did it right with Elephant–I dunno what happened here.