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sharplittleteethWe saw the new Gus Van Sant film Last Days last night.
It's about the final days of Kurt Cobain's life.
Only, it's not.
The end credits state although the film is inspired by the life of Kurt Cobain, the events portrayed are fictional. There is no Nirvana music in the film. And the Cobain character, played by Michael Pitt, is renamed Blake.
This is not a conventional biopic. It's barely a pic at all.
For most of the film, Blake stumbles around a beautiful but decayed house in a lush wood, mumbling incomprehensibly to himself. He makes maccarroni and cheese. He nods off after taking heroin. There are bandmates and hanger-ons in the mansion, but they barely speak to him.
Van Sant deliberately distances the audience from the characters. There is no attempt to get inside Blake/Cobain's head. This is cinema as expressionism, as tone-poem. And that tone is lost, isolated, and kind of tedious.
I've joked in the past about the role of tedium in video art. The grunge generation wore dirty hair and ripped jeans as a way of setting themselves in opposition to the shallow glamour of 80's pop. Likewise, arthouse cinema relies on the overlong shot and the snail's pace plot to declare "this is ART dammit, not some tits-and-explosions Hollywood crap".
Which is fine. Laudable, even. Except I'm left sitting in the cinema, wishing the mumbling motherfucker would just hurry up and kill himself already.
The film has its good points. The woodlands and the old house are incredibly beautiful. And it does stir old memories of that era.
But it just feels like something is missing. The decision to rename Cobain to Blake is an odd one - there's never any doubt who Blake is meant to be. And frankly, without the Cobain background and myth infusing it, the film would be as empty as a vacuum.
I should point out that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andricongirl enjoyed it a lot more than I did. She appreciated its abstraction.
Me, I like some actual plot.
It's about the final days of Kurt Cobain's life.
Only, it's not.
The end credits state although the film is inspired by the life of Kurt Cobain, the events portrayed are fictional. There is no Nirvana music in the film. And the Cobain character, played by Michael Pitt, is renamed Blake.
This is not a conventional biopic. It's barely a pic at all.
For most of the film, Blake stumbles around a beautiful but decayed house in a lush wood, mumbling incomprehensibly to himself. He makes maccarroni and cheese. He nods off after taking heroin. There are bandmates and hanger-ons in the mansion, but they barely speak to him.
Van Sant deliberately distances the audience from the characters. There is no attempt to get inside Blake/Cobain's head. This is cinema as expressionism, as tone-poem. And that tone is lost, isolated, and kind of tedious.
I've joked in the past about the role of tedium in video art. The grunge generation wore dirty hair and ripped jeans as a way of setting themselves in opposition to the shallow glamour of 80's pop. Likewise, arthouse cinema relies on the overlong shot and the snail's pace plot to declare "this is ART dammit, not some tits-and-explosions Hollywood crap".
Which is fine. Laudable, even. Except I'm left sitting in the cinema, wishing the mumbling motherfucker would just hurry up and kill himself already.
The film has its good points. The woodlands and the old house are incredibly beautiful. And it does stir old memories of that era.
But it just feels like something is missing. The decision to rename Cobain to Blake is an odd one - there's never any doubt who Blake is meant to be. And frankly, without the Cobain background and myth infusing it, the film would be as empty as a vacuum.
*
I should point out that
andricongirl enjoyed it a lot more than I did. She appreciated its abstraction.Me, I like some actual plot.
