Hey, I just read that Gus Van Sant has a new movie out that is "based" on the last days of Kurt Cobain. In fact, he even decided to call the movie Last Days. Peace, PD
I hope that's not the only thing he ate. Especially since he already had a lot of serious stomach problems. Peace, PD
Yeah, I don't know what to think of this movie...It comes out in the states July 22, 05 It seems like a mockery of sorts, but the fact that Kim Gordon (Kurts long time friend) Is in the movie... maybe it'll be good. Hopefully it gets new people into Nirvana, Or it will stir up some shit, and Courtney will be taken back to court!
I'm really not sure. But Van Sant is known for making odd little films, and sometimes they can be quite good. I thought Drugstore Cowboy was awesome. So I hope this one (about Kurt/Blake) turns out to be as good. Peace, PD
Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best movies ever made, but Van Sant has really taken a turn for the worst since then, especially with his remake of Psycho....maybe this can turn around his career Remake of Psycho?! What the hell
The actor playing Kurt/Blake is somebody named Michael Pitt? I saw a pic of him (taken from the movie), and he does sorta look like Kurt. Or at least he looks like somebody trying to look like Kurt Cobain. Not just some anonymous rock star. Peace, PD
I really liked To Die For. And Finding Forrester was not a total disaster. But yeah, I think the Psycho remake was a big mistake. I haven't seen the one he made about those school shooters from a couple years back? I think I'll try and rent that one. Peace, PD
Your talking about Elephant, I won't come out and say don't watch it, but I really didn't enjoy it that much. I guess I was expecting more, but I'm not sure why haha
Here's what Roger Ebert says about LAST DAYS: CANNES, France – If you’re going to make a movie about a rock star who drifts into drugged oblivion and death, you basically have two choices. You could make one of those lurid biopics filled with flashbacks to a tortured childhood and lots of concert scenes and sex, while the star savors success before it destroys him. Or you could do it the Gus Van Sant way. His new film “Last Days” is a dark, lonely portrait of a man leaving this world almost obliviously. A closing credit acknowledges that the film is inspired by the life and death of Kurt Cobain, and adds, in the most precisely-worded disclaimer I can imagine, “the characters are, in part, fictional.” “Last Days,” an official festival entry here at Cannes, is a film I admire enormously while wondering if anyone will want to see it. The more you know about filmmaking the more you will appreciate it; the more you know about Kurt Cobain, the less. Van Sant refuses to romanticize the material or analyze the personality or motivation of his subject, named Blake (Michael Pitt). He doesn’t even show him using drugs. Sometimes he doesn’t even show him at all. The film is wonderfully photographed by Harris Savides, who captures a damp, chilly world of cold stone houses isolated in a dark, gloomy forest. Blake is first seen wandering in the woods, mumbling to himself, sliding down a hill, splashing in a stream, and sitting beside a campfire defiantly shouting “Home on the Range” into the indifferent night. The film watches, mostly in long shot, as he drifts in and out of a cabin on the grounds of one of the houses. Visitors arrive and leave. Band members talk vaguely of songs they’re working on. A private detective (Ricky Jay) arrives to have a look at him, and can’t find him. A woman, not identified, appears and asks, “Do you talk to your daughter? Do you say, ‘I’m sorry that I’m a rock and roll cliché?’” She wants him to leave with her. He will not. There are disconnected passages from a suicide note, which he reads aloud to himself. Long shots of him at a distance, moving aimlessly inside the cabin. Events unfold around him without his notice or participation. One night as some friends are driving away, one stops and looks for a long time at his figure, wandering alone in a window. The next day he is found dead. This is the third of Van Sant’s death trilogy. “Gerry” was about two friends who go for a walk in the desert and get lost, and never get found. “Elephant,” which won the Palme d’Or here two years ago, was inspired by Columbine and followed two students as they methodically went about the process of murder. Now this bleak death of a man so wiped out by drugs that he is not really present for his own exit. The distinguishing thing about all three films, the courageous thing, is that Van Sant refuses to manufacture drama to “explain” the events. In the world of these films, death comes without motive or meaning. The characters are already doomed when we meet them, but not for reasons he supplies in a simple-minded docudrama way. When Jim Morrison checks out in “The Doors,” it’s Wagner crossed with Entertainment Tonight. When the “in part, fictional” character in “Last Days” dies, it is like the slow flickering out of a lamp. This, Van Sant suggests, is what it is really like to die of numbing drug abuse: Not sensational, not dramatic, just the mind wandering away and leaving the body to stumble into its grave.
Hey, thanks! Awesome review. And now I'll know what to expect. It's good to know that the project was handled with good taste. Peace, PD
I dont like the idea of this movie for a couple of reasons; 1) as a Nirvana fan i'd much more enjoy a movie about Kurts life and 2) his "Last Days" as far as public record go are to say the least somewhat foggy, in other words it would be hard to make this film remotely accurate. Just my opinion!
I totally agree with you. But I guess Van Sant did his best to "imagine" what the last days of any chronic addict (and not just Kurt) might be like. And how the movie is more about what drug addiction can do to a person, and not just a sensational bio about a rock star. Sorta like that movie "The Rose" was not actually about Janis Joplin. Even though many saw it as such. When it actually was a movie about drug addiction (and death) in the rock world, etc. Peace, PD
I looked it up and cant wait to see it. THe director also did my own private idaho with river phoenix and keanu reeves. very good movie.
