Last Days

A movie that is not about the late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, but about a man who looks exactly like him, sings exactly like him, acts exactly like him and ends his life exactly the way he did. A horrible movie (and I’m a little ashamed to call it that, since so many other filmmakers are out there actually making movies, while Mr. Van Sant keeps getting praised by the French for manure like this), that isn’t just bad, but incredibly boring, uneventful, uninspiring, unentertaining and ultimately, lacking in anything worth anything. But seriously, maybe I should let you know how I really feel!

As seen at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival

You know how when you’re at a party and your friend gets drunk off his ass and walks around making a fool of himself, while you’re sober and trying to stop from feeling embarrassed? Well, even if you don’t know how that feels, all you need to do is go to see this movie and experience 97 minutes of a man walking around his house, mumbling nothingness to himself, looking and acting stoned, delivering 2 lines or so, and ultimately (and thankfully for us), shooting himself to death, and you’ll have that same feeling, times one hundred. The first ten minutes of this movie features the lead actor, Michael Pitt, starring as a grunge singer who is NOT Kurt Cobain, walking around a forest by himself, taking his clothes off to take a dip in the stream and building a fire. No dialogue, no nothing. And it’s pretty much downhill from there! Oh, and for anyone who thinks that actor Pitt is actually impressive as Cobain, walking around like a hunched-over old lady, mumbling incoherently and looking like he reeks of crap, he showed up at this film’s press conference in Cannes, looking ragged, mumbling incoherently and basically showing the world that he is the world’s worst actor, as he wasn’t acting in the film at all…that’s basically the man, in real life. Way to go, guy!

What else sucks about this movie? Boy oh boy, I wish I had the time and space to let you know all about it. Let’s start with the fact that it has no plot, no character development, no score, no acts, no meaning, no premise, no insight, no nothing! That’s on top of the fact that I see no reason why a film about a guy who resembles real-life musical icon Kurt Cobain would make any sense in the first place (then again, this comes from the director of the shot-by-shot remake of the classic PSYCHO). I wish I could tell you that this movie offered even a smidgen of artistic vision, but other than a gratuitous scene featuring two men making out that has nothing to do with the movie (why would it) and a scene in which the director thinks it’d be humorous to make fun of the Latter Days Saints, as opposed to the drugged-up morons living in Cobain’s abode, we get zero insight into why the lead man is depressed, why certain people are living in his house, why he decides to kill himself and most importantly for me, how the Foo Fighters came to be? Seriously folks, if you’re looking for anything worth anything in a movie, skip this one and consider my 97 minutes of hell, a sacrifice that I made for the greater good of mankind. In fact, if ever I’m in a war situation and I get caught by the enemy, I want them to read this review and realize that the greatest torture that they can ever inflict on me, is to play this film in front of me, over and over and over and over again. I would “name names”.

Oh, and if all that wasn’t enough, the film features a couple of sequences with horrible music (nice ode to Nirvana, you prick), Asia Argento “acting” with thick, black glasses and a shot of her ass, a tacky-upon-tacky ending after the lead character offs himself with the proverbial shot of Michael Pitt’s ass and an inexplicably stupid tacked-on conclusion, that makes zero sense and makes it feel as though Van Sant actually thought he had made a “movie” here and that anyone would honestly care about the 3-4 characters that were living in Cobain’s house and wearing parkas and winter hats during the summertime. So why am I even giving the film a rating of 2/10? Well, one point goes to “actor” Michael Pitt for looking an awful lot like the real Kurt Cobain, even though he’s not really supposed to be him, and one point goes to writer/director Gus Van Sant (what did he write anyway…there are all but 10 spoken lines in this entire picture?), for ending the torture after only 97 minutes. Of course, the 97 minutes felt like 3 hours, but at least the film wasn’t 3 hours, so that it would feel like 6 hours. I don’t normally “boo” after movies, but after hearing a couple of schmucks with the gall to applaud after my screening (after about 1/3 of the audience walked out earlier, mind you), I just couldn’t help myself. Boo on this entire production and anyone who had any part in it. It truly is a perfect example of how pretentious filmmakers can lose their way if nobody reminds them about the fact that film actually has to contain a meaning, energy or a life, in order to be worthy of creation.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian