Thoughts on the film “Last Days”

During SIFF I saw North American premier of the film, Last Days  What follows are my thoughts on the movie and not really a review.  It also may contain spoilers so do not say you have not been warned.
Last Days came from the Cannes film festival to SIFF.  It was show as the gala ending film of the festival.  The director Gus Van Sant got up and said a few brief words about how he had flown up from Portland, OR for the screening – he lives in the Northwest but did not do a Q & A afterward.  I like Gus Van Sant films a lot and Last Days was supposed to be loosely based on the last day or so of Kurt Cobain’s life who was the lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana and most people think he took his own life.
I did not like this film at all.  I found it to be very slow and there really was not a lot of development as it went.  Michael Pitt does an OK job playing the rock star and in much of the dialog he has a Cobain like mumble.  There are minutes where the footage in the film is of Pitt just walking through the woods with no dialog at all.  Visually the film was good but the plot and story sucked.  There were a few funny parts such as when a yellow pages salesman comes to resell some ad space for the next year and Pitt character is in a women’s slip and keeps almost falling asleep while the salesman is talking.  While I am not a Mormon I did appreciate the fact that the two brothers that came to the house are made fun of in the film.  I should also say that as a Nirvana fan growing up around them and seeing them at shows in the Northwest I really could not relate to any of the characters but maybe I really was not supposed to.
All and all it was really long and I kind of wanted to walk out of it.  After I saw it I read that it really was not liked that well at Cannes either.  I doubt it will do well if released to the big screen and the film did say HBO films at the beginning so maybe it will be going directly to cable.  I am a bit disappointed because I like Van Sant’s work and this really did nothing for me.

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