Last Days

I walked downtown, over the Hawthorne Bridge, last night to go see Last Days. It was a beautiful night. My old friend Peter arrived from New York on his motorcycle and it was great to walk and talk with him.
I missed Last Days while it was still up at Cinema 21. Regal Cinemas is vile. The advertising for NBC television and their inane in-house entertainment news program The Twenty is maddening. If I wanted to suffer that shite I would stay home and watch the little screen.
Fox Tower may be the place to see art house cinema in Portland, but the quality of the prints, projections and the projector noise from the projection booths is maddening. I had to leave a screening there the other week due to a serious focus issue that went unresolved after multiple complaints. The other sheep sat there squinting in the dark.
Gus Van Sant's latest film has been regaled as visionary and masterful. While viewing I had to struggle to stay awake. Boring doesn't equal bad, however. Thank goodness some critics out there proclaimed its genius, otherwise I might have given up on it. In spite of my attention to filmmaking as an artform, I did come of age and still live in this culture of Hollywood fare. Taylord Hackford's bios of musicians go in one eye and out the other, leaving no aftertaste, but they do meet my expectations of sensational storytelling.
Last Days avoided the sentimental grid that Kurt Cobain's life could easily chart -- the abandoned young daughter, the megalomaniacal wife, the hordes of flannel clad fanatics and worshippers. Instead, Van Sant stages the quietest of passion plays. Aside from a trite confrontation by a record exec played by the stunning but wooden Kim Gordon, the daughter is excused from the manipulation of our heartstrings. We did not have to suffer Courtney. The band was in their own blur, avoiding the usual expository histrionics. Lukas Haas was genius, though a great deal of my praise is for his hipster Jerry Lewis specs.
Sentimentality and judgment were remarkably absent.
The camera did not linger on the tragic beauty of Blake/Kurt. Most of the time we saw only the curtain of his greasy locks. Michael Pitt played the physical life and murmurings of a doped genius perfectly.
The camera work was beautiful. Capturing the physical presence of Pitt, and to some degree Asia Argento, much like Wong Kar Wai's famous shots of women from behind as they lean forward, creating unique organic forms within the formal composition. The reworking of time through multiple perspectives courageously portayed the mundane nature of mental and spiritual disintegration. As Christ reportedly said upon his death, Many will be decieved.
Harmony Korrine's cameo was retarded. And the superimposition of Kurt/Blake's ascension was pushing it.
My viewing partner mused if the mumbling wasn't some sort of subtext indicating the lack of substance in Cobain's words.
Given Gus Van Sant's prediliction for beautiful young men and youth culture, I sincerely doubt that.

Trying hard not to decieve,
nac