Van Sant placed too much on this stylistic reinvention and crossed a creative line. Last Days crawls past frustrating, even worse for longtime fans of the director. Everything those critics wrote about Gerry and Elephant that we dismissed as thin-skinned and impatient is suddenly too true when applied to Last Days. Nothing happens when so much should. It didn’t need to happen conventionally–so much occurs in the seemingly quiet Elephant–but still.

Last Days follows pale rocker Blake in the days before his self-inflicted head-shot, as he stumbles around a secluded house. There are no creative results. The story has many similarities to the death of Kurt Cobain, yadda yadda, but critics are quick to point out that it’s not a biopic. Although an exploitative Hollywood version of Cobain’s life will inevitably surface at some point (what would it be like in 20 years?), Last Days makes you wish it was fucking now (or tomorrow).

Cobain was a death rattle, like the nuclear reactor in Project X trapped with Goliath, and the details surrounding his demise form one of the great Caucasian artist deaths out there. Last Days has little of the figurative ulcer bleed and writes nothing below the questions. It’s tired and stupid-like a naive student.

This pointless look at is a couple days in any drug addict’s life. Aside from one or two inspired music scenes, the film has no heart, no motivation, and no meaning. This is nothing new–Hollywood releases two flat-lining and meaningless films every week, four a week come summer–but Van Sant must be feeling wear and tear or running with just a wad of cash to retirement.

Michael Pitt is Blake, and like Bully and The Dreamers, he’s stoned. Hey, he’s that student! There aren’t enough close-ups of Blake to let Pitt act with his eyes, so instead he has to act with body language. Gosh. Pitt’s never been a dominant presence onscreen or on stage [coughing up blood] so he does little to improve upon Van Sant’s bleak direction, although to be fair, no one could have.

Before seeing this, a safe bet was that if Van Sant failed somehow, Harris Savides’ cinematography would be redeeming. While his resume is shorter than modern greats like Roger Deakins and Robert Richardson, Savides has to be considered among the best working cinematographers, if for his work on Gerry and Elephant alone. But while Last Days is indeed a beautifully shot film, the visuals do nothing to mask the absence of thought.

When Gerry first played to film festival audiences, people thought it might have been a joke on art house seat-warmers to see how much they would tolerate. Real-time sunsets and 10-minute steadicam shots are unheard of recently outside of The Brown Bunny. Post theatrical release, however, people started to warm up to it, and the support it received allowed Elephant to be realized. There are surely people who get Last Days- “but that was Cobain” and so it goes-but wait as the end credits spill, hope for a sign that it was just a joke-maybe even a hazy post-shoot piñata celebration. That’s more fulfilling than what was just seen.

Years after Van Sant’s Psycho bombed, Ebert asked him why he remade the original. Van Sant replied that he did it so no one else would. It’s a dumb, pretentious response, and the same reasoning behind churning out this suicide watch.

-Shawn Wines