Last Days (2005) Dir. Gus Van Sant
A companion piece to Van Sant’s Palme d’Or winning Elephant, Last Days is equally rewarding. Telling a fictionalised account of the final moments of Kurt Cobain’s life, we watch Blake (Michael Pitt) as he stumbles around his decaying mansion mumbling to himself and avoiding the painful encounters with his friends. It’s a quiet and fascinating piece that fights the argument of cinema as art. There’s just something about this movie that I couldn’t shake for a few days. The scene in which a character sits listening to The Velvet Underground’s Velvet in Furs has especially stayed with me. It’s one of the best uses of music in a film I’ve seen, but why? Those kind of questions are what make Gus Van Sant movies so great.