NPCoombs
Registered: 04-2005
Posts: 32
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Last Days
I think readers of this board would enjoy 'Last Days', which is a masterpiece of modernist filmmaking.
It is a tragic, melancholy and romantic meditation on death that reminds me of elements of Ozu and Kubrick. The rock star theme is almost completely irrelevant, there is very little music in the film, just the slow fading of life.
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6/11/2006, 12:08 pm
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DavidWishard
Registered: 05-2006
Posts: 4
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Re: Last Days
Yes, so few people seemed to mention that forgotten film. Among Van Sant's "lugubrious cycle" it was by far the best. I think that it has a few slights problems which I'd like to mention. I think the film lends itself too much to being broken down into "favorite" shots. I remember being awestruck by the shot where the rock star, wearing a dress and huge boots, suddenly begins to bend over and sort of die, right on the floor, or the famous long take from outside of the rock star composing a whole song from scratch. However, this shot to shot, scene to scene structure seems to make the film into a collection of pieces that the viewer can pick and choose among. Scenes like that with the phone book salesman or the music agents riffing in the drive to the forest house were do obviously improvised that they felt like pure filler.
However, this is not to say it was a bad film. I was hypnotized by it. The sound was quite astounding and Van Sant's general conveyance of the disgusting, grimy, unhygienic and aimlessness of the extreme bohemian life was frightening to me, having lived with similar people a year ago. The late-waking pointlessness of everyone's life was just disgusting. The film's chief achievement, I believe, is its shatteringly slow-melting decay, it's putrid and suffocating angst. It made me never want to leave my dished unwashed again.
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6/12/2006, 6:48 am
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