Last Days

Clearly based on Kurt Cobain, this dreary, mannered chronicle of a rock musician’s final drug-addled moments gives all-new, all-boring meaning to the word pretentious. On the bright side, Last Days marks the end of director Gus Van Sant's trilogy of pop pointlessness, including Gerry, in which Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walk the desert for two hours, and Elephant, in which cameras ponderously follow students around a Columbine-like high school. Last Days is comprised of static shots of the woozy, mumbling rocker wandering in and out of frame so incoherently you’ll swear these are the outtakes. It finally comes alive when the music starts and we're given any reason to care that someone is about to settle in for a long dirt nap. Unfortunately, Van Sant—whose early promise with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho has dissolved into auteur experimentation like this and outright disasters like his shot-for-shot remake of Psycho—seems more interested in technique than credible storytelling. How else to explain aimless scenes that meander for several minutes without a single cut, camera move, or line of dialogue? Or the movie's lack of a beginning or middle? When this film was screened at Cannes, some critics praised it, with one even comparing it to “a beautiful Renaissance painting.” Close. It's more like watching paint dry.