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Gus Van Sant's rock epiphany is the final film in his informal "Death Trilogy" which includes the films "Gerry" & "Elephant".

"It's a long lonely journey from death to birth." ~ Blake

Not everyone will love "Last Days." Nonetheless it concludes a minimalist trilogy that continued to build Gus Van Sant's credo as a serious and original filmmaker and did so better than anything since "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho". And in its way it's every bit as good as its predecessors, "Gerry" and "Elephant", and like them is HBO-sponsored and exquisitely filmed in a boxlike and claustrophobic small format. The irony is that this career-making role for the young Michael Pitt is that his role in "Last Days" contains little discernible dialogue and he only mumbles but he embodies, lives and becomes his role as few actors you will see have done. He goes to a dangerous and disturbing place. River Phoenix might have taken the part, but maybe it's a good thing for him he never did.

Pitt channels the dying spirit of Kurt Cobain as he was, isolated in a big house, avoided by people there and avoiding them and almost everyone who came looking or called. Once he picks up the phone when his producer is calling and he listens, but never speaks. Blake (Pitt's character's name) is a shaky, peripatetic Howard Hughes, who goes native in the first sequence, wandering in a daze, walking into the woods, bathing in a river, spending the night by a bonfire of sticks. The mumbling is eerie, it's eavesdropping without insight for us. As he returns to the house, stumbles about, prepares makeshift meals in the kitchen, puts on a dress and brandishes a shotgun, the lack of human interaction brings home as no dialogue-written scenes ever could how isolated and mad he has become.

Since "Last Days" is largely a mood piece -- a splendidly original, dreamlike one -- setting is crucial and the old stone house with its crumbling, paint-peeling walls and mess and sound equipment and instruments and paintings, is a major player, so well represented in the elegant, original cinematography of Harris Sayides that it resembles no place else you've ever been. There are three or four other people in the house -- the action's so chaotic and haphazard you may not quite know who or how many. One's clearly "Asia," Asia Argento, and she's sleeping with "Scott," Scott Green, and there's "Luke," Lucas Haas, tall and gangly in Coke-bottle glasses. Blake sneaks up on Asia and Scott with a shotgun when they're in bed together sleeping. Typically, nothing happens. He doesn't shoot, and they don't notice him. They and other people go out to and return from nightly revels. Blake is… just there.

As in "Elephant" Van Sant's approach is neutral. He does not analyze or explain or judge, and the actors are free to improvise and be themselves. Blake's respected because it's his house, but he's also a kook. Random visitors who're let inside are grotesque and comic: first it's dorky but cute twin Mormon "Elders," then a large well-spoken black man selling a renewal of a Yellow Pages ad from the year before. "How's your day been so far?" he asks as an opener. "Uh….it's another day…." mumbles Blake. He's cooperative in a rote sort of way but there's little indication he knows what he's talking about. There's a detective and a young man who once knew Blake, who escapes them and other people by running outside to the woods again. These two are neither sinister nor funny: they just are. They're just interlopers, like everybody else, into Blake's lost world.

The method that this trilogy has in common is that it requires quiet acceptance of the proceedings; that if you give yourself up to its sometimes real time sequences (especially in "Gerry," where Van Sant says they're influenced by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr), they're hypnotic and special, and if you don't, they're just irritating and boring. The experience requires a lot from the viewer. It's hard to describe a movie in which little happens. Nothing turns out to be quite a lot and you might remember that James Joyce wrote a long detailed novel about the events in the life of a little man in a single day in Dublin. It's certainly important that Pitt is deeply in character. If his acting were mannered or theatrical or unfelt, nothing would work. When he finally sings one song, a plangent cry of despair with the refrain, "It's a long lonely journey from death to birth," it's very Cobain, but Pitt's own song and passionate, exciting performance.

There's a kind of climax here, but there's nobody (but us) to witness it. Luke and Scott are up in bed with each other. As in 'Elephant', several sequences repeat. Blake seems to be dying repeatedly, as Asia stumbles upon him lying on the floor and he seems to nod out, though you never see him do drugs and maybe it's just the after effect of them from long before. Finally he's gone. We don't see him do that either. His soul quietly climbs naked up out of his supine body, like a Duane Michals photo. Then there's all the police, the ambulance, and the other inhabitants sneak off, as Blake did. It's all a pageant.

It was Grunge Rock and Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994 at the age of 26, to whom the essence of this film is dedicated. If you give yourself to it and take it in its own context it's a wonderful film, a beautiful funny-sad experience of doomed-damned youth and a deeply felt meditation on isolation and death. ~ Chris Knipp
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FILM INFORMATION: 'Last Days'

Web: Additional Cast, Details and Bios at IMDb
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writer: Gus Van Sant
Full Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Music | Drama
Awards: 1 Win 3 Nominations
Runtime: 97 minutes
Spoken Language: English
Subtitles: n/a
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FILM CLIP: 'Last Days'



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Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'

Last Days.part01.exe Last Days.part03.rar Last Days.part05.rar Last Days.part07.rar

Last Days.part02.rar Last Days.part04.rar Last Days.part06.rar Last Days.part08.rar

Method 2.) Download and rejoin files with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) and (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat.

Last Days.avi.001 Last Days.avi.003 Last Days.avi.005 Last Days.avi.007

Last Days.avi.002 Last Days.avi.004 Last Days.avi.006 Last Days.avi.008

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"Elephant" is the second film in Gus Van Sant's informal "Death Trilogy". It is a deeply affecting, haunting film with a laser-like focus on the spirit crushing ennui which permeates our culture and a brilliant distillation of the resulting alienation and angst. "Gerry" is the first film in this trilogy and "Last Days" is the final film.

'Elephant' is Gus Van Sant's brilliant and mind-blowing distillation of teenage alienation and angst. Set on one of those sterile suburban high school campuses, the film recounts a typical day in the life of a school - typical that is until it ends in a Columbine-type massacre.

Here is a film in which style does indeed become substance, where the 'meaning' lies in the form and shape of the film itself. Rather than tell us a conventional 'story,' Van Sant has chosen to give his film the look and feel of a pseudo-documentary, merely recording the events and conversations that occur that day, a day we are led to believe is not unlike every other at that school. Van Sant's prying camera eye turns us into voyeurs, as we observe the cliquishness, petty humiliations, and sheer overwhelming banality that have defined high school life for so many of us. Van Sant uses space brilliantly.

Despite the fact that this is undoubtedly a school with a large student population, the characters on whom he focuses seem always to be somehow isolated from almost everyone else around them. None of the characters we see really seem to have any connection with one another, and even when they do, it tends to be of only the most superficial kind. They are like people stranded on their own individual islands, enduring their suffering alone and in silence. Van Sant sets the tone with his tracking shots of characters strolling down seemingly endless corridors heading to nowhere in particular, making little or no human contact as they go.

The camera, throughout the film, seems to have a mind of its own, often avoiding what seems to be a major plot point and, instead, zeroing in on something that seems to have little or no real importance. Then through the process of editing, he weaves nothing less than a tapestry of alienation. By concentrating so intently on the seemingly irrelevant minutia of daily life, Van Sant brings to the film a sense of documentary immediacy most fiction films lack. We are made privy to bits and pieces of conversation only to have the talk dribble off as we or the characters turn the corner and move on to the next group of people. It is the deadening 'sameness,' the insignificance of so much of what we see and hear that makes this such a sad and haunting experience.

One thing Van Sant refuses to do is try to 'explain' why the killers act as they do. He's smart enough to know that there is no single explanation for such behavior, that it arises from a variety of sources and that it is primarily the product of a general feeling of alienation in modern society. We see one of the murderers taunted as a fag and suffering humiliation at the hands of two schoolmates, the second killer playing a violent video game and perusing a gun magazine, but these, in and of themselves, cannot be the sole explanations. At best they are symptoms of a much deeper societal sickness, one that Van Sant can only hint at but never fully grasp - for who among us can claim to truly understand it? What 'Elephant' does is to make us focus on and actually see this spirit-crushing ennui which permeates our culture and which defines life for so many of our young.

The director has drawn fine work from his cast of talented unknowns. Their every word, their every gesture rings believable and true. He has also employed Beethoven's 'Fur Elise' to serve as a haunting refrain throughout the film, capturing the poignancy of a world in which beauty, spontaneity and joy seem to have been removed.

There are some who will find 'Elephant' to be slow-moving, empty, arty and pretentious. For those there are plenty of mindlessly upbeat depictions of high school life to watch. But for those who can appreciate a film artist working at the peak of his form, 'Elephant' is a mesmerizing, vision-altering experience that pushes the boundaries of the medium and takes us to a place, emotionally, that we haven't ever been before. ~ Roland E. Zwick

FILM INFORMATION:'Elephant'

Web: Cast, Bios and Additional Details at IMDb
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writer: Gus Van Sant
Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Crime | Drama
Awards: 5 wins & 6 nominations
Runtime: 81 min
Spoken Language: English
Subtitled in: n/a
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FILM CLIP:'Elephant'
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DOWNLOAD & EXTRACT FILM FILES: 'Elephant'
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Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'

Elephant.part01.exe	Elephant.part02.rar
Elephant.part03.rar	Elephant.part04.rar
Elephant.part05.rar	Elephant.part06.rar
Elephant.part07.rar	Elephant.part08.rar

Method 2.) Download files & rejoin with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat.

Elephant.avi.001	Elephant.avi.002
Elephant.avi.003	Elephant.avi.004
Elephant.avi.005	Elephant.avi.006
Elephant.avi.007	Elephant.avi.008

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"Gerry" is the first in Gus Van Sants informal "Death Trilogy". The second film in the trilogy is "Elephant" and the final film is "Last Days".

"Gerry" sketches a portrait of
a complicated friendship that looks back obliquely to the
bond between River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in
"My Own Private Idaho".

GERRY serves as an extreme of Gus Van Sant's departure into slow-take cinema. Not surprisingly, as he showed a year later with his Palme D'Or winning "Elephant", he can settle into the minimalist mode of filmmaking better than almost any other director.

In "Gerry", he makes outstanding use of the stylistic tradition; as the film progresses, the audience, the integrity of which must be permitting, gradually gets sucked into its unique aesthetic rhythms. At 103 minutes, the film feels infinitely longer and more profound than one would expect. Unlike most films, Gus Van Sant's are demanding. They require us to slow our normal human functions until we are in a peaceful state of quietude, prepared to succumb to the film's simple pleasures, whether it be hypnotic audio or extensively long landscape takes. Particularly in "Gerry", it is quiet easy to be put into that meditative state by its heavy breathing, stomping footsteps, and deserted sublimity.

The plot involves two hapless twenty something hikers, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, as they take a walk through the desert and end up hopelessly lost. In the first thirty minutes of the film we are introduced to the two characters, both named Gerry, as they rant mindlessly about random aspects of their lives, often times seemingly inside jokes. The characters most certainly present nothing close to philosophical musings, but rather create a disparate contrast between their innocence and the majestic, imposing landscape they inhabit.

Eventually, when we are right there emotionally with the two Gerrys, Van Sant begins to work his magic. Hypnotic long takes of time-lapsed skies and barren terrain give way to fluid tracking shots of two broken down shadowy figures as they trudge aimlessly (there is one shot that is so strikingly similar to a shot in "Werckmeister Harmonies" that it must be a homage, given Van Sant's reverence of Bela Tarr). The silent world that has become that of Gerry and Gerry is depicted so magnificently with the dedicated technique presented by Van Sant. The piercing piano lines that are added at opportune times take us to an extremely high emotional peak, and spike with the climactic ending of the film, one that is truly devastating. With Gerry, you will once again be astonished by Gus Van Sant. ~ Carson Lund
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FILM INFORMATION: 'Gerry'

Web: Additional Cast, Details and Bios at IMDb
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writers: Casey Affleck, Matt Damon & Gus Van Sant
Full Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Adventure | Drama
Awards: 2 Wins & 3 Nominations
Runtime: 103 minutes
Spoken Language: English
Subtitles: French srt subtitle file available for download
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FILM CLIP: 'Gerry'



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Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'

Gerry.part01.exe Gerry.part03.rar Gerry.part05.rar Gerry.part07.rar Gerry.part09.rar

Gerry.part02.rar Gerry.part04.rar Gerry.part06.rar Gerry.part08.rar Gerry.part10.rar

Method 2.) Download and rejoin files with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) and (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat.

Gerry.avi.001 Gerry.avi.003 Gerry.avi.005 Gerry.avi.007 Gerry.avi.009

Gerry.avi.002 Gerry.avi.004 Gerry.avi.006 Gerry.avi.008 Gerry.avi.010

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In Gus Van Sant's feature debut he gives his material fresh shape in a unique invigorating, syncopated style. It keeps coming at you in surprising, dazzling and jazzy ways.

The deadpan comic buzz you get from Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy" is practically narcotic. The movie heightens your senses and mildly anesthetizes them at the same time, like a potent mixture of stimulants and depressants. One of the most invigoratingly original American comedies since Jim Jarmusch's 'Stranger Than Paradise', "Drugstore Cowboy" follows druggy, irregular rhythms all its own. Whether in a heavy-lidded daze or wired with giddy, post-high paranoia, "Drugstore Cowboy" displays an uncanny alertness to detail and texture -- yellow-white bus headlights that barely penetrate the slate-gray, late-afternoon gloom on a rain-drenched northwestern road; the surreal surge of blood into a hypodermic syringe as it enters a vein in intensified close-up. But the film's vibrant aliveness to such minute sensations is submerged beneath a cold, clammy complexion: the blue-gray pallor of a day-old corpse.

Set under the oppressive, overcast skies of Portland, Oregon, in 1971, "Drugstore Cowboy" boldly stakes out a piece of cinematic fringe territory, as seemingly remote as the chilly little corner of the world in which this dead-end road movie takes place. In a late-'80s America obsessed with winners, and a contemporary climate of anti-drug sentiment verging on hysteria, Van Sant has made a devastatingly funny, melancholy but unromanticized picture about a bedraggled band of doped-up losers -- with no apologies to (or excuses for) anybody. It's a shame you even feel the need to mention that this isn't a revisionist anti-drug tract, or a seductive glamorization of narcotics use/abuse. That much ought to be as apparent as it is irrelevant to what this movie's up to.

The first shot fixes us inside the consciousness of Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon, in a perfectly modulated performance), the 26-year-old leader of a scruffy, four-person pharmaceutical burglary ring. Staring semi-catatonically into the camera from his mattress, with hallucinatory lights playing across over his cold-sweat-glistened face, Bob appears to be either high or dying. Or both. He's fully aware of what is happening to him, and how he got here, but he doesn't (or can't) move. For the moment, he's just along for the ride. And he takes us with him, down a convoluted and dope-sodden memory lane.

"I was once a shameless, full-time drug fiend," Bob recalls in voiceover as he reminisces about his druggie days of not so long ago, when his family circle included his loyal partner/girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his earnestly dense, Saint Bernard-like buddy Rick (James Le Gross) and Rick's restive teenage girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham). All of these terrific performers -- along with William S. Burroughs as a defrocked, zoned-out junkie priest, James Remar as Bob's cop nemesis, Grace Zabriskie as Bob's scolding mom and Max Perlich as a neighborhood weasel -- inhabit their roles organically, never betraying any sense of superiority to their characters.

We first see Bob's crew in grainy, shaky 8mm home-movie memories, self-consciously goofy images of youthful, stoned innocence. These compulsive outlaws aren't greedy career criminals; they're benumbed rather than hardened. As they see it, they're just trying to make a living the best way they know how. And living, for them, means forever scrambling from one fix to the next, searching to sustain that elusive chemical high. Bob can't even wait until he gets home after pulling a job. He shoots up in the backseat of the getaway car and slumps against the window as little silhouetted, refrigerator-magnet images of cowboy hats and syringes slide down the glass, like shadowy floaters gliding across the surface of your eyeballs.

While the rest of the gang provides distraction, Bob trusts only himself to do the hands-on work, rifling through behind-the-counter pharmacy drawers for prime pills and injectables. He's ecstatic after a score, bragging about the street value of the loot, but he never gets around to selling any of it because of the insatiable habits of his consumer household. Dianne gets a sexual thrill from the drugs, but like the impotent Joe in Andy Warhol's Trash (one of this movie's funny, dopey ancestors), Bob isn't interested. He's already planning the next job, the next challenge. Looking for that imaginary pot of pharmeceuticals at the end of the rainbow, Bob gets as big a kick from stealing as he does from the illegally obtained substances themselves.

Bob and Dianne, who have settled into their roles as old man and old lady to the childlike Rick and Nadine, take their parental responsibilities seriously. In one hilarious living-room family conference, the stoned "parents" give the "kids" a wacked-out lesson in survival, solemnly explaining the oblique but somehow uncontestable reasons behind such superstitious house rules as No Dogs and Never Put a Hat on the Bed.

There's so much going on here: Bob and Dianne, intent upon impressing Rick and Nadine with the gravity of the matters at hand, seem to be talking themselves into believing their own implausible explanations, recalling the tragi-comic tale of a beloved housepet as if it were a nearly forgotten bad dream they once shared. Gullible Rick sincerely wants to believe them, but is surprised to find himself mildly skeptical. Still, he's good-natured enough to give Bob the benefit of any doubt. And Nadine -- like a brattly little girl who's always spoiling illusions by asking 'Why?' -- doesn't swallow a word of it, though she's too scared and insecure to admit it. She's tired of being Bob's scapegoat, the source of the hex he claims is bringing them bad luck.

Needless to say, this is not a movie about the "Just Say No" generation, although it does reveal some of the glibness behind that specious motto. "Just Say No" may make a fine slogan for a publicity campaign aimed at schoolchildren, but for junkies already driven by the desperate (and inevitably doomed) need to string out a perpetual chemical high, it's simply not a realistic option. Bob eventually decides to "Just Say No" -- but it takes a junkie's full-blown nightmare come true (smuggling a corpse out of a motel room during a sherriff's convention) to turn him around. Rather than face a lifetime hex, he decides trade in his illegal habit for an authorized methadone maintainence program and a regular job, even though he knows it means breaking up the family.

Bob's conversion isn't a triumph for sobriety, just another manifestation of his innate integrity. For Bob, the straight life proves scarcely any different from the high life -- you just trade one form of lucidity for another, one form of numbness for another. Drugs, he reasons (without irony), are just things people use "to relieve the pressures of everyday life, like tying their shoelaces." The toughest thing is learning to live with the uncertainty: "Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But dope fiends have a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles..." ~
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FILM INFORMATION: 'Drugstore Cowboy'

Web: Additional Cast, Details and Bios at IMDb
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writers: James Fogle (novel) & Gus Van Sant (screenplay)
Full Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Crime | Drama
Awards: 10 Wins & 4 Nominations
Runtime: 102 minutes
Spoken Language: English
Subtitles: n/a
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FILM CLIP: 'Drugstore Cowboy'



DOWNLOAD & EXTRACT FILM FILES: 'Drugstore Cowboy'
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Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'

Drugstore Cowboy.part01.exe Drugstore Cowboy.part03.rar Drugstore Cowboy.part05.rar Drugstore Cowboy.part07.rar

Drugstore Cowboy.part02.rar Drugstore Cowboy.part04.rar Drugstore Cowboy.part06.rar Drugstore Cowboy.part08.rar

Method 2.) Download and rejoin files with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) and (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat.

Drugstore Cowboy.avi.001 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.003 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.005 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.007

Drugstore Cowboy.avi.002 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.004 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.006 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.008

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