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 . FILM INFORMATION: 'Last Days'
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'
"Sex, drugs & punk rock. Add violence & time travel & you have . . . . Jubilee"
Derek Jarman's 'Jubilee' (1978) is a wildly beautiful film which strikes a precarious, and compelling, balance between sheer anarchy and genuine tenderness. Jubilee begins when Queen Elizabeth I (played with quiet power by Jenny Runacre, who also portrays Bod) has her court alchemist, the historical John Dee, summon Ariel. The sloe-eyed spirit with huge hands (whom Jarman describes as having "a glitter punk scintilla") transports all of them 400 years into the future – just beyond our own time – to a dystopic London, which has become a literal wasteland, overrun with violence and decay.
Let Jarman summarize Jubilee for you in his own words: "Law and order has finally been abolished and do-your-own-thing is the order of the day. The church is a strip club [and Buckingham Palace a recording studio].... Open war between all factions of society. A gang of bike girls centered at H.Q. in Southwark, rape and kill all adversaries, led by the Queen of Punk, Bod [Bodicea].... The music of groups like The Slits, Sex Pistols plays incessantly to rapturous reception. The film is anarchic and very beautiful." "Leave the guy alone, he's better than a vibrator and he's bigger" The film has misleadingly been called a "Punk movie." It is much more than that, although the then-nascent movement informs the film in many ways, from music to casting to tone. Punk's heyday was 1975–80, with its two key albums – The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash's The Clash – both appearing in 1977, the year Jubilee was filmed (coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee). Punk provided a clarion voice for alienated teenagers in its mix of hard-driving rock, socially aware but simple lyrics – that crystallized the mood of anger, powerlessness, and rebellion in the face of a severe economic recession – and a confrontational style which extended from the songs to the fashions of its devotees. 'Jubilee' provides a virtual catalog of the Punk Look, from Mad's (Toyah Willcox in a stunning performance) close-cropped hair dyed Day-Glo orange to angsty graffiti which covers almost every wall to the scrawled quotation from 'Psycho' which ends "...wouldn't even harm a fly" which fills the back of the jackets worn by the female biker gang. You may recall Hitchcock's final scene, when the strait-jacketed Norman Bates, "possessed" by his dead mother, tells us how harmless he now is, yeah, right. Even a small detail like this resonates, since the tangled connection between gender identity and violence is one of Jarman's key themes. "Most people would hang up the phone, she's hanging on for dear life." Jarman's brilliance as an artist allows him to meld all of these eclectic sources, and more (including his two wildly diverse stated sources: Punk fan magazines of the day and Frances A. Yates's The Art of Memory (1966), a classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page), into a film of consummate originality and power. He also brings beauty and emotional resonance to the film through his characters. He creates a resonance with these eccentric, and sometimes lethal, allegorical people. Jarman is well-known for including friends and lovers in his films. Not only does this provide a cost-effective approach to casting, it also brings a deeply personal connection to his films. Jarman not only published his autobiography in book form, throughout his life he also shot hundreds of hours of Super 8 footage. Some of those "home movies" found their way into his feature films, including the surreal "Jordan's Dance" and Jarman also re-edited and incorporated into Jubilee "Amyl's Dance,".
"I just love a man without its uniform."
Despite its Punk trappings, ultimately the film seems more about Punk than of it. How Jarman uses then-rising star Adam Ant reveals much about the film and filmmaker. When Crabs meets, and instantly tries to pick up, Kid (Adam Ant's character), she coos that he is "gorgeous." With his sweetly boyish persona – made just a bit wild by the black leather and painted-on lower sideburns – it is no wonder that Jarman, as reported by a friend on the DVD's documentary, fell "madly in love with him." But how Jarman uses Kid in the film may reveal at least as much about his sociopolitical insights as his romantic frustration. When Kid is asked what he does, he replies, "Nothing... Music." And throughout he is as passive offstage as he is frenzied onstage. His performance with his group, Adam and the Ants, is one of only two or three full musical numbers in the film; and it strikingly reveals Jarman's gifts as one of the originators of music videos.
But Kid is unable to connect with anyone, including Crabs. He seems content to lie on his stomach while Crabs pulls his t-shirt up and strokes his back, and that only because she has promised to introduce him to Borgia Ginz (played by "Orlando," aka Jack Birkett), the mogul who controls the entire world's media and hence political, and even religious, power structure. (Ginz shares a palatial mansion in Dorset with an aged Adolf Hitler.) Ginz is, of course, taken with Kid and signs him, immediately rechristening him "Scum." Claiming that's commercial. It's all they [the audience] deserve."
"It's like pornography; better than the real thing."
In the "triangle" between the two teasingly incestuous brothers, Sphinx and Angel (who utters the classic line, "I didn't know I was dead till I was fifteen."), and the artist Viv there was real connection and tenderness between all three of them, despite what many people would consider the highly "problematic" nature of their relationship. The brothers read as a gay couple and Jarman describes Viv as a "butch dyke." Yet they go to bed together; although the morning after Sphinx and Angel again seem more interested in each other than in Viv. What makes their relationship so poignant is that Jarman then goes on to show us their day together, which is the most genial sequence in the film. They also introduce us to the most hilarious character, Max – the Bingo king and former pimp, who now has a huge garden entirely of artificial flowers. (Max is played to the hilt by Neil Kennedy, who was a comparable character with the same name in Jarman's previous film, 'Sebastiane'.) You will not soon forget what happens when Max, horrified, spots a caterpillar on one of his plastic plants.
"Scum. That's commercial. It's all they [the audience] deserve."
Perhaps the most haunting, and disturbing, image of Kid is the close-up of Kid kissing his own image on TV and a moment later, he licks the screen lasciviously with his tongue, giving a decidedly postmodern twist to the myth of Narcissus. And on still another level, Jarman was showing his foresight into Punk's future. Just a few years after the release of Jubilee, as the filmmaker wrote in his memoir Dancing Ledge, "the film turned prophetic.... the streets burned in Brixton and Tosteth. Adam [Ant] was on Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball." Jarman concluded the passage by repeating the chilling words he gave Borgia Ginz at the end of 'Jubilee': "They all sign up in one way or another." " . . and cries and cries, clutching herself, rolling . . " The film's most overwhelming moment comes from an unlikely source: Mad. At one point, she and Amyl go off on a vendetta against two of the fascistic police officers. They find one, alone, taking a pee. Mad whips out her knife, as she and Amyl jump him, wrestle him to the ground, kicking and screaming. Then Mad, in a frenzy, castrates him. Although this is not Jubilee's only scene of "ultra violence," the result is unprecedented. Mad breaks down – the only time any character does this in the film – and cries and cries, clutching herself, rolling. Shockingly, this moment feels absolutely real. Significantly for the film, as actress Toyah Willcox (Mad) notes in the documentary on the DVD, Jarman shot a huge amount of film for this project. But this was the only instance where he included the "extended" footage. By implication, Jarman forces us to confront the full human toll taken by life in a completely anarchic world, without any order or social restraint. Although much of the film has depicted an ebullient, even enticing, picture of life in this near-future wasteland, this scene stops us cold. It forces us to reconsider the price of absolute "freedom" – and the deeply complex connections between anarchy and beauty – even as it humanizes the most dehumanized character in the film. It's an extraordinary, raw, literally visceral scene, and one which most will not soon forget.
No one can live in such a world, even in its ultimately commercialized form as 1970s Punk, with mass-produced albums and Punk boutiques. But Jarman ends his film on a much more subtly problematic note. In a hauntingly beautiful coda, we see our Elizabethan time travelers back in their own "Golden Age," as they walk along a placidly beautiful sea coast. But Elizabeth longs for a still earlier, and more pure, time, when she asks, "Oh, John Dee, do you remember those days? The whispered secrets at Oxford, like the sweet sea breeze? Codes and counter-codes." The 'doubleness' of her "codes" remark reminds us of the complexity of her reign: Does Jarman expect us not to know about the Machiavellian (or Borgian) intrigues, and murders, which marked the historical Elizabeth's court? As Mad remarks near the film's beginning, "There are no heroes." – yet Jarman acknowledges how we long for them, for a leader like Elizabeth, whom he describes (in his notes on Jubilee) as "The Virgin Queen, distant yet sympathetic, the paradigm of royalty." And what about John Dee, with his multiple nature, as another possible "hero"? He was a man half in the superstitious past (as an alchemist and magician) and half in the modern world (as one of the first scientists). The film nicely, and again - ironically, circles in on itself. Happiness is swept away with hope to be replaced by despair, all at the doing of the punks who are only acting out of what they feel is justice. Self destruction reigns supreme. Again, Jarman gives us no clear, or simple guides for our own lives. ~ J. Clark FILM INFORMATION: 'Jubilee'
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'
John Waters does a quirky spin on '50s nostalgia in Cry-Baby, his musical homage to Rebel Without a Cause and Romeo and Juliet. Set in Baltimore in 1954 at the birth of rock & roll, the film features Johnny Depp as Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker. Depp is pure charisma as a juvenile delinquent with a permanent tear slithering down his cheek, a reminder of his state-executed parents.
In the depths of his despair appears goody-goody girl Allison (Amy Locane), who has a sexual crush on Cry-Baby. But Allison's Pat Boone-like boyfriend, Baldwin (Stephen E. Miller), the leader of the squares, is dead set against Cry-Baby and the rest of the juvenile delinquents and leads a revolt against them. In the resultant riot, the juvenile delinquents are blamed for the chaos, and Cry-Baby finds himself dispatched to reform school. ~ Paul Brenner
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours" comes this brilliant film that redefines sexuality, love, and fidelity.
Although critics often resist the urge to pour praise like waterfalls, it is hard to do anything but gush over exquisite small jewels like 'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD', Michael Mayer's measured and moving film adaptation of the novel by Michael Cunningham. Like similar films of its style and size -- You Can Count On Me springs immediately to mind -- it bears the marks of care and craftsmanship. Imperfect, uneven, and occasionally rough in spots, Mayer's new film wears its flaws like scratches and marks on a careworn antique, features that only serve to distinguish and enhance its overall uniqueness. The subject matter -- about a trio of friends who redefine sexuality, love, and fidelity to fit their own needs -- will not appeal to everyone, but then, the greatest art never has. Let the praise-laden waterfall commence...'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD' is the finest cinematic study of relationships to come along in quite some time.
Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, has turned his own earlier novel into a workable, adept screenplay that loses none of its wordplay or emonal impact. If prose can ever be characterized as "poetic", Cunningham's would fit the bill; the language nearly bursts with metaphor and emotion, powerfully magnifying every interaction. 'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD' is a contemplation about the potentiality of our existence, of the possibilities inherent in living a life...the idea that not just anything can happen, but everything can happen. And yet, Cunningham is not simply awash in a gorgingly potent worldview. Even with all of life's bounty, he is keenly aware that human existence is solitary, and that our need for contact and love from others compels us through our days. As one of the characters says in 'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD', we are all both beautiful and alone. It isn't quite a contradiction, or an oxymoron. It is, simply and magnificently, a revelation ootif reality.
Mayer, an award-winning theatrical director making his cinematic debut, is blessed with a calm, assured style and a talented cast that interprets Cunningham's tale with compassion and care. As childhood friends in Cleveland, the orphaned Bobby (Colin Farrell) and the geekish Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) bonded tightly; Bobby was even taken in after his parents' deaths by Jonathan's parents (Sissy Spacek and Matt Frewer). After high school, however, Jonathan left for New York, where he moved in with Clare (Robin Wright Penn). Bobby, lost and alone, eventually follows to New York, where he begins a relationship with Clare, who is still in love with the now-openly-gay Jonathan. Chronicling over a dozen years in their lives, 'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD' measures the struggles of these three people to find a balance and future together as they grow up, change, and metastasize into a configuration outside of the mainstream...but not outside of a personal and contextualized normalcy.
Perhaps the biggest revelation for audiences will be Colin Farrell, who proves himself to be a much better actor that his hunky good looks or clunky blockbuster resume (Daredevil, Phone Booth, Minority Report) would indicate. As Bobby, Farrell finds the courage to wholly inhabit a gentle, slightly dimwitted, and ultimately soft persona -- Bobby is the antithesis of an action star role. His natural handsomeness is muted by his injured eyes and timid gestures, which make him a most endearingly sensitive lunkhead. For a Hollywood player on the rise as Farrell is, it is a surprising career move and an exceptionally commendable performance, neither show-offy nor self-aggrandizing. Male actors don't win awards for playing soft, but in a more perfect world, Farrell's performance would be rewarded with an Oscar.
Equally luminous are the performances by Sissy Spacek (In The Bedroom) and newcomer Dallas Roberts (Burn This). Spacek, unquestionably one of the great actresses of her generation, makes Alice her own without imposing any strictures that might upset the precarious balance of her character's incongruities. As a woman trying to adapt and reach beyond her own limits, Alice is the perfect embodiment of those women who rediscovered their self-esteem and direction midway through life. Likewise, stage veteran Roberts nimbly reveals the lonely pain behind Jonathan's cool Manhattan-ish flair. Futilely trying to disengage from emotional entanglements, Roberts' Jonathan is a walking contradiction performed with seamless precision. Also worth noting are the charming performances by Harris Allan (Queer as Folk) and Erik Smith (Cold Mountain), who play the teenage Bobby and Jonathan during the first quarter of the film.
Set against a rollicking, evocative 70's score featuring Laura Nyro, Jefferson Airplane, Leonard Cohen, Yaz, and Mozart, 'A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD' belongs in the pantheon of classic New York stories (even though the characters' search for roots lead them elsewhere for periods of time). New York City is itself, of course, both a real place and a metaphor, a combination of gritty geography and modern myth. Brimming with self-absorption and self-discovery, the unlikely dreamers of Cunningham's universe mirror those of classics like Annie Hall, The Apartment, Angels in America and Moonstruck. In the city that never sleeps, the possibilities of life are endless. And in Bobby, Clare, and Jonathan's home, there's always more life, in all its glory, waiting around the next corner. ~ Gabriel Shank Film Information: 'A Home At The End Of The World'
* Note: The last two songs by Laura Nyro, for some ridiculous reason, are NOT included on the original soundtrack CD. Both songs are prominently featured in significant portions of the script so they are included here for your listening pleasure! .
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