Word: cobain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that high art met low trash on the Cote d'Azur, with two quirky North American directors offering analyses of death-love in the cult of showbiz. Today's prestige items: Gus Van Sant's Last Days, an imagining of the death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, and Where the Truth Lies, Atom Egoyan's film of a murder case involving a comedy duo not unlike Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Because Van Sant, from the U.S., and Egoyan, the Canadian, are revered for their elaborate, eccentric visions, we figured we would not get simple tabloid tattle. We came...
...Elephant, which traded off the Columbine shootings, Last Days is a pot of post-narrative sludge that hopes to attract an audience by alluding to a gruesome event, and turn a celebrity tragedy into an art film. "Although this film is inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain," Van Sant and his lawyers declare, "it is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed are also fictional." In other words, we're not paying anybody...
...Michael Pitt (the young American in Bertolucci's The Believers) incarnates Blake, the Cobain character, as a stumbling junkie whose monologues are often incomprehensible; we got a hint of their meaning only by reading the French subtitles. He trudges through the woods, swats imagined flies, collapses against doors. One exasperated woman asks him, "Do you say, 'I'm sorry that I'm a rock-and-roll cliche'?" Van Sant and Pitt aren't sorry. They embrace the standard version of the pop star as lost boy, doomed poet; Blake is a rock Rimbaud. At the end he dies...
...Maybe this year's Zeitgeist movie will be another Van Sant crypto-history, Last Days, with Michael Pitt as a doomed rock star in the mold of Kurt Cobain. A few days ago we heard an unsolicited rave on the film from Christopher Doyle, the Australian cinematographer and poet, who thinks Van Sant is one of the few directors today pushing toward a cinema of tomorrow. That recommendation would be enough to have us queueing for the film, if it weren't our job to see it and a hundred other "unmissables...
...Pixies (Frank Black, a.k.a. Black Francis on guitar and vocals, Kim Deal on bass, Joey Santiago on lead guitar and David Lovering on drums) formed in Boston in 1986, put out five albums of genius pop/punk, influenced essentially every guitar-based band of the ’90s (Kurt Cobain once admitted that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is just a Pixies rip-off) and gave real meaning to the word “alternative,” then imploded acrimoniously in 1993. Deal rejoined her previous band, the Breeders, Black and Santiago continued to make...