Somehow, I actually forgot to mention something about Last Days in my post below, namely having to do with the film title. There are no credits to the movie until the very end, and when the title card shows up it reads “Gus Van Sant’s Last Days.”
I haven’t seen this really mentioned anywhere, and I guess I just hadn’t noticed that some of the ads read that way as well. Having that kind of credit on a title card so that the director’s name as a possessive becomes part of the title is extremely rare, certainly more so than the ubiquitous “A film by …” credit on a separate card. But obviously seeing those white letters pop-up on a black background after spending more than an-hour-and-a-half watching those particular images makes them read not just as “Gus Van Sant’s [film] … Last Days,” but also as “Gus Van Sant’s Last Days.”
I’m not trying to read a death-wish into Van Sant’s film, but it was just eerie. I sincerely doubt this was a credit imposed on the film by HBO Films. Credits — placement or non-standard styles — are negotiated as part of a contract, so Van Sant must have specifically requested it. Fellini’s name was regularly attached to many of his films as part of the title — Fellini Satyricon, Fellini’s Roma, Fellini’s Casanova — but I don’t actually know if that was his auteurist choice to put his stamp even more specifically on the film or primarily a marketing ploy for his films’ releases, especially here. Either way, I wonder if in some way Van Sant was actually inspired specifically by Fellini, who grew out of the Italian Neorealism movement to create something that certainly bridged the gap to what I might call the hyperrealism of Van Sant’s trilogy.
Yet after walking out of the theater, I simply couldn’t get that out of my mind. We had just watched Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. A movie? A statement? Hmmm.
Out of Focus 