BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Dan1863Sickles This movie is pretty bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Gus Van Sant is a guy I really hate because his movie EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES ruined one of the best books I ever read. (Read the book by Tom Robbins, it's amazing.)So I assumed going in that Van Sant meeting Kurt Cobain was going to be a typical Van Sant massacre, a Bambi Meets Godzilla orgy of artistic self-indulgence with Gus doing Kurt "his way." And I was right. But strangely, if you give this movie a chance it's not all that bad. The condescending, one-note story line, (helpless, fragile, beautiful boy dies slowly while drainers, users, liars, and cheats circle like vultures), is rendered poetic and even poignant by the sheer artistry of the camera work and the striking visual images. It's a great achievement, in a way. Gus Van Sant can convey despair better with a single shot of tall grass than another director could with ten pages of dialogue. You have to give him credit, in a way.Lost in all the dreamy doom and damnation, however, is the disturbing sense that Gus really doesn't know much about Kurt Cobain . . . other than that he was a beautiful boy who died. (And therefore the perfect object of desire?) Even though Michael Pitt (later to become a legend as Jimmy Darmody in HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE) gives an incredibly charismatic and nuanced performance, there's nothing here to suggest the dynamic energy of a charismatic and rebellious dynamo who changed the music world forever. Whatever music you hear is only to underline the despair, not the talent.Meanwhile, the outside world, (the squares, the straights, and always and above all the women) are dismissed as irrelevant and grotesque, monsters who just don't love our beautiful boy enough. This is sheer laziness. The cheap shots at Mormons and traveling salesmen would have been stale on a vaudeville stage one hundred years ago. But Van Sant can get away with it, because by God he's a real artist with a dreamy touch. All that art in the service of so much self-indulgence.

teryolawwashere The theme/plot/point of this movie simply doesn't work as some kind of obscure art-flick. Gus Van Sant uses the exact same framework as he did in 'Elephant': Long shots of boring everyday things that everyone does.The very big difference however, is that it worked very well in Elephant. The seemingly trivial shots of everyday happenings worked as a contrast to the disaster that would eventually come in the end. (And this isn't a spoiler because if you're gonna watch Elephant, you know it's about a school shooting.) Showing the young children interact with one another and their families for the entire movie made sense to give off just how unexpected and horrible the event must have felt.In this movie however, it's really just stupid and doesn't make for anything than a really boring film that you regret giving a chance. Absolutely nothing happens during the entire movie and then he dies. That's it. Im not exaggurating either, all we see is long shots of "Cobain" stumbling around looking druggy. He barely ever talks and when he does he just mumbles incoherently, there is no insight into his mind, he just looks doped up and then he suddenly dies. It's really just a terrible terrible disappointment and a failure of cinema."An introspective artist who is buckling under the weight of fame, professional obligations and a mounting feeling of isolation" is a very interesting topic for a movie. The right thing for Van Sant to do would have been to actually include dialogue with psychological insight into the mind of Kurt Cobain and really bring us into his head and what he is going through. It's not IMPOSSIBLE to do that because there are plenty of diaries, biographies and journal entry's that you can draw from to give some kind of a understanding into his problems with fame and himself.But no. Instead he chose to do something that is just wrong on every concievable level. Im not going to say that he chose to do something cheap, because I have more respect for him as an artist than that. I don't think he threw together a shitty movie just for the sake of it. But misguided? Poor judgment of how to treat the subject matter? Completely. 1/10.

rbk102750-1 Beside being trite and a story line too often used, the chromatography was a complete bore. It tried way to be hard to be ultra artistic instead of trying hard to help tell the story. From the ultra slow pans around the actors to the too often used window reflections to the fade out blur...OMG it was so boring I could hardly stand to watch it.Now I will take the rest of the review to waste even more of your time trying to meet the ridiculous and arbitrary minimum 10 line review requirement of IMDb. Really, you guys should know better than anyone not ever movie deserves a 10 line review.if you decide to watch this movie, Please, please don't pay any money to do so...You will feel ripped off.

jeannine-17 The movie needs a story and dwells on morose and dingy themes of growing insanity. If you wanted a movie to capture what it must have felt like to ***BE Kurt Kobaine then BINGO this is your movie. If you want to be entertained look elsewhere. This is a train wreck. No story ... No story ... No story ... No story ... NO STORY. You can make the same points but have a story.Some small sections of music make this tolerable. The scenery is awesome.Why did I waste my time? It is like looking at a car wreck you just can't help it