Here we are now, entertain us

Robert Christgau takes down Gus Van Sant's Last Days, his Kurt Cobain biopic starring Michael Pitt (of Murder By Numbers and The Dreamersnon-fame). His verdict: too pretty. Money quote:

Cobain was a sucker for this kind of project and probably would have dug it. But not counting a few lyrics, in his own art he took a more conventional path, and that conventionality was an essential component of the charisma Van Sant refuses to engage. Cobain was an arty, hypersensitive pretty boy, absolutely. But he wouldn't have been Elliott Smith if he hadn't rocked dynamite hooks like a motherfucker. The self he seemed to inhabit was animated by a populist passion Van Sant has no gift or taste for.

Exactly. Nearly 14 years after Nevermind's release fans overlook the fact that Butch Vig's production and mix was probably more revolutionary than Cobain's songs. It was as if Boston auteur Tom Scholz produced a Damned album. What his choice said about where his sympathies truly were led Cobain to hire Steve Albini for In Utero (ever the contradictory cuss, Cobain then had R.E.M. righthand man Scott Litt apply hand cream to "Heart-Shaped Box" and other songs which sounded like hits).

In another review (I counted four features on the Village Voice film page) Joshua Clover rebukes Van Sant for indulging in the same vacant art-house anomie that made Elephant one of the most boring, overpraised films in recent years:

They are the most ennui-filled people in the world, entirely without content. And Van Sant is in love with whiteness in the same eroticized way he's in love with fatality; in his image-world it's all ghosts all the time, moving so slowly they seem for a couple hours to be almost human.

The casting of Michael Pitt, who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio cloned as a harmless A student, is not an example of a turbulent force of nature who would upset the project's aura of respectability aura (Brando, or hell, Ryan Gosling he ain't).