This is Brad Pitt trying for an oscar by taking his turn as a retard.

Regarding any awards for acting, most critics will view his ambition as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing about the cow's leg, and assuring her that he will be gentle. Tactically, it wasn't a bad career move; the execution, however, stunk. While the rest isn't half bad, of the film's three hours, at least two involve Pitt possessed by Death and trying to experience life; instead it kills life - the kind that sits in theatres and expects entertainment...

The recent wave of post Marty/Charlie retard movies started in 1988 when Dustin Hoffman was a clumsier and more stupid adult than Tom Hanks in Big, and won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Acting with his role as an autistic adult (Rain Man). In the next year, Daniel Day-Lewis showed that a wheelchair isn't always enough (Tom Cruise thankfully missed with Born on the Fourth of July) and that total paralysis and speech impediments are better career moves; best actor went to My Left Foot (1989).

Next up, Robert De Niro, who was nominated for Awakenings (1990). The following year a jealous Robin Williams took off his loony-bin lab coat (which he wore as De Niro's doctor) to try his turn as a three-cans-short-of-a-six-pack homeless guy named Parry in The Fisher King (1991). That same year Harrison Ford missed getting nominated (even with Mike Nichols directing) as a shithead corporate lawyer who gets a bullet in his brain and is transformed into a nice dummy (Regarding Henry).

Al Pacino won in 1992 playing a blind prick (Scent of a Woman), and the next year the oscar went to the operatically delirious and sarcoma-covered Tom Hanks (Philadelphia). Returning to the basics, Hanks went two-for-two the following year portraying a charming retard named Forest Gump (1994).

A suicidal drunk won the next year (Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas), and then came a banner year, 1996: Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, and Geoffrey Rush in Shine (two nominations, but Rush won).

Oops, almost forgot Pitt's nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a straight jacket (1995's Twelve Monkeys). Oops, or that he won the Golden Globe in the same category. See a pattern yet?

It's not hard for me to imagine a cycle where vain and award hungry stars put pressure on their agents; the agents then create a demand for variations-on-a-retard projects; the studio execs then pressure their tame writers to come up with anything, anything (fat dumb sheriff role for Sly) that will sign the celebrity power to pull the movie. As an incidence to winning the awards, you see, you make more money.

In Meet Joe Black, Pitt is supposed to be the very slow-thinking, ponderous, and entirely uninteresting universal force we sometimes call death. What the movie aspired to was an inverted Anne Rice description of Louis' experiences becoming an undead vampire (oops, forgot that Pitt played Louis in Interview with the Vampire).

What it achieves is Pitt looking like a retard licking peanut butter for the first time (it's much more interesting watching him lick Claire Forlani for the first time, but this is due solely to Forlani's considerable beauty and screen presence).

Pity Pitt's agent (probably desperately trying to get him to do romantic sex comedies with Jennifer Aniston). When Joe Black tanks, he'll take the heat from Pitt though it's the director who screwed up a great project by casting Pitt instead of Jim Carrey, who could have given us death experiencing for the first time sex, flatulism, and humor (the joy of giving Hopkins' butler wedgies, say) in a great comedy. It would have really worked...

Despite my deliberately anti-pc tone (I'm a firm believer that 99% of humor is at someone or something's expense), I really liked a few of the above films (Children of a Lesser God, for example).
Anthony Hopkins plays the exact same character he did in The Edge (beloved billionaire book collector). He has an apparently undiagnosed cardiac condition, is approaching his 65th birthday (and a party on Long Island that is shaping up to be a huge event), and has just decided not to merge his CNN-like company into a larger media corporation that won't run it with his ideals.

Part of the movie's weakness is this assumption that there's no conflict between being a billionaire and a really sweet humanitarian, but this is more than compensated by Hopkins, who really is just great to watch.

The movie's best scene comes early and is the stuff of fairy tales and chick daydreams; essentially the perfect woman (Hopkins' daughter who is also a doctor) meets the man of her dreams in a coffee shop. Pitt is a lawyer going into a new low paying job as an environmental lawyer, and over coffee Clair Forlani (Schwing!) finds out that he'd give up his own dreams for the woman he marries, etc.

Be warned: when Death, needing a body, takes Pitt's, he does it in a sudden and spectacularly gruesome traffic accident in which we see everything (after they leave the coffee shop and Pitt has walked a block and is standing in an intersection).

One fifth of Meet Joe Black is elegant, nice, and romantic. But the rest can't compensate, and ultimately it's a turkey of a movie. Not recommended. Pitt will win his academy award for this film when icicles ornament Surtur's fiery realm (anyone see In and Out, in which Glenn Close is reading the nominations for Best Actor: "...and the final nomination goes to Steven Segal for 'Snowball in Hell.')


PS - The 'ludicrous egotism' sentence at the beginning was taken from the novel Shibumi, by Trevanian. It just seemed appropriate.

Bring me the Bore Worms
movie reviews by Ian MacLean
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