Post 66

Last night, I watched Meet Joe Black, and I'm really not sure what to think of it. I liked the pacing of the story, which is odd because its slow canter made it a three-hour flick, I have voiced my dislike of long movies more than once on this blog. Also, the whole movie struck me as quite beautiful and artistic, which is also odd because I thought that the pivotal coffeehouse scene was somewhat unconvincing and that the ending wasn't quite satisfying. Also, despite the fact that the obligatory sex was illicit and explicit, I was totally unoffended by it, which is also very odd since I am opposed to explicit sex regardless of legitimacy and illicit sex regardless of explicitness. I'm not sure why I enjoyed this movie so much, but I really did.

One thing I was pretty impressed with was the acting. I thought Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt worked well together, but it was Jeffrey Tambor's performance that really wowed me; I thought he was fantastic. He was decent throughout the movie, but the scene wherein he confesses to Joe his guilt regarding Bill's forced retirement was--it was frickin' amazing, to be totally honest if not entirely eloquent; something about the big, ironic "surprise surprise!" smile he puts on after he spills his guts made me think, "Holy cow! The man's brilliant! That's so true to life, yet no one would think to do such a thing when acting because--because it just isn't the stereotypical I'm-not-coping-well-with-my-inner-pain sort of expression."

So anyway. Those are my thoughts. I watched the movie all by myself, so the fact that parts of it made me laugh out loud is a couple of times is also worth noting. That initial boardroom scene was--really good. Also, Drew's last scene--when he's talking with Joe and Bill in Bill's private home office with the board listening clandestinely via speaker phone--very well done. Brad Pitt does a very convincing job of portraying the I'm-Death-and-I'm-angry thing, and I was quite impressed with how well he delivered the little monologue that employed such words as "Machiavellian." I was also impressed that that monologue was written well enough that it didn't sound like, "Hey, I'm a screenwriter, and I'm gonna whip out some fancy words; where's my thesaurus?" but actually sounded like, "I'm Death; feel my sesquipedalian wrath." Really, my only complaint acting-wise was in the coffeehouse scene, Brad Pitt had a weird accent, which wasn't too bad because it was fairly consistent, but at the end of the scene, Claire Forlani (whom I really don't find very attractive, by the way [I seem to be alone in that view, so I thought I'd throw it out there]) seemed to accidentally start picking it up. Maybe that's not so bad; some people probably do that in real life, but I thought it was kinda weird.

Overall, a good movie; I'm happy to have it in my collection.