Nice effects though.

Fantastic!

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Meet Joe Black is ultimately a disappointment and an an exercise in how one should understand the pacing of the movie. Starring Brad Pitt, Claire Forlani and Anthony Hopkins this is based on an older film called Death takes a Holiday (1934). Brad Pitt dies and is reborn as "death" and enters a wealthy mogul's life to understand the meaning of life, meanwhile falling in love with his daughter. The pacing is a killer and sorry to say but the acting is pedestrian- especially Brad Pitt. It seems they're all here to collect paychecks to buy mansion, the likes shown in this film.

(Flash Review)Imagine if death introduced itself to you in human form and hung around until he was ready to do his thing and while hanging around he dated your daughter. Yikes you may say! This is the surface plot to this movie and is played out tactfully over three hours. I suppose the underlying crux to the movie is about not taking life for granted and enjoying the little things in life. While death is in human form, he finds the most unusual and simple things novel and pleasurable. Pitt plays death very well. His 'human' character bookends his death character and plays them both distinctively and with fun charms. While being three hours long the dialog is interesting enough not to bore yet is certainly doesn't feel short. Clever story to wrap around a romantic tale.

This is a movie that I can watch over and over again. It shows how the mechanics of love work in real life. When Joe meets Sue, the chemistry between them is so real and the scenes with them are movie magic. When they leave each other, the question is, do they look back? And they do. There are countless other scenes in this movie that are well executed by the actors. The scene where Anthony Hopkins character comments upon his whole life is something that William Shakespeare would have penned today. I really love this movie for its writing, direction and acting. Marcia Gay Harden and Jeffrey Tamborn also do great jobs portraying their parts and help the movie along. But Brad Pitt makes the movie and there is no question in my mind that he captures what being in love feels like on the screen.

Very few films are given the opportunity to clock in at a three-hour runtime. When one does, like "Meet Joe Black", it's a shame that it only uses the gift of time to completely fritter away any semblance of engaging plot or characters.For a basic plot summary, "Meet Joe Black" tells the story of William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins), who is visited by the entity of Death taking the body of the recently deceased Joe Black (Brad Pitt). Death makes a deal with Parrish that he'll belay that impending heart attack as long as Bill will allow him to stay in the real world. Bill's daughter Susan (Claire Forlani) quickly becomes enchanted by Mr. Black, yet remains at a distance because of the strangeness of the entire ordeal.This is a metaphor film, first and foremost. The metaphor is "death is literally in the room with you", and how does Bill Parrish react to that. Sadly, though, so much of the film is awkward and stunted because it just doesn't make sense that Joe Black could just show up out of nowhere. That is the huge hole in this story that destabilizes everything around it. I'm always up for a little suspension of disbelief when I go to the movies, but this stretched it a bit too far. For this whole thing to work, there needed to be some explanation for who or what Joe Black was, and the rules were clearly set against that. What if Black would have been a ghost who only appeared to Parrish? Might that have worked better? Something...anything...besides having Black show up out of nowhere and have the issue never get resolved.Secondly, this is very much a character film in the sense that if deep, emotional characters weren't established the whole thing was going to collapse. That is exactly what transpired. Maybe this film was just a "product of its times" (1998), although I hate using that excuse for any film. Perhaps, though, Hopkins as "important business man" during the late 90s was more relatable to audiences and Pitt in an exquisite suit wooing a doe-eyed Forlani was just what viewers expected from those characters. Even if it "played better" during its day, though, it still isn't quality character development by any means.Finally, we get to the film's length. At three hours long, this film had all the time it needed to flesh characters and explore every plot nuance. Instead, it just kind of saunters along until the very end, when some stirring music and fireworks are supposed to provide the emotional context that three hours of runtime could not.Thus, I was extremely disappointed in "Meet Joe Black" and really found myself a bit angered at how a film given so much "room to play with" could screw it up so bad. It turns an interesting concept into tedium and turns great actors into bores. Not a great recipe for any film, much less one that plays everything so serious and full of gravitas.