8. Meet Joe Black (1998)

I guess this one could be considered controversial, but I don’t really know what the consensus is on Meet Joe Black. If you want to say this movie has a lot of script problems, that would be a fair assessment. This is definitely a weird movie, but I give it credit for running nearly three hours without boring me. Meet Joe Black suffers from a lot of “Episode II romantic dialogue” syndrome, but oddly enough I think that works for the movie. Brad Pitt plays Death, and he agrees to delay Anthony Hopkins’ demise for what is basically a glorified vacation. The idea of this unsettling fish out of water storyline works in an weird sort of way. While the romantic angle between “Joe Black” and Susan (Claire Forlani) doesn’t have a lot of “oomph” to it, the relationship between “Joe” and William (Hopkins) fires on all cylinders, and that’s ultimately why I like this movie. It has a lot of likable characters, and Pitt’s performance is especially strong – very calculated. It also has one of the best call backs to the old saying “death and taxes” ever used.

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