Meet Joe Black (1998)

  So I went on a date Saturday night.  It was the second date so I went to his place to watch a movie.  This was the movie he picked.

Hi, I'm Lucy.  Have you met me?

So, of course, I hated it.

I vaguely remember when this movie came out.  I was still in my "I hate Brad Pitt" phase (I'll explain in a minute) so I avoided this movie like the plague.  Didn't even know what it was about until almost ten years later.  By then I was over the phase and found myself a tad bit curious.  But I had made my stance on it clear and I couldn't flip-flop like that.  So I'm secretly grateful that someone else picked it so I could satisfy my curiosity without selling out.

Ok, so the "I hate Brad" thing came about when I saw Legends of the Fall on HBO as a kid.  I fucking hated every minute of it and thought it was probably the stupidest, most senseless thing I had seen up to that point.  I was about 12 so it could be argued that I didn't have the emotional maturity to understand what I was seeing but I stand by the opinion that it was just a shitty film.  Anyway, I decided that the main problem with the movie was Brad Pitt.  He was just another pretty boy who couldn't act.  So I avoided everything with him in it like I owed him money.  Even Fight Club when it first came out.  I couldn't bring myself to watch.  Then I saw Snatch and it completely shattered my worldview.  He got dirty for that role and spoke like a fucking crazy person.  That was outstanding.  And I have liked him in most of the movies he's been in since.

Back to this movie.  Death Takes a Holiday has been remade several times since 1934.  (My personal favorite is the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel Reaper Man.)  It seems like it could have been a really great movie if they had cut 40% of the running time.  For instance, every scene with Marcia Gay Harden made me want to take a cheese grater to my eyeballs.  (She was the other sister, if you're trying to place her.)  Also, Claire Forlani has all the personality of a dust bunny.  Still, most of the dialogue was pretty good, especially the interactions between Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.

I'm going to talk about the ending now so this will get a bit spoilery.  **Spoiler Alert**

Ok, so Death takes over the body of some random schmuck that Claire Forlani meetcutes in a coffee shop who then gets hit by a minivan.  He shows up at her dad's house so Anthony Hopkins can teach him what it means to be human in exchange for a few more days on the earth.  Along the way, he falls in love with Claire.  By the end of the movie, he has learned about sacrifice and puts Dead Schmuck's soul back in place and sends him off to be in love with Claire.

How fucking confused would this poor woman be?  She met a dude in a coffee shop, liked him, then he shows up with a completely different personality, inserts himself into her family's life as her dad's new BFF, begins a relationship with her, then suddenly develops amnesia and goes back to the personality he had before she fell in love with him on the same night that her dad dies.  Because romance or not, Death has a fucking job to do.  Plus, there's no guarantee that she'd actually like Dead Schmuck's actual personality so what if, after all that, they realize they have nothing in common?  She's going to feel so betrayed.  That seems like the worst possible thing Death could have done to her.  If he had just disappeared, she could have held on to all the positive memories instead of feeling like she's involved with a dude who has multiple personalities.