What is your least favorite movie?

Remember how earlier on in this challenge I revealed that I often times say, “This movie has these actors in it so how can it be bad?” and how I tend to set myself up to be let down with that phrase?  The movie I am about to speak about is a perfect example to this phrase.  I fell into this trap after listening to a friend of mine whose favorite movie was Meet Joe Black.  I love Anthony Hopkins so I thought that there was no way he would be in a bad film.  After all, most of the films I had seen with Mr. Hopkins up to that point were amazing.  This is the one that proved me wrong despite the fact that he was amazing in the feature just like in all the others.

Day 30: Your least favorite movie – Meet Joe Black

When my friend told me the premise of this film, I was intrigued. Meet Joe Black sounded like something that would be right up my alley. Instead, I found myself painfully bored. Beyond bored really. With the run time of the film being three hours long, the film is in desperate need of a good trim job. I’m not sure if there is a decent film inside of the three hour long piece we are given, but I want to believe that there is a decent movie within the time I feel I wasted.  I want to believe with such talents as Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins there’s something more there than just want Joe Black  (Pitt) fall in love with peanut butter.  I need to know that the interesting turn of events int he movie is actually interesting and not making me as irritable as watching the The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when all I wanted was sleep.  Granted, that is a good movie despite being long but my eyes were hating me and thus did not appreciate the five million endings.

A good movie is not one I’m writing about today.  Nope.  I am focusing on Meet Joe Black instead.  The odd part of not liking this film is that I like the ending.  I enjoy how everything is brought back full circle oddly enough.  Normally when I don’t like a film it is because the movie has ended in such a way that has left me scratching my head or wishing I could just delete the last five to ten minutes of the film.  Not this one though.  I actually believe the director did right by the end of the film.  The truth is we want good things for William Parrish (Hopkins) even though we know he’s not meant to be a part of our world much longer. Instead we find ourselves rooting for good things to come to Susan Parrish (Claire Forlani) and debate if Joe will allow that to be the case. After all, he has a job to do. Yet we don’t really care about his job because despite the film’s spiritual nature we are driven practically mad by the film’s slow pacing and sometime awkward pacing as well.

Ultimately, Meet Joe Black is not even a film I would personally buy out of the five dollar bin at Walmart.  I now cannot help but wonder if that is where it has ended up after all this time though.  While I know most people have issues with other Brad Pitt movies, the one I hear about the most is Legends of the Fall, this one is the one that is not my cup of tea.  It makes me glad I saw this one way after seeing Interview with the Vampire because I will openly admit it deterred me from seeing his films in particular above anyone else in the cast.  Maybe that is because despite loving awkward characters Joe was actually too awkward from what I remember. But to be honest, I cannot remember a ton of the film because I have tried to push what little I remembered out of my head until today when I had to remind myself what the movie was about in the first place.