Cinema: Death Be Not Proud

Brad Pitt makes a good-looking Grim Reaper, but that hardly makes Meet Joe Black a good movie

Pale and cadaverous, cowled and carrying a scythe? No, no, it's just so...medieval. You can't personify death that way anymore. Our age demands something hunkier, less menacing, sort of a surfer dude to help us catch the curl of our last wave gracefully.

To borrow a phrase (and a pseudonym), meet Joe Black, as played by Brad Pitt, who has a real gift for standing around looking cute and stupid. He appears, along with chest pains and some numbness in the left arm, at an inconvenient moment in the life of an even more unlikely figure--a media mogul with a conscience--named...

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