Once Upon a Time vaults towards the top of my list of Brad Pitt favorites

In looking back at all times I've mentioned Brad Pitt on this website, it's amazing how many great films he's almost been in. That said, after seeing two Pitt classics over the past several days - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Moneyball - it's amazing just how many classics in which he has accepted roles.

Hard to believe he's now been acting in movies for about 30 years and, with that output, there's a good chance I'm missing something here. But these are my favorite BP roles. In my top three, he is just about the coolest actor around (right up there beside George Clooney):

1. Fight Club
2. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
3. Ocean's Eleven
4. (Tie) 12 Years a Slave and True Romance (maybe both better than all these above it, but Pitt's roles are supporting ones)
5. Moneyball
6. Inglorious Basterds
7. Seven
8. The Departed
9. Interview With the Vampire
10. A River Runs Through It
11. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
12. Kalifornia
13. Ocean's Twelve
14. Burn After Reading
15. The Big Short
16. Killing Them Softly
17. Snatch
18. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
19. The Tree of Life (yuck)

Ones I still should see:

• Legends of the Fall
• World War Z
• 12 Monkeys
• Thelma & Louise
• The Devil's Own
• Babel
• The Assassination of Jesse James
• The Counselor
• Fury

Best Magazine Reads: 10 Great Nuggets About Heathers

Heathers is one of my all-time favorite movies. I didn’t include it in my recent 60 Funniest Movies Ever, but it would no doubt be #1 in a similar list of dark comedies. It was released in 1989 to slim audiences but built a huge following through home release.

And the cult still grows. Here are the 10 most interesting nuggets from Entertainment Weekly’s recent oral history entitled The Original Mean Girls.

1. Winona Ryder, whether or not she would have played protagonist Veronica Sawyer, absolutely loves Heathers. She said she’s seen it probably 50 times and can recite every line. She calls it “great literature.”
2. The original ending was that Christian Slater’s J.D. would blow up the school and there would have been a prom with all the students in heaven. Studio execs wouldn’t allow it.
3. A “pimply-faced” Brad Pitt auditioned and was not cast, but he told the writer his script was brilliant.
4. Jennifer Connelly and Justine Bateman both rejected the role of Veronica, even though they were the choices ahead of Ryder.
5. The crew had to retrieve Slater a couple of times because he overslept during filming. He told them he had a sleep disorder.
6. Slater says Shannen Doherty didn’t seem to have any interest in him during filming, so he just stayed away from her.
7. Ryder says she was a virgin during the time the movie was filming.
8. With her conservative upbringing, Doherty had some problems with the acidic language and swearing. Ryder grants her that she had just, after all, come off her role on the 100 percent innocent Little House on the Prairie.
9. After asking “did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” in the movie, Kim Walker, who played lead Heather Heather Chandler, died of brain cancer at age 32 in 2001.
10. The new TV network Fox was starting up and execs there chose between two scripts – a Heathers TV show or Beverly Hills High. We all know what they choose, and what they renamed it.

The Tree of Life: Sappy or "Important?"

I'm not usually one to rule out something simply because it's artsy or experimental. That is probably why I watched The Tree of Life.  

But what a painful and pretentious waste of time. Director Terrence Malick has got nothing here compared to his early-career writing credit for Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. It didn't stop the typically-out-of-touch Academy from nominating him for best director. The film was also up for best picture.

The only nomination I agree with was best cinematography. The Tree of Life is gorgeously filmed and on par with 2001: A Space Odyssey. That said, the Big Bang interludes and dinosaur flashbacks, or whatever they are, couldn't be more boring. The lack of dialogue doesn't help build any kind of story.

Brad Pitt turns in a strong performance as a mildly scary and abusive father in the 1950s. Sean Penn plays Pitt's grown-up son and wanders around aimlessly as if he can't comprehend the fast pace of modern life, with no explanation as to why he entered the urban rat race in the first place.

I understand that this movie was aiming at a deep message about how fleeting everything in life is (except for perhaps that tree in Pitt's yard), but for anyone looking for Hollywood entertainment, The Tree of Life is a real piece of sap.

*1/2 out of ***** stars