If brad pitt angelina jolie World War Z in 2014??
Zombies in the drugstore. Zombies on the roof.
If brad pitt angelina jolie World War Z in 2014??
We wait .....
Zombies in the streets and making a mad dash for your windshield
Those walking dead pervade nearly every inch of screen of the much-buzzed-about, apocalyptical flick
World War Z -- and they provide heart-pounding thrills with each staggered step.
PHOTOS: Walking Dead cast -- see what they look like off-screen
Of course, if there's one guy who can stop them, it might as well be
Brad Pitt.
He's Gerry, a retired United Nations investigator enjoying a quiet
domestic life in the suburbs until he's summoned back to the job. Seems
millions of people all over the world have become infected with a
mysterious virus that instantly turns them into sinister you-know-whats.
Do a quick IMDB scan of the star
's resume and you'll
see that he rarely delves into big-budget summer escapism fare (let's
not count Troy). Yet the steely-eyed actor -- who's pushing 50! -- has
never looked more confident in the hero role as he treks from
Philadelphia to South Korea to Wales trying to stop the bloodbath and
find a vaccine. As one colleague wryly tells him after a near-death
experience, "You're a tough bastard."
PHOTOS: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie -- how their love has evolved
The global chase moves swiftly, with some truly fantastic and
tension-filled set pieces enhancing the drama. In Jerusalem (where
officials have literally sealed off the danger), the bad guys form a
towering ladder and scale a wall as the innocent sing in harmony on the
other side. On a crowded commercial airplane preparing to land, one
barking lap dog leads to terrifying chaos among the passengers. The
scenes feel fresh and authentic.
While Pitt plays sleuth, his worried wife (
The Killing's
Mireille Enos)
and two cute daughters bide their time on a military base, waiting for
his phone calls. These filler scenes feel like a distraction and seem to
function solely to illustrate his soft family-man side. Audiences might
also pick up on a few disjointed action sequences and form too many
unanswered questions about the ghouls themselves. (Why do they want to
eat their prey anyway? To paraphrase
The Princess Bride, are they dead or
mostly
dead?). Still, given its reported ballooning costs, production delays
and overhauled third act, it’s impressive that the movie even has a
beginning, middle and end, let alone intelligence between the lines.
PHOTOS: Brad's cutest moments with Maddox
Perhaps most impressively, the project rates low on the camp-o-meter.
Save for a wild-eyed doctor loitering in a medical lab, the massacres
and the monsters aren't played for laughs. Heck, Pitt doesn't even fire
off a single zombie-themed zinger. Oh no, better to just let audiences
sit in the dark, paralyzed in a state of fear. Pass the popcorn!
World War Z hits theaters Friday, June 21.
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Brad Pitt |
The son of a trucking company manager, Brad Pitt was born December 18,
1963, in Shawnee, OK. Raised in Missouri as the oldest of three
children, and brought up in a strict Baptist household, Pitt enrolled at
the University of Missouri, following high school graduation, studying
journalism and advertising. However, after discovering his love of
acting, he dropped out of college two credit hours before he could
graduate and moved to Hollywood. Once in California, Pitt took acting
classes and supported himself with a variety of odd jobs that included
chauffeuring strippers to private parties, waiting tables, and wearing a
giant chicken suit for a local restaurant chain. His first break came
when he landed a small recurring role on Dallas, and a part in a
teenage-slasher movie, Cutting Class (1989) (opposite Roddy McDowall),
marked his inauspicious entrance into the world of feature films. The
previous year, Pitt's acting experience had been limited to the TV movie
A Stoning in Fulgham County (1988). 1991 marked the end of Pitt's
obscurity, as it was the year he made his appearance in Thelma &
Louise (1991) as the wickedly charming drifter who seduces Geena Davis
and then robs her blind. After becoming famous practically overnight,
Pitt unfortunately chose to channel his newfound celebrity into Ralph
Bakshi's disastrous animation/live action combo Cool World (1992).
Following this misstep, Pitt took a starring role in director Tom Di
Cillo's independent film Johnny Suede. The film failed to score with
critics or at the box office and Pitt's documented clashes with the
director allegedly inspired Di Cillo to pattern the character of the
vain and egotistical Chad Palomino, in his 1995 Living in Oblivion,
after the actor. Pitt's next venture, Robert Redford's lyrical
fly-fishing drama A River Runs Through It (2002), gave the actor a
much-needed chance to prove that he had talent in addition to physical
appeal.Following his performance in Redford's film, Pitt appeared in
Kalifornia and True Romance (both 1993), two road movies featuring
fallen women and violent sociopaths. Pitt's next major role did not
arrive until early 1994, when he was cast as the lead of the gorgeously
photographed Legends of the Fall. As he did in A River Runs Through It,
Pitt portrayed a free-spirited, strong-willed brother, but this time had
greater opportunity to further develop his enigmatic character. Later
that same year, fans watched in anticipation as Pitt exchanged his
outdoorsy persona for the brooding, gothic posturing of Anne Rice's
tortured vampire Louis in the film adaptation of Interview With the
Vampire. Pitt next starred in the forgettable romantic comedy The Favor
(1994) before going on to play a rookie detective investigating a series
of gruesome crimes opposite Morgan Freeman in Seven (1995). In 1997,
Pitt received a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for his
portrayal of a visionary mental patient in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys;
the same year, Pitt attempted an Austrian accent and put on a backpack
to play mountaineer Heinrich Harrar in Seven Years in Tibet. The film
met with mixed reviews and generated a fair amount of controversy,
thanks in part to the revelation that the real-life Harrar had in fact
been a Nazi. Following Tibet, Pitt traveled in a less inflammatory
direction with Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own, in which he starred
with fellow screen icon Harrison Ford. Despite this seemingly faultless
pairing, the film was a relative critical and box-office failure. In
1998, Pitt tried his hand at romantic drama, portraying Death in Meet
Joe Black, the most expensive non-special effects film ever made. Pitt's
penchant for quirk was prevalent with his cameo in the surreal comic
fantasy Being John Malkovich (1999) and carried over into his role as
Tyler Durden, the mysterious and anti-materialistic soap salesman in
David Fincher's controversial Fight Club the same year. The odd
characterizations didn't let up with his appearance as the audibly
indecipherable pugilist in Guy Ritchie's eagerly anticipated follow-up
to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch (2000).In July of 2000,
the man voted "Most Sexy Actor Alive" by virtually every entertainment
publication currently in circulation crushed the hearts of millions of
adoring female fans when he wed popular film and television actress
Jennifer Aniston in a relatively modest (at least by Hollywood
standards) and intimate service.Pitt's next turn on the big screen found
him re-teamed with Robert Redford, this time sharing the screen with
the A River Runs Through It director in the espionage thriller Spy Game
(2001). A fairly retro-straight-laced role for an actor who had become
identified with his increasingly eccentric roles, he was soon cast in
Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Rat Pack classic Ocean's 11 (2001),
the tale of a group of criminals who plot to rob a string of casinos.
Following a decidedly busy 2001 that also included a lead role opposite
Julia Roberts in the romantic crime-comedy The Mexican, Pitt was
virtually absent from the big-screen over the next three years. After
walking away from the ambitious and troubled Darren Aronofsky production
The Fountain, he popped up for a very brief cameo in pal George
Clooney's 2002 directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and
lent his voice to the animated adventure Sinbad: Legend of the Seven
Seas, but spent the majority of his time working on the historical epic
Troy (2004). Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, the film employed a huge
cast, crew and budget.The media engulfed Pitt's next screen role with
tabloid fervor, as it cast him opposite bombshell Angelina Jolie. While
the comedic actioner Mr. and Mrs. Smith grossed dollar one at the box
office, the stars' off-camera relationship that made some of 2005's
biggest headlines. Before long, Pitt had split from his wife Jennifer
Aniston and adopted Jolie's two children. The family expanded to three
in 2006 with the birth of the couple's first child, to four in 2007 with
the adoption of a Vietnamese boy, and finally to six in 2008, with the
birth of fraternal twins.In addition to increasing his family in 2006,
Pitt also padded his filmography as a producer on a number of projects,
including Martin Scorsese's The Departed, the Best Picture Winner for
2006. He also acted opposite Cate Blanchett in Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarritu's drama Babel. Interestingly, that film hit theaters the same
year as The Fountain, a film that was originally set to star the duo.
Pitt also stayed busy as an actor, reteaming with many familiar
on-screen pals for Ocean's Thirteen. At about the same time, Pitt teamed
up with Ridley Scott to co-produce a period western, The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Pitt also stars in the film,
as James. The year 2007 found Pitt involved, simultaneously, in a number
of increasingly intelligent and distinguished projects. He signed on to
reteam with David Fincher for the first occasion since Fight Club, with
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - a bittersweet fantasy, adapted by
Forrest Gump scribe Eric Roth from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a
man who falls in love while he is aging in reverse. When the special
effects heavy film hit theaters in time for awards season in 2008, Pitt
garnered a Best Actor nomination from both the Academy and the Screen
Actors Guild. Also in 2007, Pitt produced an adaptation of Marianne
Pearl's memoir A Mighty Heart that starred Angelina Jolie. In the years
that followed, Pitt remained supremely busy. He delivered a funny lead
performance as Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's blistering World
War II saga Inglourious Basterds (2009), then did some of the most
highly-praised work of his career as a disciplinarian father in Terence
Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) - a sprawling, cerebral phantasmorgia
on the meaning of life and death that became one of the critical
sensations of the year. He also won a great deal of praise for his turn
as Billy Beane in Bennett Miller's adaptation of the non-fiction book
Moneyball, a role that not only earned him critical raves but Best Actor
nominations from the Academy, BAFTA, the Broadcast Film Association,
the Golden Globes, and won him the New York Film Critics Circle award
(though the institution also recognized his work in Tree of Life as
figuring into their decision). ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi