Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
Warrior Queens Elizabeth is a lurid paraphrase of the old Groucho Marx line about Doris Day: "I knew the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin." As the movie tells it, she was a sylvan, redheaded princess (Cate Blanchett) given to gamboling with her fella (Joseph Fiennes) between periods of internment in the Tower of London on charges of conspiring to overthrow her half-sister, the heatedly Catholic Queen Mary (Kathy Burke). The daughter of the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and therefore dubbed a bastard by the papists, the Protestant Elizabeth ascends the throne to find the air still thick with smoke from roasted heretics, a team of skulking Catholics plotting her assassination, and a council of advisers (lords, bishops, sundry old boys) who snigger openly at the prospect of taking orders from a woman. Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. (Her French suitor enjoys wearing dresses.) After skulls are smashed, throats slit, and bosoms skewered in the name of Christ, Elizabeth decides to: a) "unsex" herself and become a symbol--the Virgin Queen, married only to England and b) entertain dissenting opinions exclusively from those whose heads are affixed to spikes. You can't be both a queenly queen and a womanly woman, says the script (by Michael Hirst)--at least not in 1554. (The director, Shekhar Kapur, made the same point in his grim 1994 Indian epic The Bandit Queen , against a backdrop of scrubby plains along the Ganges.) Is this feminist take historically accurate? Probably, although the evidence suggests that Elizabeth had developed a head for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions about How Things Work in a barbarous state. With all due respect to Blanchett, Bette Davis, and Glenda Jackson, my favorite Elizabeth I remains Miranda Richardson's capricious, baby-talking psychopath on the BBC comedy Blackadder II . (Casting about for a new lord high executioner, she mews to Rowan Atkinson, "There are thousands of Catholics simply dying to have their heads sneaked off --and there's no one to organize it.") But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety. Gradually expunging all empathy from her moist, pink eyes and permitting her visage to ossify, she gives this carnival of carnage an awe-inspiring center. In Velvet Goldmine , Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please. The core of the movie turns out not to be the Bowie figure but the journalist, Arthur Stuart, who was a witness to the events he's now reconstructing. Bale is such an expressive performer that Stuart's remembrance of things past attains a Proustian intensity. To him, Slade was a sexual messiah. I've never seen a more vivid distillation of rock's allure than the scene in which he reverently opens the new Brian Slade album--its centerfold image is a lithe, naked, green-tinged Maxwell Demon--slips the vinyl out of its paper jacket and, after gingerly setting the LP on the turntable, props a chair under the doorknob to keep the uncomprehending world at bay. Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A. Pitt plays two roles in this seven course schlockfest. He's (briefly) a slick but wholesome yuppie and then (interminably) Death, who takes over the young man's body when he's thumped by a couple of cars in the movie's most promising moment. Bleached so blond that he looks like an irradiated android, Pitt expels all expression from his face and all tone from his voice. He speaks very, very slowly. The stunt half-works, at least until he's supposed to undergo an inner transformation and acquire human emotions--whereupon his face remains just as blank. Pitt's conception of the role is an idée fixe by someone who doesn't appear to have an idée in his head. Martin Brest, the director, is known for shooting a ton of footage and then "finding" his films in the editing room. What do you suppose he "found" when he scrutinized these miles of celluloid with Pitt doing nothing and taking his sweet time doing it? The first adaptation of this story (originally a play) was the 1934 Death Takes a Holiday , which came in at a perky 78 minutes. A conceit this fragile needs to whiz along to keep our disbelief in suspension, but Meet Joe Black grinds on for three hours (longer than either Beloved or Saving Private Ryan ), and Pitt acts as if he has leased the screen by the year. Anthony Hopkins plays the zillionaire communications baron whom Death enlists in the hope of understanding the human condition--an odd choice for a tour guide, since most people's condition doesn't involve personal helicopters, sprawling mansions on Long Island Sound, or Manhattan apartments that sport Olympic-size swimming pools. Four screenwriters, among them the great Bo Goldman ( Melvin and Howard , 1980 Shoot the Moon , 1982), labored on this moldy script, which features characters who ask questions that begin "Am I to understand that ...?" and a corporate villain who directs another character to "wake up and smell the thorns." It apparently never occurred to even one of these overpaid scribes to eliminate Hopkins' rueful realization that he'd "never write the great American novel"--no kidding, given his flagrantly Welsh accent. Actually, Hopkins gives this humanistic magnate considerable weight, so that whether or not Death takes him before he can stop to smell the roses and make amends to his neglected children becomes a matter of some suspense. The rest of the cast works with equal fortitude, especially Jeffrey Tambor (Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show ) as Hopkins' milksop son-in-law and Marcia Gay Harden as his party planning, perpetually wilting elder daughter. As the younger daughter, the dark eyed, spaghetti thin Claire Forlani has to carry the picture's bathos on her exquisite shoulders. Her tremulous thoroughbred act wears thin, but it's hardly her fault: She has to emote like mad opposite a black pit of death--or is that the Black Death of Pitt?

<question>:
Who does the author seem to appreciate the most in Meet Joe Black?

<options>:
A Martin Brest
B Bo Goldman
C Brad Pitt
D Claire Forlani

<answer>:

D