Bideodromage
Joaquin Phoenix, who won the Oscar for best actor, and Billie Eilish, who performed a subdued, poignant, and haunting version of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”, were two of the vastly gifted artists amongst the assemblage at the 2020 Academy Awards ceremony.
Actor Javier Bardem won a well-deserved academy award for his portrayal of the formidable/sociopathic Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, a Coen Brothers film.
The featured scenes above bring existential dread to new heights.
Marlon Brando and David Thewlis engage in a mostly courteous exchange of ideas, and find said ideas to be at loggerheads. Various snouts, hooves, and outrageous spectacles are discussed. From The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1996. Both actors are at the pinnacle of their craft.
A Sheffield lad, Pulp’s Jarvis Branson Cocker remains a titan and figurehead of the British music world. The “Erotic Coathanger”‘s quirky, enigmatic ways make him a source of immense curiosity to millions. Then, there are his hands, the antics of which are unprecedented in the annals of such things.
The brilliant character actor Tom Noonan gives a towering performance as serial killer/child predator John Lee Roche, who may, as it turns out, be responsible for the disappearance of Fox Mulder’s sister Samantha—the entire crux of the series.
Richard Webb {as Ben Finney} and the renowned Elisha Cook, Jr. {Samuel T. Cogley} both give standout performances in this Trek episode, which focuses on a curious concept: Justice.
The brilliant actor Brad Dourif gives a mind-boggling portrayal of convicted—and soon to be executed—serial killer Luther Lee Boggs. In this story, there’s a catch—a quite big one—in that the murderer claims to have acquired psychic powers, and might be able to help capture a predator who has abducted two people, and has killed ritualistically in the past. Mulder (David Duchovny), for one, is less than convinced.
In these two subsequent scenes, firstly… although Agent Scully would dearly love to converse with her recently deceased father, it’s quite possible that Luther Lee Boggs’ (Brad Dourif loses his mind, in the best possible way) intense aversion to the electric chair has even greater motivational potency. Lastly, in the poignant, haunting final scene (the final scene *we’re* going to present…), the correct warning Boggs had given to Scully ended up saving her life, and convinces her that he’s been telling the truth. He’s only willing to convey her father’s message if she is his witness when he’s strapped to the chair in a few hours. Is this one last trick, one potential last act of cruelty? Or does he truly value the agent whose life he saved? This ambiguity is part of what makes him such an intriguing character…and Dourif’s masterful performance makes Boggs truly indelible.
Amen. Simply one of the greatest performances I’ve seen, ever.
The Zodiac Killer was active—as far as we know—in 1968 and 1969, though he claimed in one of his notorious, cryptic, and, really, legendary, letters that he had killed (and was continuing to kill…) many more than the law department could conceive of. His five “canonical” murders were unusual in a number of ways: his “signature” varied from event to event; and instead of trying to conceal his deeds, he boasted and rodomontaded unabashedly and very publicly. When he gloated that he planned to kill schoolchildren as they “came bouncing out” of a schoolbus, panic ran rampant throughout the whole of Northern California.
This scene shows the strikingly cryptic, bizarre, haunting interview that Toschi {portrayed by Mark Ruffalo}, Mulanax {Elias Koteas} and Armstrong {Anthony Edwards} held with Person of Interest Arthur Leigh Allen {played by John Carroll Lynch, who gets it pitch-perfect}. By turns haughty, indignant, angry, and laconic, Allen kept dropping revealing, tantalising bits of information that certainly got the lawmen’s attention. They glance at each other, almost in shock, as the suspect all but reveals that he’s the infamous Zodiac. But not quite. An extremely intense scene.
This riveting film focuses, for the most part, on the remarkable degree of not only fear, but *obsession* that the never-caught serial killer instilled in people. This kind of obsession destroyed a number of lives; Paul Avery {Robert Downey, Jr.}, Dave Toschi {Mark Ruffalo}, and Robert Graysmith {Jake Gyllenhaal} are those examined in Zodiac.
