Toss-up!
Also No Country For Old Men, but a different monologue. Pure poetry. I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carried one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."
Holy shit. That's a tough call if you're meaning for someone to weigh in on the better of the two. So different. One is about the beginning of life, in a way. The other is about the end. I am very familiar with the Cinema Paradiso scene. I love it. I really enjoyed No Country For Old Men, but only saw it once. That's a hell of a scene. So well acted. The sound of the clock ticking away in the background is less than subtle, but still... pretty amazing.
You can't have one without the other, I don't think. Everyone rightfully hypes Javier Bardem's performance in No Country For Old Men, but Tommy Lee Jones put in an amazing performance too.