As 2014 comes to a close, we take a moment at Geeks Of Doom to remember all the fallen entertainment figures in film and television who left us this year. This year, we gave a farewell to a large array of heavyweights, cult heroes, pioneering figures, and sentimental favorites who were among those who have passed on in a physical sense, but leaving the memories, the ones that they made in the past and the ones each of their fans have in regards to them.

Legendary Hollywood character and method actor Eli Wallach has died at the age of 98. The actor passed away in his New York home of natural causes.

Wallach is best known for his scene-stealing role as Tuco (the ugly) in Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, and also as the primary antagonist in the 1960 Seven Samurai remake The Magnificent Seven, but those two performances were but a fraction of his incredible career.

The Godfather – The Coppola Restoration
Blu-ray edition
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, John Cazale, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach, Robert De Niro
Paramount Home Entertainment
Release Date: September 23, 2008

Everyone knows the Corleone family and its members on a first name basis. Everyone speaks the family’s language. Some people even try to make their homemade sauce like them and fail miserably in trying. If I were to say the words “˜toll booth,’ “˜cannoli,’ “˜Sicily’, and “˜horse’s head’ you would know what I was talking about. These characteristics are what make Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Godfather arguably the greatest film ever made.

When watching, whether for the first time or the 100th time, it is like we are entering the Corleone’s dinning room. Their setting is dark, but it’s still inviting, the feeling is intimidating but once we become familiar with it it turns into intimacy. It’s a film that is told entirely from the inside. The outside world of the Corleone family bears little consideration. From the film’s opening lines, “I believe in America,” The Godfather paints an exact replica of American capitalism but adds a few more colors that makes this capitalism seem OK in society. It’s a vivid view of a powerful Mafia family, which wakes up one morning to find their enterprise isn’t as powerful as it once was.