Hello everyone! First of all, happy new year 2015! :) And by new year, that means a whole new bunch of films are coming our way. Yay! But I'm not going to list down some most anticipated films from 2015 on this post, though. Yup, before we step into 2015's cinema, we might want to look back a little and see the highlights from last year's cinema. So here are some of the highlights you might want to keep in your memory.

1. A Whole New Kind of Vampire.

I kind of like vampires, but I hated Twilight Saga (oops, sorry no offense). Since Let The Right One In (2008) I haven't found any vampire films that stick in my head. So that makes me really happy with last year's vampires. Jim Jarmusch's kind of vampires was really, really cool. And the fact that he used it to indirectly speak about the decay of civilization, culture, and humankind's tendencies as a result of what humankind themselves have done and do, totally attracted me. It was not all about drinking people's blood. Hats off also to Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska for performing those vampires brilliantly.

Until the minute I write this, unfortunately, I haven't got the chance to see A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, so I can't say anything about it yet. However, from the trailers and some reviews I read about it, it seems to be a film that portrays vampires in a way I would totally love.

2. A Most Feminist Year.

Congratulations, Gone Girl, on your success in finally defining what feminism really means. I think, there had been a misconception about the word "feminism". Many people had defined it as "women against men" or "women >> men" which was not true. Thanks to Gillian Flynn, and David Fincher also, for realizing us the true meaning of feminism which in fact is "gender equality".

And don't you forget about Obvious Child which was also a feminist, and just like Gone Girl, was written by a woman, Gillian Roberspierre. Surprisingly, it was also directed by her. Bravo!

Speaking of female directors/screenwriters, I feel like we should give an applause to them who kind of rule last year's cinema. I mean, besides Roberspierre and Gillian Flynn, there were like Ava DuVernay, Amma Asante, Ana Lily Amirpour, Jennifer Kent, and Gina Prince-Bythewood who caught everyone's attention last year with their magnificent films. They also offered audiences their strong female characters too. What a feminist year, don't you think?

3. Crazy Directors.

There are two directors I would like to mention here specifically; Richard Linklater and Alejandro González Iñárritu. For Linklater, he was literally crazy! Spending 12 years in making a film? Wow. I remember how I had always wondered if there's any film with the young and old character portrayed by the same actor. And then there was Boyhood, spent 12 years in the making in order to have a documentary-like film with the characters literally getting older. Linklater also had ultimately 12 scripts, one script in each year. He wanted his film to feel real, to feel like a document of time. And he did it, didn't he? It was like a blurry between documentary and fiction. 

I can't say much about Iñárritu because his directing was just.... wow. He succeeded in making the illusion as if the film were shot in one take. The idea of using only drums as the film score was mesmerizing. Everything Iñárritu did for the film was very original and.... kind of crazy, in a great way.

4. Playing Around With Aspect Ratios.

First, Wes Anderson with his pink-ish film The Grand Budapest Hotel. He used three different aspect ratios throughout the film, which were 1.85:1, 2.35:1, and 1.37:1. Each aspect ratio represented the cinematic history during the respective period. For example, 1.37:1 represented the so-called Academy ratio which was used in the 1930s. When I saw it, I was like, "oh it's like those classic films!". And yes, it was meant to feel like a classic because Anderson used that ratio throughout the Zero - Gustave story which happened in the 1930s.
Second, we got Xavier Dolan who used a whole new kind of ratio, 1:1. A total square. As far as I remember, this had never happened before in the history of cinema because a film's frame is usually a rectangle, not a square. With a square frame, Dolan wanted to present the ideal structure of a portrait, where the character is at the center of our attention.

5. Cinema Finally Got Its MVP. 




No. I can not say much about this. Just... well done, Jessica Chastain! She totally deserves that. Critics' Choice MVP Award is the first ever to give, and that makes her the first ever actor to receive such award. Chastain was in 4 films in 2014; Interstellar, Miss Julie, A Most Violent Year, and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. She also had Salome released that year. So how were her performances in all those films? Well, it's Jessica Chastain, everyone. A female actor who can act as a lovely and open woman, then turned into the "motherf*cker that found this place" kind of woman, and then surprisingly as a woman who had an octopus tattoo! She is probably a chameleon! A very talented chameleon. Bravo!