Diandra’s Late Farewell to 2014 Viewing
2014 was a very busy year for me. My summer was occupied with moving to a new city, while the rest of the year was mostly spent at my new day job. Still, I managed to watch two hundred-thirty movies and two hundred ninety-one full episodes of television).
Movies
Thanks to a two-week free trial of Fandor and a McDonald’s Monopoly prize of one month of free Hulu Plus, I was able to stream many movies I hadn’t been able to access before through legal channels. This year I also finished watching the feature filmography of actor and promising director/writer Sergei Bodrov, Jr., as well as the fiction features and shorts of Djibril Diop Mambéty (it was only when writing this that I found out about his behind-the-scenes documentary Parlons Grand-mère).
Actor I watched the most:
Joe Shishido (宍戸錠), six films
Runners-up: Zbigniew Cybulski and Tatsuya Nakadai, five films each.
Newest addition to my favorite films:
Wanderers of the Desert (El-haimoune).
I couldn’t quite get into Nacer Khemir’s other films in the Desert Trilogy, though.
The only movie I gave a perfect rating
La Vie de Bohème, Aki Kaurismäki’s droll but ultimately devastating adaptation of La Bohème.
Feline performance of the year
Masuka the cat, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Most stirring moments from 2014’s releases:
- Maleficent – true love’s first kiss
- Indonesian-international tie: the hotel fight and chase from the Mo Brothers’ Killers, and the prison mud fight from The Raid 2: Berandal
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier — “I’m with you till the end of the line.”
- Haider — The Jhelum [clip] search montage and Haider performing for audiences
- Godzilla – The HALO jump upon San Francisco.
Can there be a monsters and atmosphere-only edit of this movie ?