{"id":2617,"date":"2014-12-31T18:58:51","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T17:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2617"},"modified":"2014-12-31T18:58:51","modified_gmt":"2014-12-31T17:58:51","slug":"seeing-the-best-out-of-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2617","title":{"rendered":"Seeing the best out of 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of a year with even more travel than usual \u2013 Hawaii to Tahiti, out down the mouth of the Amazon, round the Mediterranean with my son Leo, and films on India and Pakistan in the autumn, let alone a great deal of time spent in Glasgow and Scotland \u2013 good to catch up on myself and the best things I came across that sustained me on the journeys:<\/p>\n

\"ida-2013-003-praying-by-roadside\"<\/a>Best films: <\/strong>\u00a0In June, I stumbled into a small art-house cinema in New England on the off chance and saw the only movie that looked promising, although I\u2019d never heard of it \u2013 Ida<\/em>, by some way my film of the year for its unflinching honesty, beauty and rigour, despite what seems the unpromising scenario:\u00a0 Polish girl in a 1950s convent has to decide whether she stays or she goes, not necessarily helped by her hard-drinking, hard-living aunt. A luminous film in the spirit of Bresson, and the first Pawe\u0142 Pawlikowski has made in Poland rather than Britain.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a great year for strong female performances.\u00a0 The best things about Mr Turner<\/em> and The Theory Of Everything <\/em>were not the technically accomplished portraits of their heroes by Timothy Spall and Eddie Redmayne, but the life given to the films by their screen wives, Marion Welsh and Felicity Jones, who were both superb.\u00a0 Likewise, Scarlett Johansson pulled off some bold strokes in first the very enjoyable and slightly bonkers Lucy<\/em>, and then the less enjoyable, but equally bonkers Under The Skin<\/em>, ludicrously overrated by the Guardian <\/em>as their #1 film of the year.<\/p>\n

Both Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan produced fine films in The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em> and Interstellar<\/em>, even if neither was their best, and the less said about the execrable Wolf on Wall Street<\/em> the better \u2013 Scorsese been running on empty so long, the car should surely just be left in the garage.<\/p>\n

But along with Ida<\/em>, the other knockout film of the year was Boyhood<\/em>, for letting us feel the director\u2019s surprise at how lives unfold and people age.<\/p>\n

Best books<\/strong> were Arundhati Roy\u2019s rage against caste, The Doctor And The Saint<\/em>;\u00a0 Adam Nicolson\u2019s passionate advocacy of Homer and the Bronze Age in The Mighty Dead<\/em>;\u00a0 and two work of popular history told with verve and flair \u2013 Charles Spencer on how The Killers Of The King <\/em>(Charles I) were hunted down after the Restoration, and Boris Johnson on The Churchill Factor <\/em>without the boring 3-volume life bits or indeed bothering with much chronology at all.<\/p>\n

In my own field of travel books, amongst some increasingly austere and dull nature writing, one book shone out for its unaffected simplicity and grace:\u00a0 Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0John Lewis-Stempel.<\/p>\n

Best exhibitions:<\/strong>\u00a0 the British Museum\u2019s \u2018Mummy: The Inside Story\u2019, \u00a0where they revealed the faces of those inside the mummies by using CT Scans;\u00a0 \u2018Matisse: The Cut-Outs\u2019 at the Tate which proved that a big blockbuster show can still be thoughtful.<\/p>\n

Best albums<\/strong> were the eponymous Ryan Adams<\/em>, his best for many years and all the better for being guitar driven;\u00a0 and Mark Kozalek\u2019s remarkable Benji<\/em>, in which his talent for long narrative songs about the American mid-west made him a sort of aural equivalent of Boyhood.\u00a0 <\/em>Kozalek (aka \u2018Sun Kil Moon\u2019) also gave the most audacious concert I saw in which he had to hire a drummer from the audience as his own had failed to turn up (and paid the replacement in cash on stage), and then asked if any women in the audience would come up and sing a duet with him on \u2018I\u2019ve Got You Babe\u2019, at which the audience collectively sucked in their teeth at the humiliation to come, but Joanne from Glasgow gave a knockout performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of a year with even more travel than usual \u2013 Hawaii to Tahiti, out down the mouth of the Amazon, round the Mediterranean with my son Leo, and films on India and Pakistan in the autumn, let alone a great deal of time spent in Glasgow and Scotland \u2013 good to catch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}