Fair warning: Dave is currently doing a PhD, and there’s a very real danger he might bust out words like ‘juxtaposition’ every now and then.
The following is a roundup of every film Dave watched in September 2014 (brace yourselves for a vicious take-down of When Harry Met Sally)…
Bicycle Thieves (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
Image via Park Circus
A beautifully sparse and absorbing gem of early social realism with a simple narrative that manages to feel achingly honest – it’s charming without contrivance and deeply moving without sentimentalism. There is so much that can be taken away from this poignant slice of father/son bonding… be it a sense of social commentary, the struggle of unemployment and poverty, the trust and vulnerability of family, tensions between the individual and the collective, love, childhood and – naturally – how it’s pretty useful to have a bike hanging around.
Cuppa Critics Rating: 
How I Live Now (dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2013)
Image via Momentum Pictures
Featuring an impressive central performance by the ethereal-eyed Saoirse Ronan, How I live Now is certainly an ‘interesting’ film; not pejoratively, like when ‘interesting’ applies to an awkward personality description (the age old euphemism for ‘best avoided’), but ‘interesting’ in the sense that it has a lot of intriguing ideas, styles and ambitions that just don’t quite fit together. Basically existing in a dystopian third world war scenario that’s occasionally reminiscent of Children of Men, the film (based on the young adult novel) attaches itself to an adolescent romance pitched against the destructive forces of change. Where the film struggles is in its balance, flitting between artistic cinematography that tentatively nudges towards a Malickian/Andrea Arnold-esque evocation of textures and light, a genuinely grim undercurrent of atrocity, and the – at times – hard to reconcile young adult themes that correspond with its intended audience. So… interesting, but flawed.
Cuppa Critics Rating: 
Harold and Maude (dir. Hal Ashby, 1971)
Image via Paramount Home Video
A pallid young man with a death obsession falls in love with a a freewheeling 79-year-old with a flare for impulsive living. With its fantastic two central performances, a Cat Stevens soundtrack and a string of morbidly ingenious faked suicides (a favourite pastime of the young man), this is a uniquely eccentric way to achieve ‘heart warming’ credentials. Harold and Maude has a fuzzy smile shuffling beneath its funereal garb and became a seminal influence for both Tim Burton and Wes Anderson – find out why!
Cuppa Critics Rating:
City Lights (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
United Artists Corporation
The amiable stumbling of Chaplin’s naive tramp persona is on classic form in this innovatively choreographed and imagined slapstick tale that has, at its centre, an unnerving but enduring sense of tragic ambivalence. The potential openness of the last shot allows you, and your cynicism or goodwill, to decide the fate of romance. I, being a sworn adversary of all things cute or optimistic, see the ending as a perfectly precarious note that reveals just how much we can deceive ourselves with love as a projection and not as a reality. A mute man falls in love with a blind girl… with the introduction of sight, does love endure? Is this a metaphor for the fantasies we need to animate desire and make love possible? Can love exist without illusion? Or is that the difference between love and desire? Or love and lust? Or, navel gazing aside, is it mainly about Charlie Chaplin falling over? Slapstick gold loves a good trip and no one needs my cod-philosophies to dilute that kind of comic formula.
Cuppa Critics Rating: 
When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner, 1989)
Image via Palace Pictures
Okay – as a necessary caveat, I need to put my prejudiced cards on the table: I’m not the biggest fan of rom-coms. And here we have a pretty big player in the paternity of that forsaken genre – a canonized, unavoidable ‘classic’ to many. And it is of course fun, in all the ways now so familiar, passed down like a genetic grudge from its influential source: boy meets girl, girl hates boy, end up friends, can’t be just friends, inevitably fall in love (that is, after the typical bump in the road before a climactic ‘running to meet’ scene). Of course, there is also the (genuinely inspired) faked orgasm in the diner scene: ‘I’ll have what she’s having’.
But what is she having people!? What is happening in this film and why is it okay (dammit!) for it to be enshrined as a perfectly acceptable cornerstone for representations of entertaining love in cinema? Essentially a cocky bastard of a man, Harry (Billy Crystal) – convinced of his own irresistible humour and persuasive superiority – meets a woman who resists him… that is, until she endures an incarcerated, long-distance car journey with the insufferable prick, after which there is a floating suggestion of ‘what if?’ For starters, that seems a shame: all it takes is a couple of hours of boredom for Sally (Meg Ryan) to think (or STOP thinking and decide) ‘meh…could be worse’. During the journey Harry offers the depressingly libidinous revelation that no man and woman can be just friends… there always has to be the suggestion of sex, or else, y’know, why bother? Incredulous at his blatant disregard for nuanced emotion and the ability for his meagre member of groinal tyranny to eclipse any other experience life has to offer, Sally is, understandably, not enthralled with Harry. Yet, that said, there is still the ‘pushy’ bad boy wit and persistence of his depressing character that has an effect on her, an effect that (reading it now through the toxins of 15 years of appalling rom-com genre tropes) is predictably close to an arousal of (*gasp*) romantic interest.
Anyway, the rest of the film then proceeds to do its best to prove Harry’s Neanderthal maxim as an undeniable truism. And sure enough, after years and years of creepy coincidences – bumping into each other in times of equal loneliness – these two, who try so hard to delude themselves of that apparent myth, ‘friendship’, fall in love. The fact that, when spun out as a witty and entertaining romp of accessible quotes and heart-tugging pathos, this central conceit (men and women CANNOT be friends) becomes passively digested, is not only responsible for tides of shit films in its wake but also a deeply unsound, disturbing and upsetting precedent for onscreen emotional intelligence.
‘Calm down’ I hear you mutter, twixt sips of tea, and exasperated sighs of ‘he’s gone too far’ disdain… no, I refuse. If what ‘she is having’ is the gradual erosion of her ability to believe in any friendly interaction that does not rely on a pathological, male desire to consummate ulterior and trouser-based motives… then no, I am sending it back. I am refusing to dine here again. I am championing the possibility of meaningful friendship that does not have to be part of manly man’s exploitative campaign for infinite cock-led lumbering. It may be a ‘classic’ of its genre, and it may be damn easy to watch (and at times, yes, fun and often funny). But allowing that to become a reason for its unending praise, or consecration as a ‘classic’ is, on many levels, simply offensive.
Cuppa Critics Rating: 
Zombieland (dir. Rueben Fleischer, 2009)
Image via Columbia Pictures
In a character that justifies the early comparisons with Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg plays an awkward neurotic and one of only a handful of apocalypse survivors in Zombieland. Woody Harrelson puts in an appearance as a cartoon inflation of his later True Detective persona, Emma Stone plays the taciturn and sultry (and alas inevitable) love interest, and Bill Murray plays… well, Bill Murray. Not particularly memorable and not particularly good, Zombieland is also not particularly bad. It is a very easy and easily entertaining zombie comedy. If you were feeling especially generous you might suggest it provides a satirical take on videogame violence and the zombie genre as a natural voyeuristic extension, going on to tackle the cloying pressures to conform to archetypes of a ‘family’ as the only liveable, imaginable, unit of conventional security… but really, that would be lumping the film with intentions and ideas that, it seems safe to say, are not intentionally there. Perhaps the most fun part of the film is also the part which feels most discordant: the Bill Murray episode. All things considered, nothing is more attractive than stumbling into Murray’s mansion to re-enact scenes from his films as a viably enjoyable refuge from the flesh-tearing undead… except perhaps if were Nicolas Cage were there too, playing himself. In conclusion Zombieland is a good, if forgettable,film – the kind that’s best watched casually with friends and a pizza.
Cuppa Critics Rating: 
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (dir. Matthew Akers, Jeff Dupre, 2012)
Image via Music Box Films
In this fascinating documentary we follow the provocative career of performance artist Marina Abramovic, culminating in her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A naturally charismatic presence, Abramovic makes for a compelling subject. Her work tends to feature challenges to the body, often bordering on the masochistic and daring, exposing tensions of expectation and desire in an audience as well as more abstract questions of human existence. Also nudity seems a fairly standard pre-requisite. Have you ever sipped a cup of tea while naked? Watched a film naked? No? Try it, because, as an unofficial motto here at Cuppa Critics we have adopted the phrase: ‘You don’t need a reason for a cup of tea and the same is true of nudity.’ Granted, we abandoned this motto fairly early on due to mixed feelings at the inaugural meeting that was held for our team of writers. That team, being just Sam and I, was, we felt, slightly too exclusive and intimate, in its minimalism, to sustain the nudity without feeling a tad uncomfortable… or maybe too comfortable. Either way, we maintain you do not need a reason to drink tea. Tea is the reason. Rambling digressions aside, though – and regardless of your views (or lack of views) on performance art – this documentary is made with enough care, style and research, to ensure a consistently absorbing style. Quality stuff!
Cuppa Critics Rating:
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – presented by Slavoj Žižek (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006)
Image via ICA Projects
Žižek is a very rare figure, a famous cultural theorist, a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, a psychoanalyst and a critic (if you want to draw your definitions from Wikipedia wisdom)… but, by all accounts, he’s also a restlessly ridiculous, insightful, provocative, challenging and bizarre mind of incredible intellectual speed and agility. To see him, with spluttering intensity and gesticulations aplenty, wander through scenes from Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, The Excorcist, The Matrix, City Lights, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway – and plenty of other films – is an absolute joy. His primarily psychoanalytical explanations and digressions are endlessly fascinating, if not always convincing. And in fact, it’s often when he’s not convincing that Žižek seems all the more intellectually relevant as someone who still (in this day n’ age, I tell thee!) has the power to stir complex and captivating discussion and thought. Often the most weirdly entertaining scenes are those incidental sequences in which Žižek improvises short rants about, for instance, the obscenity of flowers (whose petals apparently cry out ‘come fuck me’!!). For any fan of cinema or challenging thought, this film (separated into three parts: essentially a quality documentary in three instalments) is an absolute must!
Cuppa Critics Rating:
The Thin Red Line (dir. Terrence Malick, 1988)
Image via 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Based on the novel by James Jones, Malick’s film explores the Battle of Mount Austen – part of the Guadalcanal campaign, fictionalising and elaborating upon a less familiar element of America’s involvement in World War II. After a twenty year hiatus from filmmaking, The Thin Red Line re-established the extent of Malick’s ambitious and poetic cinematic vision. Using a ridiculously expansive cast (John Travolata, John C. Reilly, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney, Adrien Brody, John Cussack, Nick Nolte, Jared Leto… etc), Malick’s greatest masterstroke was to dissolve star hierarchy and in doing so add an extra valence to the film’s authenticity… people keep coming and going, stories appear and are cut short, no one is a central protagonist. The typically immersive and attentive cinematography focuses on the natural world upon and in which these terrible conflicts take place. Bullets are whipping through the air as men crawl and sprint through angry jets of smoke, while the camera unexpectedly lingers on the grass to focus on the trembling struggle of baby bird, blindly groping on the earth. It is powerful, impressive and, in its battle scenes (especially the one in which they have to ascend a hill and attach bunkers), incredibly tense. For those new to Malick this will (surely) be a stunning and moving experience. Having seen Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Tree of Life (2011), though, there were moments I found myself getting mildly irritated by the insistence of the voiceover. While its poeticism is wholly admirable and at times very effective, it also tends to stray into areas of almost mawkish sentimentalism (or clumsy condescension), overemphasising often reductive dialectics in every situation: hushed reverence for the whispering of ‘Love and death, life and love, nature and man, why? Where does it all come from? Where does all this evil go? Mankind…peace, hate, nature…’ etc etc. I do feel this limits the overall ‘masterpiece status’ awarded to Malick’s film, anchoring it in an over-egged spiritualism that ironically detracts from a greater filmic transcendence. But that aside, it is a stunning and gripping war film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Full Metal jacket or Apocalypse Now.
Cuppa Critics Rating:
Satantango (dir. Bela Tarr, 1994)
Image via Pierre Grise Distribution
At a crushing seven hours in length, this stamina-testing slab of Hungarian existentialism is an unremittingly bleak experience. Shots often last for around 10 minutes in total, documenting with grim loneliness the tedious weight and elemental inevitability of time. Depending on your mood (which in seven hours will change several times over), this can either be an exhaustingly upsetting portrayal of the bare cruelty of our isolated struggle to live on this muddy, rain-soaked buzzkill of a planet, or it can be seen as a dark trudge into the absurdist tragedy of humanity, endured with a Beckett-like sense of humour. The choice is yours… either way it’s seven hours and a whole lot of silence, breathing, walking, raining, drinking, raining, walking, breathing, breathing, darkness, raining, walking, walking, walking – resting – walking, walking, walking, walking, dilapidated buildings, cracked walls, boarded windows, crumbling farmhouse, wet landscapes, mud, mud, walking, walking, walking, indifferent cattle… and prolonged anguish. That said, to spend such a vast amount of time within a film, moulding its meaning, existing in the company of its people and the shadows of its buildings… having seen it, for weeks after you feel as though you genuinely lived it. Not a film that simply stays with you, but an experience you increasingly feel was in some way – beyond film – physically and internally experienced. Not overly enjoyable as such, but undeniably powerful, unique and important… brew your tea with vodka and drink it from a rusting bucket. The Bela Tarr brew is dark, heavy and long: only for those searching for SERIOUS infusions of time and struggle should brave this… those who do, like emergent yodas, will finish the experience tired and broken… but changed. (A more detailed look at the film can be found on my blog, The Midnight Mollusc.)
Cuppa Critics Rating:
Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927)
Image via Eureka Entertainment
Epic sets of dystopian geometry and gothic splashes of German expressionism make this absolute beast of a film visually unforgettable. Whether it is feverish dreams, crowding eyes and flashing lights intercut with a particularly bizarre erotic dance, or the infamous automaton, a doppelgänger, angry mobs, social uprising or the innovative seeds of science fiction blustering in the pre-post humanism of this exuberant silent epic… there is something for all!
Cuppa Critics Rating:
BREW OF THE MONTH
Grey Gardens (dir. Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, 1975)
Image via Portrait Films
I realise, considering the quality of films seen recently (Bela Tarr, Fritz Lang, Malick), this is a resolutely (and consciously) odd choice for Brew of the Month… still, as an eccentric cult documentary, ‘odd’ is the only way to proceed…Relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (wife of John F. Kennedy) ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’ live alone together, mother and daughter, in a derelict mansion surrounded by their eight cats and the cluttered evidence of their reclusive co-dependency. A touchstone work for defining the Crazy Cat Lady syndrome, Grey Gardens is also a beautiful and important documentary… a lyrical, bittersweet portrayal of a mother and daughter, age and disintegration, joy and confusion, music and life, and the accrued debris of neglect and the gathering eccentricities of isolation: a tale of racoons, cats and dancing alone. Uniquely babbling, hilarious and uncomfortably voyeuristic, this is an appropriately jumbled, occasionally incoherent curiosity that somehow charms its way into feeling like an oddly poetic masterpiece.
Cuppa Critics Rating:
Cuppa Critics 