Vivarium

With Broadway shut we aren't getting our usual fix of films but in an attempt to try and keep them in business we renew our membership anyway. In return they continue to send us their weekly emails with links to the films that they would have been showing, so that we can stream them along with discounts off the various streaming sites.

The first one we watch is Vivarium.

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple desperate to get on the housing ladder. They wander into an estate agency staffed by Martin (Jonathan Aris), who looks like he’s just come straight off the set of Book Of Mormon.

Even though it isn’t at all what they are looking for, he persuades them to visit a new housing development called Yonder. Yonder is Suburbia on speed with its rows of identical houses with their identical white picket fences and identical manicured lawns.

They are shown around No 9 which is like a show house with everything ready for a couple to move in and complete with a spare bedroom ready for child number one.

When Martin simply disappears, Gemma and Tom can’t wait to make a run for it but they discover that escape is not possible. Every road leads back to No 9 and after driving around until it gets dark, they run out of petrol right outside No 9.

The next day, Tom climbs on to the roof where he sees nothing but more identical houses, so they decide to follow the sun to find a way out. They walk across identical garden after identical garden, always climbing over the identical fences using identical white plastic chairs. When they finally find a house with some lights on, it’s No 9. 

They discover that a box is left outside the house every day containing food and other provisions. The same food and provisions, day after day. Then one day the box has a baby inside it with a note saying, 'Raise the child and be released'.

If you assume that by merely having entertained the ‘dream’ of suburban living ‘sold’ by the estate agent and subsequently found themselves trapped in it then the last thing they should now do is to agree to raise the child. After all, why would you move to suburbia in the first place if the next step wasn’t to have a child to occupy that spare bedroom?

Out of compassion (I guess) they accept the child, thereby trapping themselves more deeply because having the child piles further demands on them. The way Tom and Gemma deal with those demands is by reverting to stereotypical gender roles.

Gemma cares for the ‘Omen’ child or at least tries to reason with it, as it grows at the rate of a dog and screams at the top of his lungs until it gets what it wants. While Tom digs because it makes him feel like he's doing something, and that is what men do.

As the child grows up into a Martin clone it all ends rather brutally as, with their roles affectively fulfilled, they are 'released' but not before we get an insight into other couples doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same trapped environment.

I thought it was a fascinating film, in the vein of the Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. A film about the treadmill of life, that life itself is a trap.

Where many films these days are remakes or sequels any film that dares to be different should be applauded. Vivarium gets a standing ovation from me.

A Couple Of Crocks

Practically everyone has banned L from running the Nottingham 10k today including her physio and her surgeon boss but she’s here on the start line with me, who no one has banned running but they should have done as I have a very slim chance of getting round in one piece. L claims it won't look much like a run, so she’s not going against anyone’s advice.

We have walked down and have clocked two beat boxes on the way but, as is becoming the way now, only one registers, scoring us zero.

A rare feature for Nottingham is that this race had a city centre start from the Old Market Square and hopefully it will stay that way in future years as it made for a great atmosphere.

In 2007 the much loved fountains in the square were flattened so that the space could be used for (money spinning) ‘events’ but it has taken nearly ten years for a major running race to be held here. Although I'm sure the real reason the square was changed was because they got fed up with students tipping washing up liquid in to the fountains which caused soap bubbles to go everywhere. Oh what fun we had.

So for once the square hasn’t got a giant Ferris wheel, a skating ring or the dreaded beach on it, it has us.

Then we’re off and heading to the Park which means some nice hilly bits and yes, it's quite a cheeky little course making the most of the undulations of Nottingham. I start quite well, at a fairly good pace and pain free, although so well strapped up that if I stop they may slap me in a pyramid.

From the Park it’s round the back of the Railway Station and then onto the Embankment. The water station is at 5k on the Embankment and I almost get there. The calf goes pop at about 4.8k with about 22 minutes on the clock, so I was happy with that. Oh well, race over and I decide the walk the rest of the way. Sadly this gives me far too good a view of the runner receiving CPR from fellow runners with just 500m to go.

By the time I have collected by bag from the luggage van I have already received a text message congratulating me on my time of almost 1:08. Hmmm, isn’t it about time that automated results systems allowed you to give them your target time, so rather than congratulations I would have ‘Commiserations on your appalling time of almost 1:08 ps how's the calf?’ instead. Entirely optional of course.

L comes in barely two minutes behind, also hobbling but looking far less injured that me.

The race t-shirt isn’t bad but doubt I’ll wear it much, it has far more illustrious race wear ahead of it. We get the bus home.

Later we head back into town to catch a nice romantic film called ‘Green Room’ after adding another dark beer, Grafton’s Black Abbots, to my trail in the Lord Roberts. Broadway also has dark one on in Nottingham’s Foundry Mild.

Green Room is the tale of an amateur punk band called the 'Ain’t Rights' on tour in Oregon without enough money for fuel to get back home. A problem they generally solve by syphoning it from the tanks of other vehicles. After one gig is cancelled, a journalist gets them a show at what turns out to be a neo-Nazi skinhead club in the middle of nowhere.

They make the best of it and show their bravado by opening with a cover of the Dead Kennedy's 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off' which does a pretty good job of winding up the locals. Despite that, the show goes well enough and they're just about to get the hell out of there when their bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) accidentally stumbles upon the body of a girl has just been murdered in the club's green room.

This results in Pat and his bandmates Sam (Alia Shawkat), Tiger (Callum Turner) and Reece (Joe Coe) being locked inside them green room by the management, in the form of Darcy (Patrick Stewart), the rather aloof owner, and his lead henchman Gabe (Macon Blair). They are affectively held hostage in the green room along with a girl called Amber (Imogen Poots) who was a friend of the deceased.

Darcy’s solution to the problem is to leave no witnesses to the murder and to frame the band for everything. So from being locked in, the band now barricaded themselves in but it soon becomes clear that that is not a good long term plan and escaping, preferably alive, is the only way out. What follows is a deadly cat and mouse game between the band members and the skinheads who now have the club has now been surrounded, one which rapidly spirals out of control.

The film does then become an almost relentless bloodbath but quite a cultured one as it does at least manage to get us quite well acquainted with the main characters, which means you feel for them more, before they are slaughtered. It also makes a good job of conveying the claustrophobic sense of hopeless inescapability that they face.

In a cast that is mainly young and largely absent of big names, you can’t really second guess who will survive, which adds a rare touch of suspense. Overall, quite a tense experience.

We finish the evening on the Borlase and two more dark ones, Lincoln Green Tuck and Acorn Gorlovka.

(Sunday 15^th May)