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.

The Double

The Double is loosely based on the Dostoevsky novel.

We meet Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) on a train; deep in his own thoughts. Thoughts which are interrupted when someone tells him he's in his seat. The rest of the carriage is empty but Simon decides to move anyway. Then instead of taking another seat he chooses to stand in the empty carriage, this you realise later is important.

You see Simon is insignificant and he knows it. At work, nobody knows him or even remembers him from one day to the next despite him working there for seven years. He has ideas but nobody, least of all his boss, wants to listen to them and he lacks the courage to speak up for himself. As for the cute girl who does the photocopying (Mia Wasikowska), he knows he’s never going to have the confidence to declare his interest in her.

If Simon lacks balls, then James must have extra. James Simon is a new work colleague and is everything Simon wants to be. He is confident and adored by everyone. He is also Simon’s double, an exact physical double. Although this fact goes unnoticed by everyone apart from Simon himself.

At first Simon makes friends with him and helps him with his work only to see James lauded by his boss using Simon’s own ideas. Not only is James an instant hit with his boss, he proves irresistible to the girls as well. Whilst Hannah of photocopying room has never given Simon a second glance, she is immediately enthralled by James and asks Simon to fix them up.

The big question throughout is, is James real? and how much of what we see actually is real? Is James merely an alter-ego? There are hints in many directions but we never get to really find out.

Of course I could be reading too much into this and it’s simply meant to show how ridiculous it could be if someone double did really appear in to their life.

The film is a real curiosity piece, which needed a few pints to debrief it afterwards. Sadly we have a race tomorrow. Pretty much like ‘Under the Skin’ last week, this is a film that will divide opinion.

After filming this together Eisenberg and Wasikowska became an item, so I wonder which one she preferred.

The Social Network

When we first heard about it, we had no real urge to go and see the story of the founding of Facebook. That was until everybody kept saying how good it was. So now here we are, The Social Network.

It seems it all happened in 2003. In the same year that someone cut their arm off with a blunt pen knife in Utah, across in Massachusetts someone else was stumbling across a half decent idea.

The film opens with a socially inept Harvard University student called Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in conversation, if you can call it that, with his then girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). He is so immensely annoying that you soon wonder what possessed her to become his girlfriend in the first place. Your second thought is why is she still his girlfriend and then, why hasn’t she hit him yet because you, the audience, certainly want to.



Suddenly she comes to her senses and dumps him. In some style as well. ‘You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.’ Don't mess with Rooney Mara; she's to be the new Lisbeth Salander you know.

So Zuckerberg is an asshole and he reacts as most teenage assholes would. He goes home and dreams up the least likely way of making himself more appealing to the opposite sex. In one night, whilst drunk, he hacks into the databases of various student halls, downloads pictures of all the female students and creates a website called ‘FaceMash’ that enables male students to rate the 'hotness' of their fellow female undergraduates. His best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is on hand to provide the scoring system, an algorithm previously used for ranking chess players.



It's such a success that it brings down the computer network at Harvard, gets Zuckerberg into trouble and of course takes his status with the ladies even lower. It does however impress the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (Armie Hammer, both of them). They plan to launch their own website called Harvard Connection, a social networking website, with the main attraction being exclusivity to Harvard students.

They ask for Zuckerberg’s help and he agrees to work with them. Only that, Zuckerberg’s social interactions are about as false as your average Facebook user’s. He immediately sees a better idea and although he maintains a sham 'friendship' with them, he has no intention of helping them, as he sets up his own site.

Again Eduardo helps him, this time providing the finance to get the project off the ground. Once complete, they distribute a link to ‘thefacebook’ and it quickly becomes popular throughout Harvard. The ‘Winklevi’, as he calls them, are enraged that he effectively stole their idea.

The story zips along at a frantic pace as ‘thefacebook’ expands into more universities. Zuckerberg certainly comes over as a nerd but a determined one and also one that can be easily lead, if it gets him what he wants. Enter Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Parker discovers Facebook in the bedroom of a girl from Stanford University, presumably he knew he was at Stanford because Stanford girls seem to have, rather helpfully, the words ‘Stanford’ written across the back of their knickers.



Eduardo is immediately sceptical of Parker, whilst Mark just about falls in love. As Parker persuades Zuckerberg to drop the ‘the’ and ingrains himself into Facebook's project, Eduardo gets more and more sidelined as Zuckerberg increasingly sides with Parker on business matters. Eduardo gets angry, freezes the company's bank account whilst simultaneously falling out with his girlfriend over why his Facebook profile still lists him as ‘single’. With such cast iron evidence that he’s having an affair at her fingertips his girlfriend sets fire to the scarf he just gave to her as a present. Yep that's Facebook.



Then when Eduardo discovers his share in the company diluted to next to nothing, he feels betrayed by his one-time best friend, he confronts him and announces his intention to sue. Parker, the wag, offers him his original stake back. Meanwhile the ‘Winklevi’, after much heart searching over the un-Harvard-ness of suing a fellow Harvardite, have also eventually decided to take Zuckerberg to court over intellectual property theft.



At first the film is a little hard to get the hang of. There is a lot of rapid fire dialogue and the format of the film is a little confusing at first. We are watching the two resulting court cases, or at least the two pre-trial deposition hearings, in tandem with flashbacks to the events being submitted as evidence in them, namely the founding of Facebook. Both lawsuits ultimately resulted in large out of court settlements.

This film come docudrama may be about Facebook but it’s also about the universal themes of friendship, loyalty and betrayal, where money and greed can ruin almost anything. The characters may represent today's world but the themes are as old as the hills.

The principal male characters were all pretty odious, so you don’t really care too much about what happens to them but then I guess they were all supposed to be, well, assholes, and to this end they all played their roles really well. It's hard to feel empathy with any them, well except perhaps a little for Eduardo, the outsider, who’s a far nicer guy than any of the others.



The film ends with Mark sending Erica, his ex, a ‘friend’ request on Facebook and then refreshing the page every few seconds searching for a positive response. After all, getting girls was the whole idea of the Facebook project in the first place.

As one of the lawyers puts it. ‘You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one.’

Zuckerberg may now be a millionaire but in one sense he’s learnt nothing at all.

The Social Network is an engaging film, a good film. It may not be a classic, but it’s trying so hard to be one.