http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/869 ... ypool.html
>
Pontypool (2008)
Director: Bruce McDonald
3 stars Time Out rating
Average user rating
No reviews Movie review
From Time Out London
In the end was the word. Adapted from scriptwriter Tony Burgess’s own novel, ‘Pontypool Changes Everything’, this cerebral horror movie plays Scrabble with the genre’s cinematic lingo, aiming for a disorienting triple-word score with the concept of a language-borne virus. As ex-shock jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) keeps the listeners of CLSY Radio 660 abreast of the local news in Pontypool, Ontario, the station’s ‘eye in the sky’ traffic reporter phones in to say that military vehicles are blocking the main road, and there’s been an incident in the town centre. Then Constable Bob Roseland phones in to play back a disturbing 911 call, in which the caller babbles about Hitler, hurricanes and windscreen wipers. Outside the basement studio, flesh-eating zombies are creating cannibalistic chaos; inside, there are hints that off-colour station assistant Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) may already be infected. Talky, tense and claustrophobic, ‘Pontypool’ is a post-modern mash-up of Orson Welles’s notorious ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast and Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search/Fil ... =pontypool
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog ... /pontypool
>>
Pontypool warns us to mind our language
A film that finds horror in words hints that our habits of speech may be threatening our future
Horror needs novelty: familiarity saps terror. Yet film-makers wheel out the same old zombies, slashers, ghosts and monsters time and again to shiver our jaded timbers. Generally, you can expect a big-screen killer plague to be passed on through the time-honoured means of infection, contagion or ingestion. To be fair, that's often the only bit of the story that makes medical sense. Yet it's at this stage in the process that Pontypool opts to rabbit-punch horror convention.
Pontypool Production year: 2008 Countries: Other English-language, Rest of the world Cert (UK): 15 Runtime: 95 mins Directors: Bruce McDonald Cast: Georgina Reilly, Hrant Alianak, Lisa Houle, Rick Roberts, Stephen McHattie More on this film Its bogeymen aren't (strictly speaking) zombies, yet they adopt the customary shambling demeanour of the undead. It's as if the film is deliberately contrasting the orthodoxy of their behaviour with the weirdness of what's provoked it. Certainly, you'd have to watch lots of movies to encounter anything quite as peculiar.
The idea that a deadly disease could be transmitted through language isn't tailor-made for cinema. Yet no effort is made to big up the visual side of an outbreak of mass cannibalism. On the contrary, we get to see hardly any of it. Instead, we're almost entirely confined to a basement radio studio – a creative choice made, we're told, not wholly for budgetary reasons. The effect is to force us to focus exclusively on the film's unique selling proposition: that verbal virus.
Nothing under the sun is wholly new. In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson envisaged a more baroque linguistic pandemic, but though that book's been optioned, it's yet to make it to the screen. Pontypool certainly feels pretty original. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to make it scary. Even its protagonists seem on the point of laughing at its thesis. All the same, it leaves a disquieting aftertaste. Somehow, its idea that language carries within it the seeds of human destruction chimes with the times.
Just why this might be seems far from clear to the film's makers. Any meaning that might look like emerging is blown away in a flurry of whimsical irrelevances, such as francophone Canadian triumphalism. Pontypool is based on a weighty book, but that's at least as opaque as the movie, if not more so. Nonetheless, a curious notion does begin to take shape. It's that the way we've come to use speech may be driving us all mad.
Like so many horror films, Pontypool is at its most gripping while normality still reigns. It begins with an in-depth study of small-town talk-radio chatter. Its hero is an ageing but outré schlock-jock. He wants to carry the patter of his trade to its logical conclusion by spouting complete nonsense. His producer pleads for a bit of news, sport and weather, but in the end desists. After all, the star's been hired to give the people what they appear to want.
Meanwhile, those same people are finding their own speech turning into nonsense; in the process, it's turning them into monsters. Their most dangerous utterances are the most banal terms of endearment, and the only way victims can survive is by purging contaminated words from their minds. A link can be detected between their sorry plight and their drive-time listening tastes.
The growing dominance of visual culture is stripping us of the intelligent use of words. We're turning our discourse into a slurry of Twittering, txtspk, teenage grunts, embarrassed mumbles and radio phone-in imbecility. Yet language has been a large part of what's made us human for perhaps 50,000 years. Some, such as Rousseau, have been convinced it was language that must have fathered reason, rather than reason, language. Since Aristotle's day, it's been accepted that the effectiveness of social structures depends on the sophistication of the languages that underpin them.
Perhaps our own social decay has something to do with the degeneration of our speech. Certainly, a diminishing capacity for dialogue seems to be making it harder for people to interact. We haven't yet taken to ripping off each other's limbs and eating them, like the good folks of Pontypool. All the same, a road-rage bust-up can give the impression that we aren't that far off.
This film's artful gibberish can be seen as clothing a sobering homily. Language is a precious gift that we need to try harder to cherish.
(But that's not to sound scornful - linguistics IS a valuable feeder discipline into AL, ELT etc - but rather to just say/repeat [as I've said somewhere on here before] that we've each got to take responsibility for our own development!).