PONTYPOOL Post-Release Discussion

Nicely done, though I liked it more than you. I'll agree there was a certain vagueness to the whole infection story, but I think that's in keeping with the Romero subgenre (which this totally was, zombies or otherwise). I also thought I spotted a few direct references to War of the Worlds, but I can't remember them now.

McHattie seems like he's trying to be the next Jack Nicholson.

I'll keep an eye out for this one. The idea of words spreading the virus (am I getting it right?) is intriguing. Is the book it's based on any good?

Read the book; haven't seen the movie. That said, there's an after word in the book where the author basically says that the movie and book's only connections are thematic ones (And the notion of a virus that's spread by language that turns people into zombies). The book is good, challenging and as far as I could tell, unfilmable. I look forward to seeing how they pull it off.

Loved this. Russ is right: you really get a sense of the scale of the attack from the outside reports. You only hear about it, but your imagination fills in the blanks. Which is 100 times more effective than if they had a larger budget and showed the attacks. Hearing about someone's leg being swallowed whole is much creepier than seeing it complete with bad CGI.

Stephen McHattie is a real presence. Haven't seen him in anything else apart from A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE so will have to find his other movies.

I'm not sure the message of the movie is clear - Freedom of speech? Don't abuse the English language? but that doesn't ruin it.

And it ends with what I assume was a nod to RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Which doesn't happen enough.

Could someone post their take on the ending? Is Mazzie helping or is he making the situation worse? Is the army right or wrong to bomb the radio station at the end? I really have no idea what they were going with at the end.

Still, I quite liked the film. Looking at the release date, I wonder if Sydney's writing on the wall was a Left 4 Dead reference.

Wiki tells me there's also a radio play wich sounds quite interesting.

I was literally trembling from the audio reports of the zombie attacks. Ultimate example of the power of suggestion.

After I first saw this I thought this was about autism, but it's actually about Twitter, I think. George Romero saw shoppers in a mall and thought "zombies". I feel Bruce McDonald looked a Twitter feed and thought the same thing.

this was made before Twitter was big. I think it's about the misuse and abuse of the English Language and people's failure to communicate.

Well if not Twitter specifically than memetics in general. Viral videos, facebook, text forwarding, whatever. Though I think it's about communication breakdown as well.

I think that Signal movie is more along the lines you are thinking Patrick.

ETA: What I meant to say, is that what you are talking about is reminding me of the movie The Signal.

McHattie played a mob enforcer in and episode of the first season of L&O, oh so many years ago.

Good movie, terrific book. Hope many people catch it. One thing about making a zombie film - you've probably got a built-in audience.

Hopefully your average horror fan can overlook the funny name and GOD AWFUL poster and check it out.

Did anyone think Mazzy was infected when he started panicking/mumbling in the booth and then made it for the door?

 

My post from another CC thread:

And a Russ quote is on the back of the Blockbuster exclusive dvd I bought used.

Bingo.

 

GREAT fucking movie. I think it's weird how the internet age, and the need for instant word-of-mouth has kept a few films from breaking out of their tiny cult status into genuine CLASSIC status. This is one of them. How is this not amongst the small handful of horror landmarks of the twenty first century?

They did make an hour long radio play using audio from the film!

I like what everyone is saying about Twitter (etc.) but I really think the idea is supposed to spread not just to recent failures in communications, but language's failure to communicate as a whole.  Mazzy mentions Roland Barthes early in the movie but only calls him a French philosopher.

 

Barthes was really a literary theorist and a semiotician who has his theory embedded deeply in much of literary critical practice today.

 

He and several other structuralist theorists of the time discussed language's inability to communicate meaning.

This is why when you repeat a word (kill) over and over, the word loses ALL meaning.  The word in itself is nothing.  Words, invented by humans, are simply signifiers to represent a concept that we have in our head.  The missing cat that is often referred to is often a word of choice for Barthes when discussing the neutral quality of words.

 

The disease spreads when we recognize a word and we truly understand it.  It almost seems that the disease only becomes an issue when language operates successfully. (The doctor mentioned the disease spreading when we understand the word)  Then the infected repeat the understood word until it loses all of that meaning and it just becomes an empty signifier.

 

While I like the idea of the Twitter and other technological methods of communication analogy, there isn't enough evidence in the movie itself for that analogy to be the only thing in play here.

 

I think it's a remark on the linguistic ideas that Barthes, amongst other literary theorists, presented a few decades ago.