Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The word "provincial" is usually used in a derogatory context, but those of us who live in the Canadian province of Ontario might revel in the capital-P-provincial aspects of Bruce MacDonald's Pontypool. It's an Ontario zombie movie. The premise: language is a virus --- more specifically, the spoken English language is a virus that's taken hold in small-town Southern Ontario, and the Quebéçois militia are circling in helicopters and gunning infected people down. In true zombie-movie form, the real enemy is a mysteriously contagious disease of epidemic proportions, only this time the subtext isn't AIDS, it's Alzheimers. Scary like 28 Days Later, classicaly Western, conservative, and indulgently post-apocalyptic like Omega Man, Pontypool's neuroscientific veracity leaves Inception in the dust and surpasses even neuro-geek Charlie Kauffman's Synedoche New York by leaps and bounds. I mean bonds…, uh, bonding. Um..I mean bounding.. and leaps. I mean leaks….. Three thumbs up! (wait...how many thumbs do I have again? Maybe we should count this in tomatoes, I know I have three tomatoes...) SPOILER ALERT: Pontypool has typo in its name, plus the letters p o n o l (in no specific order) (with a captial T and that ryhmes with P and that stands for pool...or something...okay, this isn't really a proper spoiler...). It is a real place. |