SXSW Movie Review: Choke
After watching Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s (Survivor, Fight Club) novel directed by Clark Gregg, the words vulgar, crude, profane, blasphemous, obscene, and, best of all, hilarious, all come to mind. A sharp critique aimed at our self-centered, self-absorbed culture, with a few digs at group therapy, psychiatry, and dysfunctional parenting, Choke is the kind of film that can be only made outside the Hollywood system, then gets picked up by a Hollywood-based distributor after it becomes a hit with festival audiences and critics, as Choke did at the Sundance Film Festival two months ago. Choke was picked up by Fox Searchlight, with a released planned for late August, a lucky month for them (Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine were both released in August).
Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has a problem, actually many, many problems. Victor numbs himself with meaningless sex with a random assortment of women, young, middle-aged, beautiful, and not-beautiful, then shows up for his weekly group therapy for sex addicts. When he’s not pursuing women with his fellow sex addict and best friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), he’s working as a “historical interpreter” (i.e., tour guide) at a Colonial-era amusement park. Frequent run-ins with his boss, Lord High Charlie (Clark Gregg), who takes the Colonial experience far too seriously, don’t help much. Worse, Victor’s mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), a former grifter who made Victor’s life extremely difficult, has been hospitalized with Dementia and the prognosis is far from good.
To cover the costs of the expensive private facility that’s caring for his mother, Victor runs a scam on unsuspecting restaurant patrons: he chokes on food, hoping one of them, preferably someone with money and a conscience will “save” him. Once they save him, he has them on the hook, frequently contacting them with requests for money to pay his bills or cover fictitious medical procedures (money he dutifully sends to the private hospital). Everything changes for Victor (as it should) when he meets Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), a seemingly brilliant doctor who suggests a novel, experimental procedure for saving Ida from Alzheimer’s and dying prematurely. And that’s all before an out-of-left-field twist about Victor’s paternal identity presents itself, upending Victor’s views of who he is and who he wants to be.
If you’ve read or seen the film adaptation of Fight Club, then Choke is more of the same: sharp social and cultural critique delivered through scabrous, scatological, offensive, outrageous humor, all in service of whatever themes Palahniuk wants to express. Not surprisingly for a novelist for whose work pushes boundaries hard, adaptations of his work run the risk of appealing to only a small segment of moviegoers or a larger segment, but only if the adapters water it down it considerably. The latter happened here, at least where the ending is concerned (expect something wholly different from the novel). The new ending fits the film adaptation, but it veers far from the novel’s Old Testament-style ending. But that’s a minor problem for Palahniuk’s fans (or it should be) and a non-problem for moviegoers new to Palahniuk’s novels or Fight Club (all five of you).
Unfortunately, Choke has none of Fight Club’s hyperactive visual style. Gregg doesn’t have David Fincher’s (Zodiac, Panic Room, Se7en) talent or skill as a director, but he also didn’t have Fight Club’s budget or Brad Pitt/Ed Norton-level stars. What Gregg does have, though, is a talented cast in the always underrated Sam Rockwell, excellent here as the emotionally damaged, amoral sex addict/con man Victor, Angelica Huston as his grifter mother, sweet and loving one moment, emotionally manipulative the next, Kelly McDonald, a Scottish actress memorable in No Country for Old Men who’s just as good here showing solid range, and Brad William Henke as Victor’s best friend and fellow screw-up/sex addict, who does the big man/wounded vulnerability bit convincingly.
Sam Rockwell and Jemaine Clement Sign On For Jared Hess’s Gentlemen Broncos
The actor with the best perma-squint in showbiz, Choke’s Sam Rockwell, has just signed on, alongside Flight of the Conchords Jemaine Clement and youngster Michael Angarano, to star in director Jared Hess’s comedy Gentlemen Broncos. Angarano will play a teen attending a writer’s convention (what fun those are) where he discovers that his idea has been stolen by a “legendary fantasy novelist” played by Clement. Rockwell should have a field day as he plays the title character (what an odd name) in both the kid’s and novelist’s stories.
Hess, who previously directed Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess, and I like the log line, sounds write up his alley. Oh yeah, to the guy who bemoans when I don’t mention this, that would make Hess, ahem, a writer-director. The film is set for release in 2009.
Not sure why, but I’m in the mood to see a comedy about a fantasy novelist, and Clement, whose face is quite devilish and elastic, is a bit of inspired casting. Movies that literally play with literary structure are always interesting, whether it’s terrible (The Number 23) or mildly amusing (John Candy’s Delirious). Anyone got another flick that fits this category? Discuss below.
Source Link: THR
Sundance Movie Reviews: Adventures of Power, Phoebe In Wonderland
I’m running way behind of Sundance reviews, so I’m going to a quick rapid-fire run down to get a couple films out of the way.
The plot synopsis for Adventures of Power is as interesting as you’ll find. The film follows a former mine-worker named Power, who is ridiculed in his small town for his air-drumming “skills”. But when Power discovers an underground subculture of air-drummers, he sets off to compete against a billionaire rapping cowboy named Dallas H in the air guitar world championships. Ari Gold writes, directs and stars in this dumb Napoleon Dynamite rip-off which attempts to do for the nonexistent sport of air-drumming, what the movie Dodgeball did for dodgeball. Surprisingly only a few of the gags contained within are chuckle-worthy. At the core of the story is a semi-sweet love story between Powers and a deaf woman (Shoshannah Stern). But this just isn’t enough to make this film worth your nine bucks. 4/10
Pheobe in Wonderland stars Elle Fanning, the young, cuter, not as freakishly smart, sister of Dakota, who was the talk of the town at last year’s festival with Hounddog (a disgusting film which explored child rape and has since never been released). Phoebe is a young girl whose obsessive compulsive behavior is getting her in trouble at school. She joins the school play and is cast as Alice, and goes further down the rabbit hole of depression into her own Wonderland. I really dug her performance in John August’s The Nines at last year’s fest, and we begin to see her true range in this film. Phoebe has incredible art direction, a couple nice performances, and a nice third act twist which you probably won’t se coming. 7/10
Fox Searchlight Buys Choke for $5 Million!
In my review of Clark Gregg’s adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel Choke (which was posted just minutes ago), I nervously wrote a plea to distributors, hoping that this film would get the big screen release that it deserves. Choke is not an easy film to market. It contains a lot of nudity and sex, and most distributors might not want to be associated with a Da Vinci Code-esque controversial subplot. Well good news Palahniuk fans, Choke was purchased for $5 million by…
Fox Searchight!!!!!
Fox Searchlight is by far my favorite studio in terms in independent releases. Searchlight knows how to market a little film, and they know how to execute the platform release. Searchlight is the company behind the success of Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, Once, Napoleon Dynamite, Thank You For Smoking, and Sideways.
I’m in line to see the new Morgan Spurlock movie, than after I will be off to interview Chuck Palahnuik. So please check back for that interview later tonight or tomorrow.
Official Plot Synopsis: Actor-turned-director Clark Gregg shows he is as adept behind the camera as in front of it with CHOKE, a wickedly colorful dark comedy about mothers and sons, sexual compulsion, and the sordid underbelly of Colonial theme parks.
Victor Mancini, a sex-addicted med-school dropout, keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida, in an expensive private mental hospital by working days as a historical reenactor. At night he runs a scam where he deliberately chokes in upscale restaurants to form parasitic relationships with the wealthy patrons who “save” him. When, in a rare lucid moment, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of his father’s identity, Victor must enlist the aid of his best friend, Denny, a recovering chronic masturbator, and his mother’s beautiful attending physician, Dr. Paige Marshall, to solve this mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever.
Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Chuck Palahniuk, CHOKE tickles the funny bone as it dives into darker areas of human behavior. At the heart of the film is yet another staggering performance by Sam Rockwell as Victor. He fully inhabits the character and nails both the comedic and dramatic aspects with indelible timing and delivery. A delicious blend of fresh writing, juicy performances, and sharp directing, CHOKE is actually quite easy to swallow.