Choke

Hello again! Before we begin with this week's review I would like to apologize for the recent lack of articles, I'll try to post new reviews more often (At least once a week).

Leaving that behind, I'd like to talk about the film I watched this week, it is called "Choke" and it marks the directorial debut of Clark Gregg (Famous for his role as Richard in "The New Adventures of Old Christine"), It stars Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Houston and it is based on the eponymous novel written by Chuck Palahniuk (Of "Fight Club Fame").

Victor (Rockwell) is a sex addict who comes up with a little scheme to help pay the hospital bills for his Alzheimer's-diseased mother (Houston); Victor goes to upscale restaurants and intentionally chokes on the food in order to get money from the rescuers. He also maintains a part-time job as a re-enactor of life in Colonial America and finds himself constantly in trouble due to his drug use, his sex addiction and his devilish personality.

As I said before, this film is the directorial debut of Clark Gregg, who worked on the script for five years after receiving the book as an assignment for a class. Even though the film is based on a book by the writer of cult - mega classic "Fight Club", "Choke" is quite different from "Fight Club", see let me see if I can explain this easily, "Fight Club" the movie is one of those weird cases where the movie ends up being significantly better than the book, And I do not mean to criticize Palahniuk's writing skill, in fact he's one of my favorite novelists, however when he wrote "Fight Club" his writing skills were not fully developed and the book turned out to be a huge incomprehensible mess. Jim Uhls took that book and turned it into a great book.

Anyway, back to "Choke", the script is a perfect adaptation of a really good book and it shows that Gregg really did his homework when it came to directing and writing this film, the casting choices of Rockwell and Houston are spot on and they do an amazing job of bringing their characters to life. However I felt the pace of the film was rather choppy and inconsistent, focusing too much on a few dull moments on the script, which makes the film a bit tedious at times.

The perfect combination of Drama and Comedy make this film quite enjoyable, specially by Palahniuk fans, however the cynicism and black comedy elements that surround the very soul of this film might drive casual viewers away and might want to approach this one with caution, if anything watch it for the excellent performance by the demented Anjelica Houston.