Choke (2008) - Clark Gregg

[Joe-Fagundes]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1024715/

Isto promete, é um dos melhores livros do Palahniuk, aliás considero-o melhor que o Fight Club e pelos vistos o Sam Rockwell vai fazer de Vitor Mancini. O livro está à venda cá com o título Asfixia, vale bem a pena.

We can more or less deduce the following of the main protagonist in Choke; Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a medical school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzehimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.
"Art never comes from happiness" says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case--in the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palanhiuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot but suffice to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with that book and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, such as this sceptical slight on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palanhiuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does on the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better ... What it's going to be, I don't know."

Brett Easton Ellis
‘Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo’

[Joe-Fagundes]

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.

/Film Rating: 8.5 out of 10

[Joe-Fagundes]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_bUZIWinLE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBydC_UBJ7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=311hD7KaGvI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrtIuwU-W1o

[alan_smithee]

Já não tinha grandes espectativas em relação a este filme, então depois de ver os clips... credo que mau

[Joe-Fagundes]

eu que já li o livro mais que uma vez gostei bastante dos clips, especialmente do 1º, tem o espirito do livro bem presente, não faças juizos apressados

[alan_smithee]

Eu também li o livro, mas não é um dos meu favoritos de Palahniuk. Os que mais gosto são "Monstros Invisíveis" e em particular "Lullaby".

[jimmy]

Vai ser a estreia na cadeira de realizador do Clark Gregg. Por muito bom que seja o material (nao li o livro mas já me deram opinioes muito favoraveis) , e o proprio talento do realizador , a verdade é que nao acredito que o Clark Gregg esteja nesta altura ao nivel do Fincher.

Já agora esta ideia de pequenos clips do filme antes de sair , é uma ideia que abomino. Sem qualquer contexto , nunca consigo tirar valor destas cenas.

[Shivers]

Estreia esta semana:

Asfixia

Victor Mancini um desistente do curso de Medicina, planeou o golpe perfeito para pagar os cuidados médicos à sua mãe que está internada num hospital privado – fingir engasgar-se num restaurante pois os desconhecidos que o salvam sentem-se responsáveis pela sua vida - desenvolvendo o esquema do Asfixiado por diversas vezes e sugando a bondade dos desconhecidos num saudável fluxo monetário. Entre actos de Asfixia, Victor trabalha como "intérprete histórico", frequenta grupos de viciados em sexo e visita a sua mãe doente num hospital psiquiátrico. Quando Victor descobre que a doença de Alzheimer da sua mãe esconde uma verdade chocante sobre a sua paternidade, a sua cuidada e estruturada vida de "sexo sem amor" desaba e ele começa a apaixonar-se pela enigmática médica da mãe.

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/choke/