While attending Austin's South-By-Southwest Film Festival in March of this year, I caught a screening of the big-studio adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke, which I’m told is daring and provocative and, apparently, beloved by hipsters. The theater was filled with big studio Men in Black armed with night vision goggles and whatnot to prevent any pirating of their upcoming release...odd, considering the much more likeable and successful Knocked Up got screened at the 2007 festival without nearly so much off-putting, paranoid nonsense.
Anyway, Choke tells the story of sex addict Sam Rockwell and his sex addict friends (including Joel Grey?!!?!?) and their struggles with sex addiction, which is apparently a terrible problem in Los Angeles and, uh, probably other places (like the story's New Jersey setting, Palahniuk's Washington State stomping grounds and wherever David Duchovny happens to be at any given moment)...although, to be fair, I’m guessing the condition is more of a problem for sex addicts who don’t get to screw around with gorgeous starlets like Kelly Macdonald and Bijou Phillips.
Rockwell’s character also likes to pretend he’s choking in restaurants, because the attention it brings him makes up for the love he was denied by his wacky, now Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother (played by recent bad-mom specialist Anjelica Huston).
Ho-hum. Not a bad movie exactly: there’s some funny bits involving a colonial theme park, a sit-up-and-take notice performance by Gillian Jacobs as a stripper named Cherry Daquiri (not her real name) and, of course, plenty of sex and nudity...but it all just winds up playing like the pilot for some new Showtime series I'm never gonna watch. Sam Rockwell is once again likeable yet not quite likeable (or relatable) enough to really care about, and I left the theater wondering how many better (or at least more interesting) movies, say, the Baghead mumblecore crowd, the documentarians behind Man On Wire or Young@Heart or any number of unheralded SXSW and other below-the-radar indie filmmakers could have made with the millions they spent making (and marketing the shit out of) this utterly disposable "edgy" studio offering.
Related Stories - Trailer Review: Choke, Sundance: The Final Roundup, Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion