Choke (DVD)

After being a great Palahniuk fan and a massive admirer of the novel, I could not wait to see this film. The book is brutal, hilarious and engaging. I was under the impression the film would carry the same dark humour as did fight club. Clark Gregg didn't massacre this film - not at all. I still thoroughly enjoyed it, but I felt that it wasn't as true to the book as Fincher's Fight Club, and even less true to the dark, apocalyptic humour that is Palahniuk's trademark. Choke is more of a kinky, gross-out comedy than it is a graphic, funny portrayal of addiction and human flaws. Rockwell does do the book justice as the cynical Protagonist Victor Mancini, and ...  Read the complete review

After the meteroic success of Fight Club when released on DVD, it's no surprise that Chuck Palahniuk's novel Choke was recently adapted into a film. Like Fight Club, it's a cynical film with a great sense of humour. It tells the story of a man, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), who works in a colonial-based theme park, has a sex addiction (and thus attends sexual addiction meetings), and at nights pretends to choke on food in upscale restaurants so his "rescuers" give him money out of sympathy that he uses to pay for his mother's (Anjelica Huston) expensive Alzheimer's treatment bills. What this film really nails is its depiction of sexual addiction - ...  Read the complete review

Choke is a film released in late 2008, based on the novel by cult author Chuck Paluhniuk who also brought us Fight Club. The film is directed by Clark Gregg and stars Sam Rockwell as a sex addict struggling to cope both with his addiction and his elderly and dementing mother who is in care. This film is at times dark and disturbing and features many quite sordid goings on which seriously make you look at each other and go 'do people REALLY do that?' It is balanced out, however, by some genuinely touching scenes between Vincent (Rockwell) and his mother Ida who is clearly losing touch with reality as she sinks into ...  Read the complete review