Choke
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in November you can’t do much worse than a comedy to stir the spirit and dispel any emerging SAD symptoms. I will be checking out ‘Blindness‘ this week so keep an eye out for my review of that (sigh), until then due to the cold snap I was lazy and wondered over to my local cinema for a quick ninety minutes of US indie distraction.
‘Choke‘ is the story of Victor, a New Jersey based sex addict who works as a historical re-enactment performer with a nifty sideline in performing fake choking scenes in restaurants, preying on naive strangers who ‘save’ him with heroic Heimlich manoeuvres whom Victor subsequently taps for financial aid now that they’ve saved his life – kind of an exploitation of that Chinese proverb that if you save someones life then you are responsible for it. Victors motives aren’t entirely selfish however, after dropping out of medical school he is struggling to keep his mentally deranged mother (the always wonderful Angelica Huston) comfortable in an expensive care home as he tries to prise from her deteriorating memory the real history of his absent father and his confused childhood. Victor swiftly hits on one of his mothers nurses, the equally always wonderful Kelly McDonald and their swiftly developing unorthodox relationship leads our hero down a darkly comic path of abuse and revelation.
From that synopsis you may have worked out that this isn’t your standard issue American comedy, unsurprising given that it’s an adaption of literary sicko Chuck Palahniuk’s 2001 novel. Like his other books Palahniuk likes to explore some of the darker sides to our natures from his (deliberately) confused, conflicted Generation X perspective so I guess I can hesitantly compare “Choke’ being to sex what ‘Fight Club‘ is to violence and male machismo – intentionally shocking, nervous and unconventional. Sam Rockwell is pretty good as the shabby Victor, stumbling from one desperate, unsatisfying sexual misadventure to another – depending on your demeanour you may need a shower after seeing this film.
As a comedy I guess this just about works, passing the five out loud laughs quotient with one memorable sequence that I won’t spoil here – suffice to say if the phrase ‘pre-agreed rape fantasy sexual encounter’ makes you uncomfortable then you should probably give this a miss. It builds – if you’ll excuse the expression – to an agreeable climax (heh) with something of another eccentric resolution for our hero in a manner akin to the classic finale of ‘Fight Club’. Nice final track over the end credits as well.
Being a miserable, cynical sort I find it difficult to muster many favourite comedy films that I can happily watch again and again. There’s the three Pythons of course, a certain cold war laff riot, this cult classic, the original and still the best National Lampoon film and Matt Damon’s finest turn. After that I have to move into hybrid comedy/genre films such as ‘Dazed & Confused‘ and of course some of the older classics. Oh, and of course this and this and this. And this. And this. And this (etc).
Minty's Menagerie 
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