Did you people see the same film I saw?

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

I give Choke some credit for attempting to push boundaries and assembling a nice cast for a low budget flick. I appreciate the racy borderline gone-too-far approach at edgy comedy, though it's also showered with its attempts at drama (black comedy is the target zone). The first 20 minutes of this movie I thoroughly enjoyed. In fact, I really thought I was in for a unique experience I wanted to tell my friends about. Ready for the "but"?Choke actually feels like a more profane My Name Is Earl on long play, except Jason Lee here isn't really likable and he feels more like an impression of the bad Wilson brother (Owen). Also, the tubby sidekick in this version of Earl ends up being the one you really wish the movie was about. I'd much rather follow his easy going character Denny around than the contrived attempt at quirky likability that is Sam Rockwell's Victor. Definitely would prefer to watch a bit of Denny from The Room as long we're discussing cinematic Denny's. Alternatively, utilizing the talented cast around Rockwell into more than simple role players would have likely yielded a more heart warming, genuine result.Truthfully, there's a good amount of potential here. Kelly Macdonald shines (as others have mentioned), Brad William Henke has nice moments, and the radiant Angelica Houston does her best to save the day. To reiterate, I did enjoy the randomly profane stabs at humor here. Unfortunately, the completely implausible plot and the main character gets in the way.

I've never watched a movie and been left with an overwhelming impulse to hunt down the director and flog them repeatedly with a strand of anal beads.....until now! Clark Gregg took a brilliant book ready to stand side by side on the silver screen next to Fight Club and instead threw up a hollow shell that really just amounted to a retelling of the plot points from the book. He left out the most important element which is of course Palahniuk's sharp witted deadpan narration.As other people have touched on Fincher and Ed Norton nailed it in Fight Club but in this film Clark Gregg absolutely ruined it. Palahniuk is a brilliant satirist, a modern day Kurt Vonnegut, but without his narrative voice reacting to all of the ridiculous things going on in the story it feels more like an episode of My Name is Earl than a Palahniuk story.Watching the movie you get the sense that even the actors know it's not working and are just going through the motions the best they can. Clark basically wrote an outline of all the plot points from the book and tried to mimic them leaving out most of palahniuk's narration and not adding any imagination, style or wit. The voice over narration he does include leaves out 95% of Palahniuk's best material. The book had me belly laughing time and again. Palahniuk's writes in simple language but he has a brilliant dry wit and cynicism that's unmistakable.It's like Clark Greg was afraid to copy finchers fight club style so he went in a completely opposite mind numbingly generic direction. Director Clark Greg, also the screenwriter, had the nerve to cast himself in the role as the magistrate of colonial dunsboro. A character that was present perhaps one scene in the book, Clark writes himself in multiple new scenes for the character, none of which are funny. Go figure.Why is it not surprising Clark Gregg's directing credits only include this movie. Thank God I'm not the only one that believes he should never be behind a camera again.If anyone has yet to read the book, please please don't let this atrocity scare you away. The book is absolutely brilliant!

At the center of Choke are two superb, veteran character actors - Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston - who hand in such powerful, passionate performances that it's very likely they thought they were making a much better film than Choke. It's quite possible, in fact, that the initial script they read was much more fluent and coherent than the final product, and that it was the editing that butchered the film. Maybe a director's cut, with 40 or 50 extra minutes, will one day prove that to be the case.As it is, Choke is a barely coherent mess. It apparently tries to (or pretends to) tackle some pretty large issues, like sex addiction, subjective morality, and nurture vs. nature, but it says nothing about any of them and the end result is merely a pretty tasteless dark comedy with lots of explicit sex scenes. Entire plot threads are left hanging and make absolutely no sense, not by themselves nor in any sort of meaningful relation to others. It's most likely that Clark Gregg really loved the book, but had no idea how to make a movie out of it. It feels like a series of short scenes cut from a much larger work; that and the strong acting is enough to make for a few entertaining scenes, but not enough to make a watchable movie.

This film is based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who also wrote the rather excellent Fight Club (1999). Combine that with a cast that includes Anjelica Huston and Sam Rockwell and I hope we're onto a winner! So it was with fingers crossed and very little knowledge of the plot, I sat down to watch.Victor Mancini is a sex addict; he goes to group sessions to help with his addiction but only ends up having sex with the woman he's supposed to be sponsoring. He works together with his best friend, Denny, at a Colonial America re-enactment park, the kind of place school kids go to learn about the early settlers. He also is a com-man, faking choking fits in restaurants in order to get money so he can support his mother, Ida, who has dementia and lives in a home. On one of his visits he meets a doctor, Paige Marshall, who thinks she knows a way to help Ida, but it's risky. I really don't want to give too much away, so I'll leave my short plot summary here.A pretty well made film with really good performances from both Sam Rockwell as Victor and Anjelica Huston as Ida J. Mancini. I must also give honourable mentions to Brad William Henke as Denny and Kelly Macdonald as Paige Marshall.A lot of the story is told in flashback, harking back to when Victor was a boy on the run with Ida. A really quirky film with all the odd twists you'd expect from the writer of Fight Club. Although it's far from prefect I enjoyed this one very much, and that's not just because of the nudity and sex scenes. Over all, not perfect, enjoyable with a few laughs: Recommended.My score: 6.8/10