On Choke

Victor: "The world tells us whether we're heros or victims, but we can decide for ourselves."

Bring the kids because this movie is rated R for strong sexual content, nudity and language. Indeed, a wonderful family film.

Staring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald, Brian William Henke and an overabundance of T & A.

After watching Choke, I have to say I have never felt so conflicted about a movie in all my life. I attended a screening of the film, not knowing anything about it except that it was written by the same person who wrote “Fight Club,” which I thoroughly enjoyed. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting Choke’s subject matter, nor its explicit soft-core porn content.

Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini; a scamming sex addict that works as a villager in a mock up colonial period town and who takes advantage of good Samaritans to keep his mother Ida (Anjelica Huston) in the hospital as she slowly slips deeper and deeper into dementia. He accomplishes this by faking choking attacks in high quality restaurants, hence the movie title Choke, and through this tactic he somehow entices his victims to send him money in the mail.

The movie can be very funny at times, but when it is all said and done it really just amounts to some kind of darkly disturbing psychotic love story porn. In fact, the one word I would use to describe this movie is “disturbing”. The movies main topics are sex addiction, drug abuse, child abuse or neglect, kidnapping and rape. Furthermore (spoiler alert!), Victor soon discovers that he might have come into existence by being cloned from the foreskin of Jesus. For some reason Jesus bashing is something that movie writers love to do nowadays, though in all fairness at the end Choke tends to approach it more satirically than say Hamlet 2, but this line of so called creativity is getting so old that it is almost cliché and I find it to be in bad taste no matter what the context. When a movie goes beyond the characters and plot lines to try and belittle any group of people, belief structure, disability or handicap, I feel it shows a real lack of real creativity and intelligence as well as compassion.

Sex addiction is definitely one of today’s hot-button topics and Choke does more than just touch on it. You are frequently assaulted with overly graphic sex scenes and nudity and after David Duchovney’s recent exploits, of which I am still waiting to hear the details, the timing could not be more perfect for such a film to come out. I must admit however, that I was laughing pretty heartily during the movie, but I just cannot recommend it; that is unless you were a big fan of those movies that came on Cinemax at two in the morning in 1995. Otherwise, you might find the constant sex and nudity to be just a little too obtrusive, as I did. Why is it that all the movies that win at Sundance need to be so depraved? Movies can communicate the complexities of human nature to their audience without being overabundantly crude. The human brain has the ability to conceive of points or ideas without having them explicitly portrayed and I would say that the vileness of this movie transcends and negates any positives the movie may have had in the comedic aspect, dialog or dramatic effect.

Though the movie does have a little twisted twist at the end, it is certainly no Fight Club. However, one thing that this movie did have in common with Fight Club was soap. Not that Choke had any soap in it whatsoever, but after watching Choke I felt so dirty I had to wash my eyes out with a strong anti-bacterial. So in conclusion, this movie was just way too disturbing and despite some loud guffaws and a bit of heart I am going to have to be hypocritical and give this movie 2 out of 4 containers of Johnson and Johnson Softwash liquid soap.

Choke opens September 26th in select and unlucky cities.