Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke"

Loved Fight Club and I think Rockwell is brilliant. So this must be good...right?
 
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=21592

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Will be @ the Sundance world premiere... Hoping for something awesome. That still above kinda sucks, but I hope the movie is great! Don't know if it will be Fight Club caliber, but at least it'll be good in some way... ;)
 
excellent, if only they would do Survivor, Palahniuk said Trent Reznor had offered to score it if it ever gets made
 
I hope it'll be good. It looks cheap, like something that may end up being swept under the rug by some big-budget productions. I hope that's not the case though, it should be good.
 
The title of the article doesn't sound like and endorsement :).....sounds awesome though.
 
Fox Searchlight buys Choke for $5 million:

In what I may already called the best sale of Sundance 2008, Fox Searchlight has bought Clark Gregg's adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel Choke for a reported $5 million! The deal closed at 5AM this morning after the world premiere of the film last night at 8:30PM at the Racquet Club Theatre. We've been following this film for quite a while and also happened to be at that very same world premiere last night, and I will confirm it was a great experience with plenty of post-movie positive buzz. Get ready to see Choke for yourselves sometime this year!

Choke stars Sam Rockwell as Victor Mancini. Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.


I caught the world premiere of Choke last night and certainly will confirm that it is one hell of a great film. It's no Fight Club, but it is a Chuck Palahniuk movie in its own right delivering a solid story with great comedy and a perfect performance by Sam Rockwell. It's not my own favorite movie of the fest, but I couldn't be happier seeing this get picked up by the best indie distributor out there. Fox Searchlight has put out some of the biggest indie hits - Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno - and now it's time for Choke!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1024715/
Choke was written and directed by actor-turned-director Clark Gregg as his first time feature in which he also co-stars in. If you haven't read the Chuck Palahniuk book, then click the cover below and grab a copy right now!
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http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/01/22/sundance-fox-searchlight-buys-choke-for-5-million/
 
good review over on AICN. i'd love to read a review from someone who's actually read the book, though. sounds pretty spot on so far, though.
 
Here's a review from firstshowing.net:

The latest Chuck Palahniuk novel to be adapted is Choke, a film about a sex-addicted colonial theme park employee who chokes himself at restaurants to gain the life-long friendship of random strangers. This is no Fight Club, but the subject matter is not even remotely the same to begin with. However, it is a great film in its own right that entertains and delivers punches non-stop thanks to insanely brilliant Sam Rockwell. While I won't call Choke the best film of Sundance, and it doesn't play without some theme and tone issue, it is one of the better films this year.


Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini, the perfect fulfillment of the Palahniuk character that has had sex with almost everyone he's met and makes a living by collecting money from those who saved his life in faux choking incidents. Anjelica Huston plays Victor's mother Ida, a delusional fading elder living out her final years in a mental hospital. Whenever Victor comes to visit her she thinks he's an old lawyer and soon he discovers that his father wasn't the man his mother always told him he was. There he meets the charming Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), a doctor at the hospital, and through some confusion and miscommunication comes to believe that he is the son of Jesus Christ. How, you ask? You'll have to see Choke to find that out.


While Choke delivers some great laughs based around its hilarious lead character and his friend Denny (Brad William Henke), it doesn't have that fully immersive tone and feeling like Fight Club or even Donnie Darko. While I know these are entirely different movies, they're so incredible because they have such immersive tones (and at least one is based on a Palahniuk novel). First-time filmmaker Clark Gregg doesn't achieve the same level of perfection with its tone, but instead succeeds at storytelling and comedic timing, both of which are certainly strong elements of Choke.
Overall this is certainly a film to see that I know will be a guaranteed favorite for many people, but for me, it's not on the top of my list. Clark Gregg does a great job interpreting and adapting Palahniuk's work, but I'll say it again, this is no Fight Club.
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http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/01/22/sundance-review-choke/
 
when in the world does this come out? after seeing that footage (more, dammit!) i can easily see this being one of my favorite films (fight club currently holds the #1 spot)

i'd love to see a 'rant' adaptation done mocumentary style (kind of like surf's up), or lullaby, or especially invisible monsters... even a horror movie-ish version of haunted would be great.
 
Sounds great. Certainly a lot harder to adapt than Fight Club, so I'll be very interested to see how it's handled. Definately his best book.
 
SXSW Review:

SXSW Movie Review: Choke
Posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 1:36 am by: Mel Valentin



After watching Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s (Survivor, Fight Club) novel directed by Clark Gregg, the words vulgar, crude, profane, blasphemous, obscene, and, best of all, hilarious, all come to mind. A sharp critique aimed at our self-centered, self-absorbed culture, with a few digs at group therapy, psychiatry, and dysfunctional parenting, Choke is the kind of film that can be only made outside the Hollywood system, then gets picked up by a Hollywood-based distributor after it becomes a hit with festival audiences and critics, as Choke did at the Sundance Film Festival two months ago. Choke was picked up by Fox Searchlight, with a released planned for late August, a lucky month for them (Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine were both released in August).

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has a problem, actually many, many problems. Victor numbs himself with meaningless sex with a random assortment of women, young, middle-aged, beautiful, and not-beautiful, then shows up for his weekly group therapy for sex addicts. When he’s not pursuing women with his fellow sex addict and best friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), he’s working as a “historical interpreter” (i.e., tour guide) at a Colonial-era amusement park. Frequent run-ins with his boss, Lord High Charlie (Clark Gregg), who takes the Colonial experience far too seriously, don’t help much. Worse, Victor’s mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), a former grifter who made Victor’s life extremely difficult, has been hospitalized with Dementia and the prognosis is far from good.


To cover the costs of the expensive private facility that’s caring for his mother, Victor runs a scam on unsuspecting restaurant patrons: he chokes on food, hoping one of them, preferably someone with money and a conscience will “save” him. Once they save him, he has them on the hook, frequently contacting them with requests for money to pay his bills or cover fictitious medical procedures (money he dutifully sends to the private hospital). Everything changes for Victor (as it should) when he meets Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), a seemingly brilliant doctor who suggests a novel, experimental procedure for saving Ida from Alzheimer’s and dying prematurely. And that’s all before an out-of-left-field twist about Victor’s paternal identity presents itself, upending Victor’s views of who he is and who he wants to be.

If you’ve read or seen the film adaptation of Fight Club, then Choke is more of the same: sharp social and cultural critique delivered through scabrous, scatological, offensive, outrageous humor, all in service of whatever themes Palahniuk wants to express. Not surprisingly for a novelist for whose work pushes boundaries hard, adaptations of his work run the risk of appealing to only a small segment of moviegoers or a larger segment, but only if the adapters water it down it considerably. The latter happened here, at least where the ending is concerned (expect something wholly different from the novel). The new ending fits the film adaptation, but it veers far from the novel’s Old Testament-style ending. But that’s a minor problem for Palahniuk’s fans (or it should be) and a non-problem for moviegoers new to Palahniuk’s novels or Fight Club (all five of you).

Unfortunately, Choke has none of Fight Club’s hyperactive visual style. Gregg doesn’t have David Fincher’s (Zodiac, Panic Room, Se7en) talent or skill as a director, but he also didn’t have Fight Club’s budget or Brad Pitt/Ed Norton-level stars. What Gregg does have, though, is a talented cast in the always underrated Sam Rockwell, excellent here as the emotionally damaged, amoral sex addict/con man Victor, Angelica Huston as his grifter mother, sweet and loving one moment, emotionally manipulative the next, Kelly McDonald, a Scottish actress memorable in No Country for Old Men who’s just as good here showing solid range, and Brad William Henke as Victor’s best friend and fellow screw-up/sex addict, who does the big man/wounded vulnerability bit convincingly.
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I hope people don't go expecting another Fight Club from this. I'm excited to see Choke and I love the book. Gregg and company seemed to have given it justice. But people are just going to compare the two, which is unfair for Choke. Like that aintitcoolnews review said, this film didn't get the studio treatment Fight Club got, but it's great to hear that acting is top notch and the story is in tact.
 
Holy ****! The independent movie theater near me is playing Choke next month. I don't have to wait till September. This is awesome!
 
Awesome, I've never been there, looks real nice though. Thanks
 
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