Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

nowego Being a bit of a fan of Sam Rockwell and Kelly Macdonald, this was a pretty easy movie to watch. It helped that it was also quite amusing and downright funny in some parts. The sex might put some viewers off, but for me it didn't detract from the movie. I haven't read the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, so I cannot judge whether it does it justice or not. I can only judge on what I just watched.Anjelica Huston and Brad William Henke do a really good job as mother and best friend respectively. Maybe a minor spoiler, look for the blond cancer joke the stripper inadvertently enacted, it made me laugh out loud, but some might not find it so amusing. An amusing movie right up there with some of Sam Rockwell's good ones, one of the few movies on IMDb in which I think the current rating of 6.5/10 is about right.

SnoopyStyle Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a sex addict trying to recover and failing. He's in a group with Nico (Paz de la Huerta) and best friend Denny (Brad William Henke). He works at a colonial theme park with Denny, arrogant Lord High Charlie (Clark Gregg), and sexy Ursula the milkmaid (Bijou Phillips). He pretends to choke on food to scam his saviors. His grifter mother Ida (Anjelica Huston) is in long term care with Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald) as her new doctor. Beth (Gillian Jacobs) is stripper Cherry Daiquiri. Marshall suggests an illegal treatment which requires an unusual donation from Victor.This is based on Chuck Palahniuk's book who also wrote Fight Club. Clark Gregg adapted it and is the director. I really love Rockwell and his weird manic energy. The story is a little weird and takes some strange turns. It does lose me after a couple of turns. It's weird but it doesn't get to be wacky fun. I don't think Clark Gregg has a hold of a compelling consistent tone.

MBunge Many, many years ago, there was a television show called "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd". It was the first program I can recall being referred to as a "dramedy". I don't know who came up with that term, if it was a critic or a network suit of one of show's creators, but I believe it was meant to encapsulate "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" not following the conventions or abiding by the demands of either comedy or drama. However, rather than symbolizing some new blend or fusion of genres, "dramedy" very quickly became synonymous with shows that simply aren't funny enough to be comedies or dramatic enough to be dramas. In that sense of the word, Choke is all "dramedy".Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a sex addict with a declining mother (Angelica Huston) in a psychiatric facility. When he's not trying to bang every woman who walks by, Victor fakes choking in restaurants. He lets someone save him and then asks them for money, relying on his savior's sense of responsibility, pity or self-aggrandizement to make them fork over the cash he needs to pay for his mother's care. Victor also works as a colonial re-enactor with his fellow sex addict Denny (Brad William Henke).The film jumps back and forth between Victor's miserable present and his childhood with his charismatically crazy mom, with the scenes of past and present being connected with all the subtlety of a cinder block dropped on your groin. Victor eventually falls into a relationship with Paige (Kelly Macdonald), a psychiatric doctor who claims she can help Victor's mom. That relationship renders Victor impotent, though he seems less bothered by that than by his delusional mother's refusal to tell him who his father is.The story goes through several other digressions, but eventually winds up with Victor having an epiphany. Though all of Choke is about how his mother's care gave Victor's grotesquely low self-esteem and that's the source of all his personal dysfunction, he apparently decides to stop being a sex addict and just be a person who likes to have sex with strangers in strange places. I don't get that distinction and this movie didn't do anything to clarify it.There is a decent amount of nudity here and scattered bits of comedy that pop up now and again, but Choke is never really funny. The script sets up a lot of theoretically humorous situations and personal characteristics. All it is, however, is set up. The punch line should come when someone does something funny in those situations or behaves in a funny way because of those characteristics and those punch lines are too few and too far between.On the other hand, the supposed drama in Choke fails in the opposite direction. Every emotional and intellectual conflict in the story is spelled out so plainly and unavoidably, there might just as well have been sub-titles running along the bottom of the screen explaining to the viewer what he or she is seeing and how they should respond to it. I can't speak for everyone, but it's impossible for me to get invested into a story when it feels like someone is slapping me in the face every 5 minutes and saying "Do you get it, idiot?"There's no complaints about the acting, though Joel Grey is so effective at invoking the tragedy of sex addiction he only underscores how cavalierly the rest of Choke deals with the matter. Writer/director/actor Clark Gregg only does a decent job with the last third of that designation. He knows which direction the camera should be pointed but beyond that, he doesn't appear to have any grasp at all of his story or how he's telling it.This isn't a disastrous bit of cinema. If you're looking for something intentionally off beat, you might like it. I found myself wishing I had watched a marathon of Molly Dodd reruns instead.

ajs-10 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