Choke

Chuck Palahniuk is one sick fuck.

And I mean that as a compliment.

But as with most good and twisted writers, his stuff is damn near impossible to adapt to the screen without it simply becoming unmarketable amidst what passes for entertainment in the contemporary AmeriKan™ cinema.

In other words, except for streaming web based porn, material like Choke (when and if done right) has no place or audience in our cineplexes.

And that's a damn shame. Back in the early '90s I honestly thought Hollywood films would contain hardcore sex by now. It's 2009 for chrissakes! What are we waiting for? Sarah Palin's gonna be president in three years and we all know what's going to happen then. Swarms of morality cops and pro-life troopers crashing down the doors of anyone with an IQ over 130 and those who have ever questioned the existence of Yahweh, Jesus or Paul Bunyan. They'll take your literature, DVDs and the porn stash. They'll place content blockers on your TeeVee screens and computers. They'll pass out literature warning of end times and teh 'terrists and while you're crying your eyes out over the injustice of it all, they'll kick your miserable elitist teeth down your throat and pilfer the bills from your wallet to finance the new super death ray that will vanquish Islam, Noam Chomsky and Lucifer hisself.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Choke.

Choke should have been one of those dirty half-porn films I envisioned so long ago. Something needed to help it out. It's one of those curious, almost independent feeling movies that tries too hard to be legitimate and clever when a healthy dose of cinematic clap and filthiness would have been preferable. Think early John Waters.

It's not that the film is without vulgar charms. The quirk and kink meters' needles are flapping wildly throughout. But it has far too many eccentricities to ever merge into a fully realized piece of foul, cynical fun.

Here's the dirty laundry list:

- Our anti-hero is Victor (Sam Rockwell), a callous, confused, sex-addicted asshole who pays for his demented mother's treatment at a facility by working as a "historical interpreter" at a Williamsburg-esque type tourist stop AND by feigning choking on various foodstuffs at restaurants in order to lure fellow patrons into saving him. He subsequently hits them up for money through the old Eastern belief that once you save a life you are responsible for it.

- His best friend is an overweight loser with a compulsive masturbation problem who falls in love with a local stripper while sketching her.

- His mother (Anjelica Huston) suffers from dementia and often does not recognize him on his visits to her mental ward.

- She raised him by occasionally abducting him from various foster parents throughout his life and took him on experimental criminal journeys like releasing dangerous animals from zoos. His ear was partially bitten off by a lynx during one such endeavor.

- He is trying to get his deluded mother to tell him who his father was before she dies.

- He learns he might be a direct descendent of Jesus Christ Almighty due to the reconstituted DNA from the savior's foreskin.

- His mother's doctor (Kelly MacDonald) is seducing him so that she can become pregnant and thus use the potential stem cells to heal his mother.

- There's some symbolic side story about he and his friend building a "living" rock sculpture on an inherited, abandoned lot that used to be the property of his friend's drunken uncle.

- And Victor just wants to feel loved and normal. He desperately desires some stability.

In the mean time, he fucks anything that moves, anywhere he can.

Wow. Where's the three legged, Puerto Rican hermaphrodite when you really need one?

Victor has "mile high" sex in an airplane lavatory, role plays a rape scenerio with a women he meets on the intertoobs, screws a fellow sex addict on a rest room floor (he is her sponsor) during a twelve step program (hosted by Joel Gray, an auto-asphyxiation/she-male enthusiast), gets a handjob on a haystack from a co-worker at the colonial gig and bangs his mother's doctor in the chapel at the mental facility.

If this all seems a bit much, well... it is.

But as always with Palahniuk there are some clever insights and details of observed behavior that slip under the radar of most. One such enjoyable particular is Victor's imagination constantly picturing the breast sizes and preferred sexual positions of all the women he walks past. Most males can easily relate to that yet it is rarely discussed in polite conversation. Especially with female partners. We envision fucking everything we see. I believe that needs to be noted more. It helps explain our characters better.

Again though, as a whole, there is just too much here to place in a cohesive context or social statement. The film meanders often.

Choke is a soup. An occasionally tasty soup with too many chunks of food in it. And it's difficult to get the whole thing down the gullet.