As Spike Joneze's 2002 film Adaptation. taught us, adaptation is not an easy task. Unless, of course, you're adapting a book about assholes with incurable sex addictions - then the raw material is a dream come true for Hollywood screenwriters.
Choke follows Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) through the trials and tribulations of his not-so-common daily life, which f eatures a terrible job in a pre-1776 historical reenactment park and a mother with Alzheimer's (in addition to a ton of sex).
Victor, it seems, is a sexaholic - so guys, get excited, because director Clark Gregg frequently cuts to Victor's incessant assessment of what each female character looks like naked. But soon the audience is subjected to some comically horrible images of the women that reside in Victor's mother's retirement home and we realize Victor's problem isn't so enviable.
Gregg's adaptive style tends to leave his own directorial tinkering out of the picture as much as he can. Like Fight Club - which, like Choke, was adapted from a Chuck Palahniuk novel - the narration and dialogue from the book are often carried over verbatim from the original. And Palahniuk's famed appetite for the morbid and the twisted make for such entertaining voice-over material that the sentences themselves are enough to ensure a great movie.
The rest functions as visual accompaniment for Palahniuk's cleverly endearing one-liners, which many consider his signature. Victor's Seth Rogan-esque sidekick Denny (Brad William Henke) also solidifies the film's appeal.
Many films transport the audience into an alternate reality, but Choke takes that alternate reality and forcibly inserts it into the viewer's. well. use your imagination.
