CHOKE

By: Martyn Pedler
Date: 29th Sep 08
Format: Cinema
Mood: Nostalgic

What:
CHOKE

When:
Opens Oct 30, but we have a sneak screening...

Where:
Cinema Nova, Thurs Oct 9, 6.30pm

Watch the trailer:
Here

Win:
A dbl pass to the ThreeThousand preview screening, 6.30pm Thurs Oct 9 at Nova. To enter, email win@threethousand.com.au with the subject line ‘it's P-a-l-A-H-n-i-u-k fools'

Chuck Palahniuk owned the late ‘90s. From the moment Fight Club splattered into popular consciousness, he stood in the cyclone-eye of our every swirling subcultural anxiety.

It seemed inevitable that we'd be bombarded with so many Palahniuk film adaptations that we'd finally have to learn how to spell his name - and yet it's taken this long to see CHOKE hit cinemas, translated into a dirty indie comedy with delusions of grandeur.

Sam Rockwell is enjoyably sleazy as a lost sex addict with a burgeoning messiah complex, and Angelica Huston gives much-needed gravitas to an underwritten maternal role. Unlike David Fincher's Fight Club, however, CHOKE's muted HBO-pilot aesthetic can't quite manhandle Palahniuk's kinetic half-random prose into a coherent film.

This is a chick-flick for men, with empty sex and anal beads replacing tear-streaked reunions. So why does this feel like a time capsule unearthed in an executive's desk drawer? Were things really so different, not even ten years ago? Maybe - like Palahniuk's always radiated - we used to miss our fathers and hate our mothers more.