DRUNK ON ALCOHOL

The story of Choke is the story of a sad, empty man named Victor. As med-school dropout, he works as a historical re-enactor at a colonial village to pay for his crazy mother’s mental health facility bills. Well, at least partially. The other money he makes is from scamming people at restaurants, by pretending to choke on his food. When some customer saves him, that customer feels responsible for Victor’s life, to the point where they send him money, and he milks the savioristic feeling they get for all it’s worth.

The graphic sex comes from the fact that Victor, on top of everything else, is a sex addict. He cruises sex addicts anonymous meetings because it’s easy to score. As the book says, you put a bunch of people with the same problem in a room together, what do you expect?

The book the film is based on is by Chuck Palahniuk, the esteemed author of Fight Club. He is a man with an army of rabidly loyal fans who worship his every word, so it’s with great caution that I say, Fight Club was a much better film than it was a movie. The screenwriter, Jim Uhls, was able to take a scatterbrained, messy book and turn it into a coherent, brilliant work of art, and change a terrible ending into an amazing one. Unfortunately, Clark Gregg wasn’t able to pull off such a feat.

While Gregg stayed incredibly close to the source material, which was excellent, the most interesting parts of the book have nothing to do with the plot, but rather long expanses of little-known facts of conspiracies, told more to the reader just for show than any sort of plot development. When you take those long, rambling, fascinating monologs out, your left with an okay plot, with little to no character development.

Nothing felt conclusive, but nothing felt intentionally ambiguous either. The whole movie, especially toward the end, felt like it just kept forgetting where it was going, and forgetting where it had been, leaving everything up in the air, but not in any sense that felt like it had been done on purpose.

Nothing bad can be said about the acting though. Sam Rockwell played Victor, and he was flat-out amazing. He captured the depravity and hopeless emptiness of Victor so well, it was hard to believe Rockwell isn’t a psychotic sex-addict with self-loathing tendencies (and who knows? Maybe he is.)

Angelica Huston plays his emotionally abusive, mentally deranged mother who slips in and out of lucidity, and she is really the only person who could match Rockwell’s immersive believability. While Kelly Macdonald, as Paige Marshall, Victor’s love interest, was very good, as was Brad William Henke, Victor’s best friend Denny, it was Rockwell and Huston who upstage everyone.

One other note a praise about the film is it’s very successful use of dark humor, and it was very, very funny in all of the places where no other film could have been, but it was also unrelenting and unapologetic in it’s portrayal of the sex and the sexual culture and experiences. Needless to say, this isn’t a movie for kids, unless you have a really screwed up kind of family. Then, feel free.

While the movie may have not pulled off what made the book great, and may not have the impact of Fight Club (but hey, what does?) it was still an entertaining film. Adding to the mix was the almost-nonexistent budget of $3.4 million and a freakishly short 25-day shooting schedule, and it’s amazing the movie came out as well as it did. If your looking for a few good laughs and some attractive naked people, I would say this film is a win.

The story of Choke is the story of a sad, empty man named Victor. As med-school dropout, he works as a historical re-enactor at a colonial village to pay for his crazy mother’s mental health facility bills. Well, at least partially. The other money he makes is from scamming people at restaurants, by pretending to choke on his food. When some customer saves him, that customer feels responsible for Victor’s life, to the point where they send him money, and he milks the savioristic feeling they get for all it’s worth.

The graphic sex comes from the fact that Victor, on top of everything else, is a sex addict. He cruises sex addicts anonymous meetings because it’s easy to score. As the book says, you put a bunch of people with the same problem in a room together, what do you expect?

The book the film is based on is by Chuck Palahniuk, the esteemed author of Fight Club. He is a man with an army of rabidly loyal fans who worship his every word, so it’s with great caution that I say, Fight Club was a much better film than it was a book. The screenwriter, Jim Uhls, was able to take a scatterbrained, messy book and turn it into a coherent, brilliant work of art, and change a terrible ending into an amazing one. Unfortunately, Clark Gregg wasn’t able to pull off such a feat.

While Gregg stayed incredibly close to the source material, which was excellent, the most interesting parts of the book have nothing to do with the plot, but rather long expanses of little-known facts of conspiracies, told more to the reader just for show than any sort of plot development. When you take those long, rambling, fascinating monologs out, your left with an okay plot, with little to no character development.

Nothing felt conclusive, but nothing felt intentionally ambiguous either. The whole movie, especially toward the end, felt like it just kept forgetting where it was going, and forgetting where it had been, leaving everything up in the air, but not in any sense that felt like it had been done on purpose.

Nothing bad can be said about the acting though. Sam Rockwell played Victor, and he was flat-out amazing. He captured the depravity and hopeless emptiness of Victor so well, it was hard to believe Rockwell isn’t a psychotic sex-addict with self-loathing tendencies (and who knows? Maybe he is.)

Angelica Huston plays his emotionally abusive, mentally deranged mother who slips in and out of lucidity, and she is really the only person who could match Rockwell’s immersive believability. While Kelly Macdonald, as Paige Marshall, Victor’s love interest, was very good, as was Brad William Henke, Victor’s best friend Denny, it was Rockwell and Huston who upstage everyone.

One other note a praise about the film is it’s very successful use of dark humor, and it was very, very funny in all of the places where no other film could have been, but it was also unrelenting and unapologetic in it’s portrayal of the sex and the sexual culture and experiences. Needless to say, this isn’t a movie for kids, unless you have a really screwed up kind of family. Then, feel free.

While the movie may have not pulled off what made the book great, and may not have the impact of Fight Club (but hey, what does?) it was still an entertaining film. Adding to the mix was the almost-nonexistent budget of $3.4 million and a freakishly short 25-day shooting schedule, and it’s amazing the movie came out as well as it did. If your looking for a few good laughs and some attractive naked people, I would say this film is a win.

“The atheist God-haters who made this game obviously want to corrupt the minds of our young ones and turn them to evil,” said Constance Young, advocate for the group Devotees In Christ’s Kingdom and Service (DICKS). “This flagrant disregard for the holy bible and the stead-fast historical facts it provides needs to be punished!”

In SPORE, you create creatures from the primordial ooze, and as they grow and forage, they begin to evolve into larger creatures with more features and advantages. The natural advantages you build onto them allow them to adapt to their surroundings, and battle for territorial dominance. This has been seen by DICKS as support of the theory of evolution.

“This game is trying to lie to kids and tell them that we come from monkeys and birds and whatnot,” said Young. “Do I look like I got feathers to you?”

When told that the game features no monkeys, or humans, Young rebutted that none of that mattered. She also admitted to never having played the game, and only hearing about it from a TV commercial she saw half of.

“It don’t matter what I seen, it matters what my kids done seen!” Young yelled. “Of course none of my kids would never play this game, because they don’t have those computer things. But they got the TVs, and that’s just as bad.”

When asked to explain what she meant by any of what she had said, she stormed off and joined the picket line around EA Games’ headquarters.

Even infamous anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson was present at the protest.
“I have been told the game features the extinction of whole groups!” Thompson yelled, to no one in particular. “This game is a Third Reich simulator! Were teaching our children to commit genocide!”

It was unclear to the audience whether or not Thompson knew that animal species go extinct naturally, or even if he knew which game he was protesting.

SPORE creator Will Wright was unavailable for comment at the time of press.

For too long I’ve been waiting by the sidelines, keeping my mouth shut about politics. I never bring it up at parties or go on long rants about the disgusting maggots that most people in Washington (and almost anyone aspiring to go to Washington (even just on vacation)) are. But now I see things every day that drive me mad, and what makes me even madder is that not all of it is coming from the lie-spewing maw of the politicians, but the morons who are just sitting back and watching the collapse of our world. A bit dramatic, I guess, but fuck you.

First off, apparently the cold war is back on with Russia. According to Condoleezza Rice, Russia’s behavior is getting worse and worse all the time and we wont stand for it. That’s right, Rice said that America wont stand by and watch a world leader invade a sovereign nation under the guise of “self-defense” without even letting a neutral third-party investigation be held, and doing so against the will of most of the free-world… and she was talking about Russia… I’m amazed she didn’t explode in a bloody geyser of hypocrisy right there in her little shoes. It would have been amazing to see.

Second of all, I denounce my Irish heritage (and my strong desire to have Irish heritage). Those bastards let me down when a group made up of them invited McCain to speak about US-Irish relations. He was the first republican to be chosen is the group’s history. And why is that? Because the Irish notoriously don’t like black people. Since the Civil War, when the two groups saw each other as threats to their employment, the groups have been more hateful than any other in America (aside from Non-Irish Whites VS Everyone). So, fuck that noise. If the Irish want to win a power-player like myself back to their camp, I’m going to need tanker trucks full of premium Irish whiskey. And don’t try putting a fancy label on the side and just filling it with Black Velvet! I’ll know!

Third, and finally for the moment, An American Carol is coming out. Oh my fucking god. This psycho right-wing freak show of a film managed to grab a cast too! WHAT THE FUCK?! Movies like this should be relegated to “stars” like Kirk Cameron and Gary Coleman (who is actually in the movie, so I guess that’s okay…) But this atrocious piece of shit stars Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, James Woods, Dennis Hopper, Leslie Nielsen, and David Allen Grier! DAG!! This movie has the same kind of humor as Uwe Boll’s “Postal”, but just with a fucking ridiculous republican angle, and NOT AS FUNNY! Uwe Boll made a movie that has the potential to be better than something! What sweet, fresh hell is this?!