I don’t know about you, but even thinking about someone choking to death gives me the willies. It’s pretty unlikely, then, that I’ll see the new movie Choke, but a lot of other people will, now that Fox Searchlight has picked it up for distribution after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Variety tells us that they picked it up for $5 million, which is half of what Focus paid for Hamlet 2 but still, y’know, a lot of money.
Choke is based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who also wrote Fight Club. It’s about a sex addict (Sam Rockwell) stuck paying for his sick mother’s medical bills (Anjelica Huston) who comes up with a money-making scheme: he pretends to choke to death in restaurants, and guilts the person who saves him into sending him money. Oh, and in the meantime he goes to addiction-recovery workshops (shades of Fight Club?) and works at a colonial theme park (shades of Colonial Williamsburg?)
It’s a bizarre but incredibly creative concept for a movie, and will likely get a fierce following among Fight Club fans or Palahniuk readers. Clark Gregg adapted the screenplay and makes his directorial debut here; he’s an actor who’s been in movies like Magnolia and The Usual Suspects, and will even be in Iron Man in May. Plenty of actors have made the transition to filmmaking before, and based on Kelly’s review from Sundance, Gregg has done it well: “Gregg does an admirable job in taking this warped tale onto the big screen,” she wrote.
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I don’t know about you, but even thinking about someone choking to death gives me the willies. It’s pretty unlikely, then, that I’ll see the new movie Choke, but a lot of other people will, now that Fox Searchlight has picked it up for distribution after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Variety tells us that they picked it up for $5 million, which is half of what Focus paid for Hamlet 2 but still, y’know, a lot of money. 
