Choke

I recently saw Clark Gregg's adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel "Choke" at SIFF. In a word: Mess.

In more words: Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston try their damnedest to save it, but just can't. The tone and pace shifts without rhyme or reason (though not in the interesting ways that the book does), Kelly Macdonald is uncharacteristically bad (and she was recently phenomenal in "No Country!"), and the film is even surprisingly ugly from an aesthetic point of view.

The weird part was that as I watched it I thought, "Man, I wish they'd gotten a better cinematographer. Somebody who knows how to make an independent film look like it cost $10 million more to make than it actually did. Somebody like Tim Orr." Much to my surprise, Tim Orr was the cinematographer of this monstrosity. My brain can't compute the fact that the guy who shot "Choke" also shot "George Washington" nearly ten years ago.

The film has some merit here and there (some jokes from the book that translated well to the screen), but overall, not worth anybody's time.