I enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke back in high school. His transgressive nihilism always made me feel edgier than the rest, and I believe this was the third of his I read. From what I recall, the book was a genuinely fun, ridiculous, and unique ride with his own brand of twist. I haven’t checked back with Palahniuk in years, but I’m excited to catch up out of curiosity and nostalgia. 

With the movie, I couldn’t get onboard with anything being shown. The direction, script, and all-around production was a pointless meander for incorporating vague scenes from the source material. I can’t imagine this’d have any real flow without knowing the source? It was just plain bad, and I’d only recommend…

Film #58 of The December Project
 
As a huge fan of dark comedies, weird love stories, Sam Rockwell, and Fight Club (this film is based on a book by the same author), this was pretty much a favorite waiting to happen for me. It would've taken much more effort NOT to like this film than to like it. I haven't read the book so I have no idea how well it captures the spirit/tone of the novel, but I found the film version hilarious, thought-provoking, and profound.

Here you've got a man named Victor (Sam Rockwell) trying to beat his sex addiction by going to meetings regularly with his best friend Denny. They both work at one of those…

The world tells us whether we're heroes or victims. But, we can decide for ourselves.

Fight Club if it was about sex and sinning instead of fighting and masculinity, and done without any of the ability that could make something like that interesting. When it comes to adapting Chuck Palahniuk, Clark Gregg is no David Fincher, and that's made clear pretty early on. It looks like a basic sex comedy, a lot of the dialogue and characters often leaving a lot to be desired. If I am supposed to like these characters or be more uncomfortable with them, it's muddled when I don't think it's supposed to be. At the same time, I mainly gave this a watch for my…

Chuck Palahniuk is a repetitious hack who never grew out of his “I wish I was JG Ballard” stage and should burn in fucking hell for the sin of making me listen to idiots who barely read telling me how great he is. 

Every book of his is the same book. You got your nihilistic narrator, your punch-up repeated catchphrase, your second act unreliable narrator twist, your unhappy happy ending. I mean I get it — they’re a fast read and they’re edgy in an unremarkable way, like Marilyn Manson or Eminem, where you’ve got it, but boy, they really want you to be sure they got it. Me? I liked Survivor a lot, when I was sixteen. Fight Club…

Okay I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible but this movie made me cry. I’m really passionate about dysfunctional parent-child relationships in film and this ought to be one of my favorites. Sam Rockwell is amazing as the main character and Anjelica Huston plays the manic, erratic and borderline abusive parent so well.

I wish they had spent more time showing Victor's (Rockwell's) childhood trauma and how it burdens his life as an adult man beyond him not being able to „get it up“ with women he cares about. They could’ve scrapped the unnecessary parts (especially about his heritage, wtf was that?) and really dive into his character and trauma. For example, the part with the fake choking,…

I liked the book but based on what little I had heard about the movie, I had a hunch I'm not going to like it very much. That considered it wasn't very surprising that I didn't really like it and thought it was a bad adaptation. Then the more I thought of it, I started to realise that instead of being decent, it's actually a quite bad movie on it's own too.

There are some mistakes in there that I can tolerate. Making the movie light was a totally wrong way to go but hey, if that's how Gregg saw the book, who am I to complain. You could make a light movie out of it and still succeed fairly…

I enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke back in high school. His transgressive nihilism always made me feel edgier than the rest, and I believe this was the third of his I read. From what I recall, the book was a genuinely fun, ridiculous, and unique ride with his own brand of twist. I haven’t checked back with Palahniuk in years, but I’m excited to catch up out of curiosity and nostalgia. 

With the movie, I couldn’t get onboard with anything being shown. The direction, script, and all-around production was a pointless meander for incorporating vague scenes from the source material. I can’t imagine this’d have any real flow without knowing the source? It was just plain bad, and I’d only recommend…