tori likes to yell and stuff

First off let me stress- I ADORE Chuck Palahniuk. He is one of my favorite authors, and I LOVE how the movie Fight Club turned out despite the way it ended and a few bits of the book’s plot that it left out. I still think how Fight Club turned out was wonderful.


AND- I love the book Choke. So when I saw a commercial for the movie way back when it was being put out into theaters, I was pretty psyched. Then I saw the movie posters…


Seen here


At that point, I was thinking “Well I guess they’re exaggerating the sex in the plot, but I guess sex sells so as long as the movie is OK then whatever..”


Because, after all, the fact that he is a sex addict doesn’t really have much to do with the overall meaning of the story. It’s just character development after all, he could easily have been an alcoholic, a pill popper, or well, anything else to show that he is “dirty” or “impure” in some way. What I’m getting at is that while Victor may be a sex addict, the story isn’t about sex.


When I saw the movie I was disappointed at how much they focused on sex.. It was just too much, it was unnecessary. But honestly, that would have been fine with me, if they had kept the plot in all other aspects.


But dear god did they fail at that; Probably the worst was how they butchered the character Paige. I loved how at the end of the book, it turns out she was just batshit insane. But the movie they made her out to “just have a few emotional problems” and for some strange reason made the two fall in love? WTF was that about? It ruined the entire story.


And one more thing that bugged me was how in the book after Victor appeared on TV, everyone who saved him came to see him… and then realized that he cheated them all and stoned him with Denny’s rocks. That was a really epic moment, why on EARTH would the movie add like 30 extra sex scenes but take away that one?


It’s like they were trying to muffle the whole “Victor is Jesus” thing, when really that was one of the MAJOR themes in the book, if not the most important..! Why why why would they try to get rid of the main element that made the book so good? Sure, they showed Paige telling him about it, but other than that they basically ignored it! And even still, the stoning scene was what made him and Jesus so similar in a way, and what made Paige’s lie almost seem.. real.



So basically the plot of the movie infuriated me, and for anyone who has read the book I’m sure… And probably everyone who had seen the movie but not the book WON’T go out and read the book if they think the book’s plot is as weak and lame as the film adapted plot, which is a big loss for Palahniuk.


Another thing that bugged me was how the director was trying to cash in on it, thinking that just because Fight Club was another work of Palahniuk’s that they could just take the format of Fight Club and just plug in some of the plot from Choke.


Even in the first five minutes you can tell that they were trying to make it like Fight Club with the way they did the narration and how they introduced the story.


But the thing is, Choke is NOT Fight Club. And it’s sad, because if they had treated Choke like a work of it’s own and not some weird tribute to Fight Club, it may have become a cult classic at the very least.


But I DO like who they cast for Victor and Denny, as well as Victor’s mom. I do like the way they portrayed his tour guide job, and the way they portrayed his coworkers. The actor that played Victor portrayed the character well, and I was really pleased with his performance. It was the script I didn’t like, but when it came to acting I really did like *most* of the actors.


However, I HATE how they portrayed Paige. I’m not familiar with the actress but she seemed like she was trying to be Drew Barrymore in Donnie Darko, but failed miserably because she failed to portray the sarcasm needed for portraying that kind of character. Basically, she came across as a boring hunk of nothingness. Nothing special enough to stand out, if anything she should have been one of the random sluts that he has sex with, not the girl who he ends up liking.


Overall, I think this movie had a whole lot of potential, but they royally screwed it up. Too bad too, because this is one of the handful of Palahniuk books that couldve been *easily* adapted to the big screen… they just spend far too much time messing with the script when the way it was written could have been easily adapted without having to take out major bits of the plot.