Film Review by :Bryan Fox

When watching a film adaptation of a novel you’ve read (and there can be no relevant critique of an adapted film by someone who hasn’t first read the novel), there is really only one significant question to address:  Have the director/producer/screenwriter shown the details they need to show, and left out the ones they didn’t? 

Or, to put it another way: could the film be both enjoyable and intelligible for someone who hasn’t already read the novel?  Fight Club, the first Chuck Palahniuk book to hit the big screen, not only fulfilled the promise of the novel, but added to it with sharp, observant dialogue and effective deviations from the work it represented.  To be fair, Palahniuk’s visceral imagery, ribald hi-jinks, and comically ridiculous plot twists will always be difficult to bring to the big screen.  But ten years after Fight Club (yes, it’s already been a decade), could the second adaptation of the author’s work again rise to the challenge?

Choke revolves around Victor Mancini, a sex-addicted protagonist with a job at a hilariously-authentic colonial village (workers are punished for being anachronistic), a penchant for choking on food in restaurants so as to earn people’s sympathy and love (“Somebody saves your life, they’ll love you forever,” Victor quips), and an Alzheimer’s-suffering mother in a nursing home who may or may not still know the truth as to his lineage, something which he desperately wants to know before she succumbs to the disease eating away at her brain.

Sam Rockwell is aptly-cast as Victor, providing enough self-deprecating deadpan and smarmy sexuality to carry off the Palahniuk protagonist trope - the self-loathing anti-hero who, somewhere in his heart, just wants to be loved.  Brad William Henke as Denny, Victor’s Seth-Rogenesque best friend and colonial village cohort, provides the foil to Victor’s inwardly-focused scorn, and Anjelica Huston brings us Ida, Victor’s skittish, senile, but sensitive mother, who mistakes her son for a different one of her defense lawyers (from her previous life as a petty con artist) every time he visits.  Indeed, the casting in Choke is solid in all its significant roles, and strong acting challenges the audience to hover between sympathy for Victor and shock at just how base he seems to be.

The problem here is the scriptwriting.  In answer to the question posed above, without having read the book, Choke is a tough story to swallow.  In scarcely 85 minutes (the film is listed as 1:32, but surely that includes front- and back-end credits), we are introduced to Victor’s sex addiction (in a clear cinematic nod to Fight Club’s opening, Choke, too starts with a hilarious self-help group scene), his penchant for self-asphyxiation (a focal point in the book, but here not shown nearly enough to warrant the film’s title), his mother’s illness and his quest to find out his own back story, the absurd affections of the other elderly women in the nursing home (who variously accuse him of having raped them, murdered their sons, and being the Messiah, to great comic effect), his job at the colonial village and the subtext therein, his desires for Paige Marshall (Kelly MacDonald) a doctor at Ida’s clinic and the only woman for whom Victor suffers impotence, and, well, the list goes on….

Victor’s myriad voiceovers are not an effective palliative for the fact that the audience needs a bit of assistance to follow all of the subtle goings-on of the narrative.  And what Palahniuk can deftly navigate with a well-placed anecdotal aside (in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I am a devoted fan of the author’s work), does not translate as well as it needs to in film form.   Basically, where a novel can take literary license, a film has to present at least some cohesion to keep its viewers.  Choke, while entertaining, seems like a film that is in a hurry to get somewhere.  With another twenty minutes, perhaps some of the subplots could have been more thoroughly explored.  As it is, though, it’s basically a film for Palahniuk fans which is bound to attract many whose only previous exposure to the author’s oeuvre is the film version of Fight Club, and I can’t say they, will walk away all that satisfied.

 Movie Review By: Bryan Fox / RealTVfilms.com Blogger

Jay, played with tons of debutant charisma by Andy Cisernos, has got a lot on his plate in the Bronx.  A hard-nosed, hard-working father who wants him out of the house because he won’t pay to support another ‘parasite’ after his brother is dishonorably discharged from the Marines and sent home from Iraq with a burgeoning alcohol problem and raging PTSD.  A girl who falls for him against apparent odds but needs someone to lean on when her grandmother, her only real family, passes away.  A jittery thug from ‘round the way with monomaniacal designs on a pair of new kicks Jay procured in exchange for letting a guy from up the block store a crime-used van in the gas station garage where Jay works the night shift.  And some Harlem ‘hoods with whom he seems to cross paths an inordinate number of times in a city of 8 million after a random altercation during a house party at the film’s outset ends in chest-bumping and a quick, foreboding flash of steel.  Got all that? 

If there’s one significant shortcoming to “Shine On”, it’s simply that the film threatens to cave in under the weight of its myriad subplots.  Perhaps a slick, one-hour drama slotted in after “The OC” could address in two seasons what this film attempts to cover in just under 110 minutes. 

The movie is not without minor flaws as well.  There are a few too many cinematically timed rainfalls (any number greater than zero generally being classified as ‘too many’ in this category), and several occasions where the soundtrack, comprised largely of pleasant –enough acoustic songs written and performed by Cisernos, tells us exactly what to feel – “I like you”, playing over and over when Jay and girl Alessandra (Jenna Deman) share their first kiss, “What a day for dying young”, the portentous refrain before the climactic fight scene (so portentous, in fact, it basically gives away what’s going to happen). 

The dialogue, though on the whole appropriately witty and weighty, is not without its clichéd throwaway lines: Jay’s brooding brother Eddie, drunk and leaning against the wall of a bodega: “Ain’t nothin’ good in the ‘hood”.  Jay, after being attacked on his own stoop by the Harlem crew: “When I walk down the street, all I got is respect, and when I lose that, I got nothing.” 

But, to be fair, this is a first screenplay by the singularly-named Augustin, and he does a lot of things right – the majority of the dialogue is so natural it feels less scripted than the average reality show, and he wisely avoids the easy temptation of playing the race card regarding the repeated and escalating violence between Jay’s crew and the Harlem lot; even though the ‘Boriuca vs. Bloods’ line is there for the taking, this film is much more about turf than race.  It’s also about transcending one’s environment, with a hint of “Do the Right Thing”s ‘protagonist trying to do good in a bad, bad place’ despair.  Ultimately, though, the film’s salvation is the overall abundance of energy by nearly every key figure on the screen.  Its indiscretions become largely forgivable when the action is played out by such a dynamic cast.

The movie is carried along by the natural chemistry between Jay and his two closest boys, the lanky, sharp-tongued Mafi (Flaco Navaja), and the husky, short-tempered Lucho (Michael Rivera).  Though the actors did not know each other before the film, and only spent a month together before shooting began, they come off like three kids who played on the same Little League team, had crushes on the same fifth-grade girl, five-fingered caramelos from the same bodega.  And the majority of the actors here seem to be playing largely-unaltered versions of themselves, which is often a lot harder to do well than it would seem, though most here seem to pull it off with aplomb. 

There is something playfully anachronistic about this film - elements of Tony Manero and his crew abound in Jay and his foils Lucho and Mafi, from the latter’s playful over-gesticulation during stoopfront conversations to the juvenile post-date ‘Didja get some?’ ribbing of Jay after he begins his relationship with Alessandra. 

The profusion of violent run-ins (some almost comically stylized, as evidenced by the audience’s laughter) seems too excessive to be ignored in present-day New York, if we are meant to assume that this is the Bronx in 2008 and not the borough during the vigilante justice epoch that was the early eighties.  There’s even a theatrical ‘race to the open door of a waiting subway car after a run-in with the bad guys’ sequence at one point, replete with jumped turnstiles and flustered city cops hot on the trail.  It almost left me waiting for that staged jump off the Brooklyn Bridge under cover of night. 

Cisernos, who seemed genuinely moved by the warm reception that the screening (the film’s first) received, said to me afterwards that the thing which most worried him was the Bronx accent he felt he needed to adopt and the fact that, as a native Californian, he hadn’t pulled it off.  But the beauty of contemporary New York is that the only place New Yorkers sound like “New Yorkers” is in movies – he needn’t have worried.  The rest of the cast in attendance seemed both gracious and sincere, which leaves you wishing them well in their nascent careers.  When asked, however, by one audience member about the significance of the film’s title, the answer given by producer Andrew Adelson was less than convincing: “We don’t really know, actually – and we are still shopping the film.  So if you can think of something better, let us know!”  Paintings and poems can be named without regard to subject matter, but a feature film has to do a bit better than that, guys…

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Movie Review By: Bryan Fox / RealTVfilms.com Blogger

A far-reaching film that begins with an ending and ends on a sun-bleached hillside at the far end of the world, Desierto Sur is nothing if not a journey. Young Sofia (Marta Etura) wins a swimming competition in Barcelona as her mother expires in a hospital. At the bedside of the deceased, and later, in her home, she laments to herself and those around her “I can’t cry.”

Scenes of despair follow. A kindly but distant father, who seems more avuncular than paternal. A boyfriend, who calls repeatedly but can’t ease her pain. A swim team that turns quickly on her when she announces her desire to quit. And a mysterious envelope returned undelivered, sent originally to a town somewhere in the Chilean desert that the postman couldn’t find. The envelope contains a love letter from her late mother to a man. And thus Sofia’s journey begins.

Desierto Sur jets us out of Barcelona before we can appreciate the cosmopolitan beauty of that city, but leaves us ample time in Chile to enjoy its rugged splendor. Though divested of her purse by an opportunistic street thief shortly after her arrival, Sofia sets out from Santiago in search of clues leading to a town it seems no one has heard of.

There’s nothing like a long, dusty bus ride down a South American highway to afford one time to ponder one’s place in the cosmos, and Sofia stares out the window as she watches the sand roll by, lost in contemplation. Plagued by dreams of drowning now, she encounters Nadia (Carolina Varleta, a kinetic presence in the film), a street performer/vagabond/inveterate liar, who has stowed herself away underneath the bus in an effort to return to Copiapo and her mother. The two girls strike up an uneasy friendship, Nadia alternately stealing Sofia’s things, robbing a house she claims is that of her parents upon arrival to Copiapo, and inventing a map she says points the way to the eponymous city in the sands, among her other indiscretions.

Along the way, the girls hitch a ride with Gustavo (Alejandro Botto), a gangly, sun-browned Argentine who shows Sofia kindness and affection, and soon we learn that he is carrying more than just two jovenes with him in the back of his jeep. Sofia falls for him, but runs off into the desert when she learns the dark truth about his day job. He wins her back, but neither he nor Nadia will ultimately accompany Sofia to the final stage of her journey. In an unexpected but quite plausible plot twist, the ground drops out from under the three wanderers in a flash of misfortune, and when it does, it is a gut punch that momentarily takes the wind out of the viewer as well. But still Sofia remains steadfast in her quest, following it through to completion, undaunted by all obstacles sent her way.

Desierto Sur is the rare film where no one is a bad guy, and the sympathy we feel for each of our characters is genuine, because not a one of them is begging for it. Etura and Varleta have an easy chemistry, the latter a mercurial sprite who vacillates and cachinnates and seems as likely to turn on her new friend at one moment as to die for her at the next. Varveta told me she saw her character as a stray dog, looking for affection where she could find it, and this description seems apt, as Nadia continually nips at Sofia’s heels with playful antagonism, until the Spaniard turns and waves a stick at her, sending her cowering into a corner from which she quickly emerges time and time again.

During one especially moving scene, Sofia and Nadia finally verify their friendship, and the sniffles of the two girls sitting on a bed were not the only ones audible in the theatre. (By the end of the film, Sofia’s tear ducts will have been wrung dry several times over, and, if the audience on hand for this screening was any indication, she won’t be weeping alone.)

The raw, blanched landscapes lend superbly to wide-angle driving sequences set to an instrumental soundtrack and the desert, at times, acts more like a character and a plot device than just a background. The sand and the hills make tangible the

divide between the protagonist and all she’s left behind, everything she thought she knew. At one point, the desert sucks Gustavo’s jeep into its clutches, and later wraps its dusty arms around Sofia, dragging her down as well. Its pristine waters, part oasis, part mirage, unfold into dream sequences, Sofia and her mother alternately walking across and swimming within aquamarine pools of unresolved emotion. The stark beauty of the Chilean countryside makes for almost too-easily emotive nature shots, but, to their credit, the cinematographers do not abuse the gift they have been given.

Desierto Sur is a sprawling road film that moves just fast enough to keep things interesting, yet just slow enough to draw you in. A tightly-scripted work, rife with emotion, but at no point begging you to feel it. The rare movie that says exactly what it needs to, and precious little more. Emotionally draining, but never pithy. In sum, it’s everything a road movie needs to be.

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