Choke (The Movie)

I watched the Fight Club movie before reading the book, which turned out to be perfect since while the book was very good, the movie was extraordinary.

That said, my expectations for the Choke movie weren't very high. It's been years since I read Choke, and I always remember it as being my least favorite Chuck Palahniuk book I had read to that point (it along with Fight Club, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters).

Even with my low expectations, I was disappointed with the movie.

In the movie, the three main story lines - the sex addiction stuff, the mother stuff, the colonial times stuff, and the choking stuff were all out of proportion (although it's been so long since I've read it, it might be like this in the book for all I know), with way too much of the sex addiction stuff, slightly too much of the mother & hospital stuff, about the right amount of Denny & colonial times stuff, and not nearly enough of the choking stuff. It's pretty ridiculous to relegate the thing that gives the book its title to the D story with only 3 scenes. This would be like if Fight Club had only included 3 brief scenes of the fighting. I guess maybe they thought the choking scenes were too similar to include more? Even worse than that, thoguh, was the decision to exclude the big payoff of the choking stuff, the "stoning" scene, which was probably my favorite part of the book, where all the people who saved Victor find out it was a con. This stoning scene was included in the deleted scenes section of the DVD in 2 versions, a regular and extended version.

I think the movie would definitely have been better if it was 10-15 minutes longer, keeping everything in it, and adding 2-3 more choking scenes, and a version of the extended stoning scene, but instead of Denny telling Victor that the crowd had figured it out, we see the crowd figure it out, perhaps between a few of the people from the choking scenes in the movie.

In a conversation on the DVD between Palahniuk and the director, Palahniuk mentions that he gave the director permission to do whatever he wanted, as long as he inclcuded the stoning scene scene and also the hypnosis part. It's been so long since I've read the book that I had no memory of the hypnosis part, so I had to look it up. It's chapter 20 of the book, and I didn't think it was that great. Also, I have no idea how they'd film it and get the point across. It's kind of hard to tell if Palahniuk was joking about him wanting those 2 parts kept in, but if he was serious than the director most certainly should have followed his wishes. And serious or not, Palahniuk was definitely right that they should have included the stoning scene.