By Dennis Hartley
At the risk of sounding like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore, I'm going to go ahead now and sound like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore. There was a time, not too far removed, when the descriptive phrase "character study" was not necessarily the American film industry's code for "box office poison." Okay, I'll stop beating around the bush. I'm talking about the 1970's, when maverick directors like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson made quirky, compelling "character studies" that audiences actually went out of their way to see. The protagonists were usually iconoclastic fringe dwellers or workaday antiheroes who, like the filmmakers themselves, questioned authority, flouted convention and were generally able to convey thoughts and feelings without CG enhancement. The films may not have always sported linear narrative or wrapped up with a "Hollywood ending", but they nearly always left us a bit more enlightened about the human condition.
I'm not saying that the character study ever really went away; it just became increasingly more marginalized as the era of the Hollywood blockbuster juggernaut encroached. Indie films of more recent vintage like Buffalo 66, Jesus' Son and SherryBaby are direct stylistic descendants of episodic 70s fare like Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Altman's California Split, and Ashby's The Last Detail, and prove that the genre is alive and well. The main difference between then and now, of course, is that when you venture out to the multiplex to seek such a film these days, you almost feel like donning dark glasses and a raincoat. When I went to a weekend matinee to catch Clark Gregg's Choke, I counted exactly 4 other patrons in the postage stamp auditorium. It just made me feel so…dirty.
Choke is one of the most original comedy-dramas I have seen this year, undoubtedly due in no small part to the fact that Gregg's screenplay is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, whose previous book-to-screen adaptation was 1999's Fight Club. Choke, similar to Fight Club, serves up a mélange of human foibles (addiction, perversion, madness and deception, to rattle off a few) and tops it all off with a dark comic sensibility. To put it another way, it's a sort of a screwball romantic comedy for nihilists.
At the risk of sounding like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore, I'm going to go ahead now and sound like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore. There was a time, not too far removed, when the descriptive phrase "character study" was not necessarily the American film industry's code for "box office poison." Okay, I'll stop beating around the bush. I'm talking about the 1970's, when maverick directors like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson made quirky, compelling "character studies" that audiences actually went out of their way to see. The protagonists were usually iconoclastic fringe dwellers or workaday antiheroes who, like the filmmakers themselves, questioned authority, flouted convention and were generally able to convey thoughts and feelings without CG enhancement. The films may not have always sported linear narrative or wrapped up with a "Hollywood ending", but they nearly always left us a bit more enlightened about the human condition.I'm not saying that the character study ever really went away; it just became increasingly more marginalized as the era of the Hollywood blockbuster juggernaut encroached. Indie films of more recent vintage like Buffalo 66, Jesus' Son and SherryBaby are direct stylistic descendants of episodic 70s fare like Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Altman's California Split, and Ashby's The Last Detail, and prove that the genre is alive and well. The main difference between then and now, of course, is that when you venture out to the multiplex to seek such a film these days, you almost feel like donning dark glasses and a raincoat. When I went to a weekend matinee to catch Clark Gregg's Choke, I counted exactly 4 other patrons in the postage stamp auditorium. It just made me feel so…dirty.
Choke is one of the most original comedy-dramas I have seen this year, undoubtedly due in no small part to the fact that Gregg's screenplay is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, whose previous book-to-screen adaptation was 1999's Fight Club. Choke, similar to Fight Club, serves up a mélange of human foibles (addiction, perversion, madness and deception, to rattle off a few) and tops it all off with a dark comic sensibility. To put it another way, it's a sort of a screwball romantic comedy for nihilists.
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