The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke concerns a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to help pay for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother's (Angelica Huston) stay in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a lot of heart to temper all the black comedy. Rex Reed begs to differ: "I don’t know what to tell you about a dismal bucket of nauseating swill called Choke, except to warn that if you spend hard-earned money to sit through it, you deserve to do exactly what the title implies." Eh, don't listen to that square; check out our account of a funny Q&A with Palahniuk and Rockwell.
You may recall Spike Lee's very public spat with Clint Eastwood about his failure to include a single black soldier in Flags of Our Fathers. Now Lee's Miracle at St. Anna is here to rectify the problem, which Lee says is typical of Hollywood's treatment of World War II. A.O. Scott has a mixed review; observing that while "it sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance...it is in the fragile bonds that form between the black soldiers and the Italian villagers that Miracle at St. Anna breaks free of its own grandiosity and tells a grounded, moving, human story."
Speaking of Scott, he's got a big roundup of the New York Film Festival in the Times today. Starting tonight and continuing through October 12th, the festival will be screening many of the films at the big, beautiful Ziegfeld in midtown, which Scott says "may seem like an incongruous setting for rough and raw encounters with reality, but the grandeur is also an appropriate reminder that even small movies deserve a big screen and a big audience."
Pictured here is Waltz With Bashir, a documentary that uses animation to reconstruct nightmarish scenes of Israel's war with Lebanon in 1982. Reviewing the film for the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Byrnes calls it "a traumatic film about trauma. It is intended as a war film that will make no one want to join up. That is itself against the tradition of war films, most of which are built on the feeling that war is hell, but soldiering is glorious. Waltz With Bashir has none of that."
There is also Nights in Rhodanthe, which features Diane Lane and Richard Gere getting to know each other during a hurricane. Manohla Dargis goes to town on it: "There’s no joy and not even much cruel laughter to be had from the spectacle of sympathetic actors mouthing some of the most pitiful, platitudinous, risible dialogue in recent memory...You know the rest: trembling lips, delicate lovemaking, pop-song montage." And, strangely, there are no reviews out for Fireproof, a religious romantic drama starring Kirk Cameron as a fireman who can save lives but not his marriage. It's almost as if producers didn't want any critics to see it!
Film Forum is screening The Godfather Parts I and II as double features through next Thursday. Your midnight movies this weekend are Night of the Creeps at the Sunshine and Roger Corman's 1967 counterculture flick The Trip, starring Jack Nicholson, is at the IFC Center.
