Gag reflex: Choke’s Brad William Henke and Rock well
powerfully specific—small scale, platitude-free—about almost drowning on the bottom rung of American life. The subject, Kimberly Roberts, is 24 when the disaster strikes, with a husband, an apartment in the Ninth Ward, and a head full of rap lyrics describing her hard-knock life. The flood comes and help does not, so she and her family escape through the attic and into the aftermath. Because the Robertses were lucky and industrious enough to make something of their bleak future, the film inspires not only fury about poverty, but also cautious hope for its victims.
Bad Luck Chuck
Towelhead ★★★
SUMMER BISHIL, AARON ECKHART
WARNER INDEPENDENT, R
American Beauty writer revisits
suburban malaise
Adapting Alicia Erian’s novel,
writer-director Alan Ball show-
cases both the knack for sketch-
ing out thorny relationships that
distinguished Six Feet Under
and the impulse for store-brand
suburban angst that befouled
his script for American Beauty.
Towelhead, like The Wackness,
combines a coming-of-age story
with a short-hop nostalgia trip.
The first Gulf War looms as 13-
year-old Jasira (Bishil) gets exiled
from her mother’s house after
committing the crime of shaving
her bikini zone. She moves in
with her Lebanon-born father
(Peter Macdissi) in Houston.
The redneck next door (Eckhart)
is a predator, but Jasira finds
understanding elsewhere in the
subdivision, courtesy of Melina
( Toni Collette). Ball erases any
doubt that Melina is a worthy
mother figure by ending with
a scene of her giving birth in a
glowing delivery room: The
gesture is of a piece with a view
of adolescent messiness that
looks suspiciously tidy.
Choke comes advertised as spewing forth “from the incendiary author of Fight Club,” prompting the question of what might be getting torched in this faithfully mediocre adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s fourth novel. David Fincher’s cult-movie classic transformed the story of a young man’s alienation into a bonfire of pieties and consumer pressures— the comprehensive assault of marketing, the contemporary contempt for honest masculinity, the obligatory dates with Ikea. In contrast, Choke flickers to wan life in a modest Bic-lighter tribute to rudeness (for its own sake) and easy blasphemy (for the sake of pissing off one’s parents).
Its hero, Rockwell’s Victor Mancini, attends a 12-step program because he’s a sex addict and these are the best places to pick up women. (The movie is most exuberant—truest to its blindly offensive spirit—when Victor grinds away with some stringy compulsive in whatever broom closet or on whatever unswept floor.) At mealtimes, he makes the restaurant rounds, deliberately getting globs of dinner stuck in his throat, relying on the Heimlich-maneuvering of strangers. The kid has discovered what common sense does not
All the while, Victor’s mother (Huston)—who raised him in anarcho-revolutionist fashion—lies dying in a hospital for the mentally ill. “Comically” senile, she does not recognize him, and her fellow patients get in on the thematic act by mistaking
him for a player in their own traumas. Paige (Kelly Macdonald), a doll-faced doctor, tenders both an outré promise of salvation—maybe Ma can be saved, through fetal tissue, if Victor will knock Paige up—and an outlandish premise for Victor’s redemption. She claims that Ms. Mancini’s diaries, scribbled in Italian, reveal that Victor is, via unbelievable DNA work, the son of God. Jesus Christ, Choke jams an awful lot in, ultimately suffocating on its own forced irreverence.
Trouble the
Water ★★★★
KIMBERLY ROBERTS, SCOT T ROBERTS
ZEI TGEIST, NOT RATED
Remarkable home video
powers compelling Katrina doc
The strongest TV-news coverage
of Hurricane Katrina unfolded
as a panorama about huddled
masses, and Spike Lee’s remark-
able When the Levees Broke was,
likewise, about the suffering
soul of all New Orleans. But
the creators of this arresting
documentary discovered a char-
ismatic hurricane survivor who
captured some of her misfortune
with a 20 video camera and
whose story catches something
A Thousand
Years of Good
Prayers ★★★½
HENRY O, FAYE YU
MAGNOLIA, NOT RATED
Generations collide—softly—in
elegant Wayne Wang drama
After abandoning the wry
charms of films like Smoke for
charmless chick flicks like Maid
in Manhattan, director Wayne
Wang hits the reset button with
a father-daughter tale set in
the Pacific Northwest. Thirty-ish
Yilan ( Yu) takes in her Chinese
dad (O) after her divorce, not so
much welcoming the old man
into her home as stowing him
some place out of the way in an
apartment that’s as spare as her
life. She is cool to the point of
giving frostbite. He—warm, spry,
mildly bumbling—putters from
park bench to poolside when
not trying to melt the glacier
of his daughter’s defenses.
You—despite all the enchanting
emerald green and pearl gray
on display in the film’s Spokane
setting—may grow weary of the
quietness of Yilan’s desperation.
Still, it’s an elegant reflection
on cross-generational unease,
something you can take your
parents to and not talk about
with them afterward.
W SPOhTLIaGHtTWONeTHEDMoUSIICsOFSecret For an indie film about the aggressively odd and bitterly aggressive Germs, What We Do Is Secret stays awful close to Hollywood conventions. We see the group undone by creative differences, destructive egos, and the needle as they thrash through the ’70s’ L. A. punk scene. Yet the movie still sounds fresh in its tumultuous dementia, with actor Shane West giving gnarled voice to frontman Darby Crash. Meanwhile, you can feel Pat Smear, who served as a producer, fixing his gleefully obnoxious grin at his own battering-ram bass lines.
References:
Archives