In spite of Fight Club’s eventual cult success, it took nine years for someone to attempt another film adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk book, perhaps because their particulate, trivia-collection style doesn’t lend itself to film. Proof comes in the form of the flat, distracted Choke (Fox), in which Sam Rockwell flounders as a man who’s packed with quirks—sex addiction, a senile mom, a crappy job at a colonial-themed tourist park, a complicated choking-in-restaurants scam—but still doesn’t have much personality…
Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened (Magnolia) transformed Art Linson’s wry, inside-Hollywood memoir about just barely holding on in Hollywood’s Darwinian ecosystem into a moderately amusing comedy-drama weighed down by unnecessary family drama and a curiously restrained lead performance by Robert De Niro as a Linson surrogate. Still, Stanley Tucci is a hoot and a half as a neurotic agent, and Bruce Willis is clearly having a ball as an out-of-control movie star…
Author Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, a period during which he felt freest as a gay man in a very gay-unfriendly world. During that time, he wrote the short-story collection that would be adapted into the plays and films I Am A Camera and Cabaret. The moving, intimate documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story (Zeitgeist) recounts his rocky 33-year relationship with Hollywood beach bum Don Bachardy, and the freedom they achieved together…
Imagine a movie called The Haunting Of Hal Hartley. How about The Haunting Of Mariette Hartley? BobHartley? NinaHartley? Congratulations, you've just had more fun than you would watching The Haunting Of Molly Hartley (Freestyle), a dreary ghost story where the only thing weaker than the scares is the final twist…
An amusing cameo from Seth Green as a sarcastic Amish mechanic and an appearance by beloved/reviled punk-popsters Fall Out Boy are about all that sets the wildly passable teen comedy Sex Drive (Summit) apart from about 8 million other raunchy romps about teenagers obsessed with getting laid. It’s the kind of forgettable slot-plugger that will get rerun endlessly on cable, so don’t feel too bad about skipping over it at the video store.