Contact Us Advertising Information Online exclusives Cover Story Buzz Feature In Case You Missed It Vote 2009 Boulderganic Fall 2009 Student Guide 2009 Boulder Weekly Sweet 16 Anniversary Boulderganic 2009 Summer Scene 2009 Email Newsletter Legal Services Best of Boulder 2009 Annual Manual 2009 Newspaper of the Future Kids Camp Guide 2009 Wedding Marketplace 09 Jobs available Student Guide 2008 Best of Boulder 2008 Annual Manual 2008 Join Our Mailing List
|
October 2-8, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Don’t choke on it
by Roger Moore
Racial disharmony in the ’burbs
by Michael Phillips
Don’t choke on it
by Roger Moore
Fess up: You laughed when you heard the news that David Duchovny had checked himself into rehab for sex addiction. It’s funny, or seems that way, even if you know it’s also a real illness and kind of sad.
That disquieting blend of raunchy-randy-ridiculous and pathetic is the heart of Choke, a hit at the sex-starved Sundance Film Festival, but a little less than the sum of its body parts.
Sam Rockwell is perfectly cast as Victor, a sexaholic who works as an in-costume tour guide at a re-creation of an 18th-century town, a guy who lives to copulate, and who makes his real money by faking choking in restaurants. He doesn’t sue the restaurant. He hits up the person who saved his life for cash. And since they’ve taken responsibility for him, they fork it over.
Victor does his Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings, which aren’t helping. He’s forever sneaking off to a closet to do the deed with a willing fellow addict. His best friend is historic park colleague Denny (Brad William Henke), a chronic masturbator. So he’s no help either.
But the funny sex and funny restaurant con jobs take a back seat to Victor’s sad personal history when we meet his mom (Anjelica Huston, in great form). She’s in an institution. She can’t recall who he is, at times. She’s given him a mystery from their past to solve.
Which takes a back seat, of course, when Victor lays eyes on the shapely and seemingly open-minded doctor (Kelly Macdonald). He’s so smitten by her that he can’t perform, um, you know... exercise his addiction.
Actor-director Clark Gregg (he plays a priggish fellow re-enactor) turns Chuck Palahniuk’s novel into something not quite like a romp, lurching through shifts of tone, revelations about Victor’s mom, his past, his changing view of himself.
Choke is brisk enough to be a comedy, but doesn’t play as one. It’s too short to resolve every subject or theme it brings up — redemption, forgiveness, love. Gregg makes the movie work as a sordid sex satire, but falls short in rising above that. And the many loathsome-turned-pathetic characters make Choke, in the end, a bit hard to swallow.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
back to top
It’s ALIVE!... sort of
by Michael Phillips
Igor is about a misunderstood hunchback and an aspiring actress, and it’s easy to see why it got made in the first place: Most of the men who run Hollywood envision their world in roughly the same terms.
Screenwriter Chris McKenna — whose chief credit is the Fox series American Dad! — brings a classic supporting horror-movie player center stage, the way the Shrek movies subverted and showcased the ogre archetype. In the Kingdom of Malaria, Igors are sent to Igor School for a “Yes Masters’ Degree” (I like that bit), destined for a servile, lisping, foot-dragging existence in the employ of the country’s many evil scientists.
The Igor Igor concerns itself with is voiced by John Cusack. His venal boss, Dr. Glickenstein (John Cleese), expires while tinkering with his invention for the annual Evil Science Fair, leaving Igor to freely experiment with his own creation: a destructive force of mayhem, female division, voiced by Molly Shannon. She recalls Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein, without the electro-fro.
The gag here is that “Eva” isn’t evil in the least. Subjected to a Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing process, she is mistakenly shown a James Lipton Inside the Actors Studio program and comes out thinking she’s an actress herself, obsessed with scene study and updating her “sense-memory journal.” If this sounds rather arch, well, a lot of Igor certainly is that. You’ll surely never see, or hear, a more menacing rendition of the Annie anthem “Tomorrow” than the one sung by the newly evil-ized Eva as she batters the competition at the climactic Evil Science Fair.
I don’t like that scene much: It’s just off-putting. More fun for me, as well as for my preteen son John and his pal Liam, is the running gag with Igor’s associate, the suicidal rabbit Scamper. With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi. The boys’ favorite bit was one of the simplest: “May I suggest that you look behind you!?!” Scamper thunders, after Eva’s gone missing. Igor looks. Nothing there. “It was just a suggestion,” he says.
The visual universe of Igor is pretty grim, full of rusty maroon tones and belching smoke and pop decadence. Director Tony Leondis and his chief art director, Olivier Besson, are trying to show us there’s more than one way to evoke moods and textures made famous by Tim Burton. Even with various script doctors, Igor isn’t particularly funny, and having all those Louis Prima tunes on the soundtrack seems completely at odds with composer Patrick Doyle’s moody, sardonic orchestral commentary. But my kid went with it, and I had a fairly good time with it, as I waited patiently for the reappearance of a marble-mouthed peasant tart, Mittel-European division, voiced by Jennifer Coolidge. Half the time her line readings are hilarious, and it’s impossible to know, in any rational sense, why. That’s my kind of voice artist.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
back to top
|
| |
