Choke might have been my favorite fiction novel of all time. The movie adaptation was poor. The only good thing about it was the concepts (which I was familiar with from the book), but cramming a 220 some-odd page novel into a 90-minute film means you get liberal and rewrite a little bit. Make it into a movie, don’t just shove a book into a screenplay!

Chuck Palahniuk’s other book-turned-film, Fight Club, worked so well because David Fincher took a good idea and made it into a new movie. This guy took a book and made it a film exactly based on the book. Every theme from the novel (Sex addiction, choking in restaurants, visiting a nursing home, building something with rocks, working at a Colonial theme park, running from the cops with your mom) was squeezed into the film without giving anyone time to even like the characters.

In Choke (the novel), Victor Mancini does weird things and has weird things happen to him every day. In the film, Victor Mancini seems to have one big fucked up day that, to him and the other characters, isn’t weird or fucked up at all. So it seems like a movie about nothing. Very disappointed. I wonder what I would have thought had this not been my favorite book. I probably wouldn’t have even cared about this movie one way or another.

Still, I liked it. It will probably offend a lot of people. Fun.