*½/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad Henke
screenplay by Clark Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by Clark Gregg

by Alex Jackson Choke lost me in the very first scene. The hero, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is at a support group for sex addicts and describing all the regulars for us. There's the housewife who put mayonnaise on her crotch for her dog to lick off. There's the guy who had to have a gerbil removed from his anus. And then there's the cheerleader who needed a stomach pump after swallowing too much semen. I want to talk about the cheerleader. I think Victor said that doctors pumped two quarts out of her stomach. Considering the amount of semen in a typical human ejaculation is about 1.5 to 5 millilitres, that's a lot of blowjobs! Two quarts is around two litres, right? So she would've had to service at least 400 men. Assuming this would take about three minutes apiece, she'd have to have been at it for twenty hours straight, without vomiting up or digesting any of the semen–which, by the way, is completely non-toxic and would not require the use of a stomach pump–in the meantime. What kind of dipshit expects me to buy this? I admit I haven't read Chuck Palahniuk's source novel. I might very well be alone on this–the critics at my press screening were buzzing with anticipation and the gang over at my message board instantly recognized the title.

**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss's "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?