Choke

This film is entertaining and often clever but it doesn't amount to much. The whole sex addict shtick gets a little old (and so does the self choking scam). They're both basically great ingredients for a trailer but they don't cohere well enough to breath life into a full character. But splicing in those flashbacks at the nursing home was a nice touch.

What really sucks about this film is that the person's contemporary life is supposedly explained away as a pathetic recapitulation of the indirect child abuse he endured being raised by a mentally ill mother.

I feel strongly about the misuse of psychology as a plot device.

The film's mockery of tourism put me in mind of a great quotation from the late David Foster Wallace's essay Consider The Lobster: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."