Directed by actor/filmmaker Clark Gregg (he was great “In Good Company”), the film stars Sam Rockwell, Angelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Marley Shelton and Gregg himself. The film and novel are about a sex-addicted con-man who pays for his mother’s hospital bills by playing on the sympathies of those who rescue him when pretending to choke to death.
We’ve never read it, but it’s apparently as dark, twisted and funny as “Fight Club.”
The film is shaping up to have a pretty decent soundtrack too and will feature songs by a little band called Radiohead (“Reckoner” from the recently released In Rainbows), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! (“Satan Said Dance”), the Fiery Furnaces (“Navy Nurse”), Ben Kweller (“The Rules”), Greg Dulli’s (Afghan Whigs) newest group, the Twilight Singers (“There’s Been An Accident”) and Rogue Wave’s “Lake Michigan,” which will play out in the film’s final credits according to the film’s music supervisors Lyle Hysen and Ken Weinstein.
Alap Momin (a.k.a. The Oktopus) from the outré New Jersey hip-hop group, Dälek also scored one musical cue in the film.
The movie’s score was written by indie-rocker turned film composer Nathan Larson ex of Shudder To Think. Larson’s composed scores for a ton of films, most notably in recent years Todd Solondz’s “Palindromes” and “Storytelling,” the Kevin Bacon film, “The Woodsman” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” You can hear a bunch of free downloadable excerpts of his scores over at his website. He also put out a disc collection of his scores called FilmMusik, that came out in April of 2005 if you want a physical sampling of his work and he also has a hard-rock band called The Hot One (which features Canadian singer Emm Gryner).
There’s no release date for “Choke” yet. The film is scheduled to play in competition at Sundance later this month (January 17-27) and like many films at the Utah-based film festival hopes to score a distribution deal which means we may or may not see it in theaters in 2008 (Sundance faves like, “Wristcutters” took a year, “The Go-Getter” is still waiting for example). It’s being produced by ATO Pictures (which explains the Radiohead connection – their label TBD, is a subset) and explains why Dave Matthews was on the set of the film one day. Tim Orr the great photographer of many excellent David Gordon Green films (including the upcoming “Snow Angels“), did the cinematography on this one.
“I drew inspiration from Hal Ashby films like ‘Harold and Maude’ and ‘Being There,’ and from recent films like ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ and ‘Secretary,’ the director Gregg told Indiewire very recently about trying to capture the film’s dark comedic tones. “As we began to work together on the script Sam and I watched everything from ‘Boogie Nights’ to ‘Bad Santa.’ We watched ‘His Girl Friday,’ Tom Jones, various Fellini pictures and basically anything we thought was dark, funny or even just dirty.”
We got our hands on an not-yet-official trailer (which we can’t show yet) that features songs by Jon Brion, Chad & Jeremy and Spoon. We’ll have to wait and see if those songs make the final cut, but the trailer looks pretty good.