Choke

The directorial debut of actor Clark Gregg (State and Main, The New Adventures of Old Christine), Choke is a scattershot satire, covering everything from pop culture (Victor works as a "historical re-enactor" at a local park recreating colonial America) and sex (Victor's a sex addict whose 12-step meetings simply offer him the chance to have more sex) to the bond between parents and children (Victor's mother is a unreliable con artist, but, in her way, she loved him) and religion (as word spreads of Victor's possible origins as a half-clone of Jesus, various residents of his mother's rest home look to him for guidance and comfort).

But Choke is a little too sprawling, a little too unfocused. Rockwell is an appealing rogue, but the film's jumps between past and present, plot and subplot, make it feel disjointed; the story feels, if anything, too full of ideas. Most problematically, Choke is so close to Fight Club -- also focused on an unreliable narrator facing problems who's redeemed by the love of a woman with issues of her own -- that it simply feels redundant.