Sunday, September 28, 2008

"choke" sucked

I am a terrible student. Studying is not my friend. This is especially problematic when I am faced with a subject I find boring. I've got a stack of books TBR that keeps getting deeper and deeper (including the new Dennis Lehane!), and I'm stuck at my desk, my computer whirring and sputtering and struggling to stay alive, one window open to Wikipedia, the other to the Huffington Post (because I'm that guy), an empty, foggy Starbucks cup pushed to the side of a half empty pint of Heineken, the little roll-out keyboard area crowded with my Spanish textbook and my botany notes and a spiral-bound photocopied leaflet called "Oklahoma's First Statesmen" and an I-pod wire and an empty gum packet and my elbows. I'm a fucking slob. I like Heineken, but have you ever noticed that it kind of smells like a fart? Also, it gives me a bellyache if I drink it too fast.

I was listening to Tom Waits, but I can only listen to his music for a certain amount of time before I feel the shame of being probably the ony person in the world enough who's not cool enough to not be occasionally annoyed by how raspy (grizzled? worldly?) his voice is. So now I'm listening to Tomahawk. I used to be a HUGE Mike Patton fan. Like, really huge. I kind of lost track of what he was doing after the so-so Xecutioners [sic?] and the awful Peeping Tom record. But I like Tomahawk, even the one that sounds like American Indian music, which I think has been criticized for...I don't know.

Oh! I watched "Choke" today, and it was really bad. Which makes me sad, because it's probably my second favorite Palahniuk book, after "Survivor". The acting was bad across the board, especially, and most tragically in the miscast Anjelica Huston as Victor's mom. I'm a bad critic, so I'll keep this brief: she was bad, and delivered her lines almost like she was ad-libbing them. Actually, the same could really be said of the whole movie. It all had this ad-libbed feel. Like here's this scene and this one and this is funny too, and at the end you don't understand the relationships between anyone enough to really care. Which, like I said, is a shame, because the book is fucking awesome. The adapter really fucked with the structure, too. The first scene in the book happens at the end of the movie. Which I think was a poor choice, because that final scene would've really put some shit in perspective from the get-go. The way it stands, at the end of every scene we shrug and wipe our minds and move on. The narration kind of just disappears after the beginning, if I remember correctly. Point is, I didn't like it. Whack.

Goodnight, folks.

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