The evening screenings in Park City began under a light snow and a heavy cloud of gloom as this town of movie nuts talked in hushed, flattened tones about the death of Heath Ledger. There are those core-meltdown stars you expect to hear via friend's IM that they finally rang down the shade, but Ledger was not one of those stars. Whatever was going on inside him, he kept it off the screen and out of the papers. Maybe he'd still be here if he hadn't.
In the circumstances, Clark Gregg's "Choke" seemed a perfectly appropriate viewing choice: a comedy of the most cynical, dysfunctional bleakness, topped off with a message-y warmth that fooled no one at the screening. Based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, it concerns the misadventures of Victor (Sam Rockwell), sex addict, scam artist, colonial re-enactor, and momma's boy. Anjelica Huston plays mom, hospitalized with dementia, and Kelly McDonald plays a doctor with most unusual notions of patient care. (As Bill Murray said in "Tootsie," "That is one nutty hospital.")
There are as many laughs as gasps of calculated shock in "Choke," and everything to do with Victor's job at a historical theme park is blitheringly funny. The film loses focus, though, and eventually it loses its nerve, although always entertainingly. You'll get a chance to decide for yourself: Fox Searchlight has just acquired the film for $5 million. Finally, some business gets done at Sundance 2008.
"Sugar" is directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's follow-up to the much-loved "Half Nelson," and while the new film couldn't be more different on the surface, it continues the duo's love affair with characters who are gifted and unhappy and far out of their element. Here that character is Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a young pitching sensation in the Dominican Republic who's drafted into the U.S. farm system and finds himself spinning out of control. It's a long, observant, quietly eventful drama -- an epic boy's life, in a sense -- that looks at Middle America through alien eyes and that ultimately says some rather trenchant things about professional sports and their casualties. "Sugar" ends on a note of muted regret that becomes less and less regretful the more you think about it. After today, I needed that.
