News

In the modern age of superhero movie domination, comic book-accurate portrayals are a basic expectation. Nowadays fans even get upset when an actor doesn’t have the right hair color or nationality as the character that they’re portraying. Those expectations weren’t nearly as prominent back when X2: X-Men United was released in 2003. But that didn’t stop Aaron Stanford from doing his best to do justice to St. John Allerdyce, the Aussie mutant better known as Pyro in the comics.

“The movie Chopper had just come out and I loved Chopper, so I approached them with my best Mark Brandon Read accent,” Ashford tells Den of Geek, referring to Eric Bana’s character from the hit Aussie crime film. “I asked them, ‘Do you guys want him to have an Australian accent in this?’ and they were just like, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Making Pyro an American wasn’t the...

Eric Bana stars as the eponymous Chopper, Australia’s most notorious and celebrated criminal figure, in what’s been lauded as the “performance of a lifetime”. This brutally gripping true-crime feature received critical acclaim on its original release in 2000, and now Andrew Dominik’s directorial debut is available as a Limited Edition Blu-ray from Second Sight Films. It is also available in a Standard Blu-ray format.

Dominik’s (Blonde, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) shocking and darkly entertaining film takes us into the violent world of Australia’s most infamous figure – Mark ‘Chopper’ Read – who conquered Victoria’s brutal underworld single-handedly, in a film based on his memoirs.

Bana shows his acting chops in this seminal, career defining role of bonafide villain Chopper, and he brings the outrageous true story to the screen with maximum force. The brutality and nonchalance of the life and crimes of the one-man mafia,...

The director says his film was sympathetic to Mark Brandon Read and ‘on his side’. It had to be – to understand his violence

Few would be unfamiliar with Chopper – both the criminal, and the movie. The former is Mark Brandon Read, the notorious Australian gangster, bestselling author and serial shit-spinner, who committed many crimes and claimed he committed many more. The latter is the New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik’s terrific 2000 drama, supercharged by an astonishing performance from Eric Bana. The film returns to Australian cinemas on 26 August in a pandemic-delayed celebration of its 20th birthday.

Making a good biopic is never easy but making one about Read posed all sorts of challenges – including how to accurately represent the life of a compulsive liar. Dominik, speaking to me over the phone from the UK, says Read “sold the myth of himself as being a kind of Robin Hood character who...

[Although this film is 14 years old, I recognize the possibility that many of you haven’t seen it. Therefore, there are some slight spoilers below. ] As promised in last week’s introduction to this brief series of articles, today I take a look at director Andrew Dominik’s debut film Chopper, which was released in 2000. Based on From The Inside, the autobiography of Mark Brandon Read (aka “Chopper”), the film achieves something quite rare in that it manages to be unflinchingly brutal, warm, and funny in equal measure. A lot of crime films, especially after Pulp Fiction, have aspired to meld tones like this. But most of them have failed, in large measure because of their self-consciousness. Chopper isn't self-conscious. It doesn't achieve its alchemy by laying a grouping of desired ingredients out on the table and willing them to collide. The film is one hundred percent the result of an authentic interest in its subject. Dominik is so true to his reading of Read’s life that the film reads as an extension of his personality,...

This article is dedicated to Andrew Copp: filmmaker, film writer, artist and close friend who passed away on January 19, 2013. You are loved and missed, brother.

****

Looking at the Best Actor Academy Award nominations for the film year 2012, the one miss that clearly cries out for more attention is Liam Neeson’s powerful performance in Joe Carnahan’s excellent survival film The Grey, easily one of the best roles of Neeson’s career.

In Neeson’s case, his lack of a nomination was a case of neglect similar to the Albert Brooks snub in the Best Supporting Actor category for the film year 2011 for Drive(Nicolas Winding Refn, USA).

Along with negligence, other factors commonly prevent outstanding lead acting performances from getting the kind of critical attention they deserve. Sometimes it’s that the performance is in a film not considered “Oscar material” or even worthy of any substantial critical attention.