Chopper Read
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CHOPPER

 
  • Chopper opened nation-wide on August 3, 2000, on 138 screens.
  • It grossed $1, 258, 717 (Australian) over the opening weekend.
  • It displaced The Patriot (on 333 screens) from the top spot on the opening weekend.
  • It is the highest grossing release in Palace Films’ 25 year history.
  • After its 8th week in release, Chopper had grossed $5, 503, 559 (Australian).
  • By April 29, 2001, it had grossed $60, 338 (US) in the United States.
  • It was the first R rated Australian film to get to number one on the box office charts.
  • CHOPPER

    The one liners, the ear slicing, the best sellers, the Elle McFeast appearance, the legends about Chopper Read are now well and truly crusted onto the Australian psyche.

    Brave then of Andrew Dominik to make a film which attempts to understand the man. From the moment when Eric Bana , as the young Chopper Read, stands over a groaning body in Pentridge and with a look of complete stricken sorrow, tries to help to his feet a man whom he's just brutally attacked, Dominic's film will have you engaged.

    This film doesn't make any bids for sympathy for it's subject, and clearly doesn't approve or condone the violence which Read periodically deploys. The violence it shows is gruesome and painful, and never employed to titillate. The more interesting thing is that the film engages us from the outset in the why question, why does this man, this often likable man, do such puzzling contradictory and very vicious things?

    Eric Bana's Chopper Read can make us laugh by the bluster and wheedle, but the moments of stricken panic are there as plainly as the show he puts on for his mates, for the world, for himself. In the first half of the film, inside Pentridge's H Division, Bana's young Mark Read has a vulnerability as well as an audacity which makes him engaging even while we dread the next burst of violence.

    In the second half of the film, on his release from Pentridge, the older Chopper Read is buffeted and bewildered, increasingly paranoid, unable to get a handle on the world. But the situations he contrives for himself are absurd, as well as sick and Dominik's screenplay and direction exploits these while we watch an Australian tragedy unfolding, as Australian tragedies will, as farce. It is a stunning performance from Bana who shifts through a complex register of moods. It's a performance which has AFI award written all over it. And it's supported by equally strong performances from Simon Lyndon as his mate Jimmy Loughnan, and Kate Beahan as his girlfriend Tanya.

    chop-book.jpg

    The Movie Chopper was Based on The Man himself, Although Chopper never took Drugs, Never headbutted the mother, Never threw his guns through the door, etc... Some of the Movie is just for entertainment. Yet Someother things really happened, Chopper has mentioned starting another film called "Chopper- The Untold Story". In a year or so this may be released.

    Trojan Warrior

    Although Chopper never Acted in the Movie of the Same name, He DID have a small Cameo in "Trojan Warrior", where he played a character named "Eric Bana". How Ironic!

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    Chopper Also did a Commercial for the Pedestrain Council.
    He talks about what happened to him in Prison.
    "When I was in prison I got slashed down the face, my ears cut off, I had a claw hammer put through my brain just here, cut throat razors here and here, butchers knife there, icepick there, ice pick up the back there. . . "
    You can Download the Clip below.

    click here to download file


    "Never Plead Guilty"

    Created by she_devil_vamp 2005