Top Films According to Me

The second entry in the Pusher trilogy, Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands is an excellent look at the criminal lifestyle that forgoes the overly stylish, smooth and attractive panache of Hollywood horseshit like Ocean's Eleven and opts to give a more realistic, gritty presentation of common underworld scumbags. It touches on themes like dysfunctional father-son relationships...
and dealing with new found responsibilities while having an unstable, unscrupulous life style.
It's got plenty of solid action without big, dumb, overblown fight scenes and explosions. Director Nicholas Winding Refn is truly great in that he avoids telling the story in an excessive manner, despite the subject matter of the film itself. There is a lot of the fun sleaze and dark humor that you would come to expect from the first Pusher film with more character development this time around. The characters are true-to-life and face real world consequences for the things they do. Personally I enjoyed this more than the original, which is still a good film. With all of the funny dialogue, interesting characters, some cool music and great shots, this will remain one of my favorites. Instead of Brad Pitt pulling off some elaborate heist, you get a guy named Kurt the Cunt, who accidentally flushes his stash of heroin down the toilet because he's a paranoid, coked-out idiot. Instead of some douchey romantic subplot with Julia Roberts, you get a pregnant woman doing lines of coke . What's there not to like?

Chopper is a fun, often disturbing look at the life and times of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, a famous criminal and bestselling author from Australia. The film covers his many conflicts with the denizens of the Australian prison system...

...his mental instability...

...his relationship and interpersonal issues...


...and his way of handling the problems one encounters when dealing with the dregs of society and living outside the law.


Another thing the film deals with is the odd sort of fame that Read has achieved through his many exploits.


Eric Bana gives a powerhouse performance as the titular character while the excellent direction and screenwriting of Andrew Dominik keep the dark humor flowing throughout. You'll find yourself rooting for Chopper, even though he's a vulgar and abusive psychopath.