I woke up Friday morning with intense stomach pains that I chalked up to anxiety and indigestion. Except that they turned out to be from an ulcer. My first ulcer at 25. Hooray. I thought I'd been doing such a good job of managing the stress in my life too.

I figured an ulcer was a fairly clear message from my body, so I spent a lot of the weekend sitting around reading trashy magazines and watching my positive body image slowly deteriorate at the same time that the urge to do damage to my credit card balance grew ever stronger. Glamour and Cosmo do their job admirably well.

I did take some time to go sit in a movie theater to see Chopper. I've seen at least three reviews that compare it to Reservoir Dogs, but don't let that stop you from seeing this movie. It's an Australian film that sticks loosely to truth in telling the story of Mark "Chopper" Read, a slightly psychopathic criminal who became a bestselling author in Australia after selling stories of his exploits from prison. One of the reasons the film works so well is that, like Chopper himself, it never lets the truth stand in the way of a good yarn. You know liberties are probably being taken with the facts, but no more than Chopper must have taken with his own story. Stand-up comedian Eric Bana plays this fabulous bullshit artist with sincerity and perfect comic timing. Simon Lyndon is also great as his best friend Jimmy, a man who can stab Chopper in the chest repeatedly and look apologetic the entire time. The film handles violence very matter-of-factly, with little of the over-earnest attempts to glamorize killing or make you laugh at it of the Tarantino manner.

I also enjoyed the filmwork in Chopper, especially the contrast in color between prison life and the outside world. There is one great sequence where director/writer Andrew Dominik steps outside normal plot development techniques to recreate a scene in rhyme, twisting a horrifying event into a child's singalong. Another scene does beautiful justice to the effects of doing coke. Tension builds quite naturally in any scene with Chopper in it simply because you have no idea how he's going to react to any given stimulus, what exactly is going to set him off, who is going to get whacked.

After his book was published Chopper received news interviews and scads of fan mail from people around the world. Residents of Black Rock City will appreciate that one such piece of mail arrived from the sheriff of Sparks County, Nevada.

CHOPPER
The man has fans.