As a bonus it’s always great to see Brad Pitt play white trash. He seems to love it so much.

It takes a supremely self-confident director to make this kind of movie, and especially to give himself the time needed to let some of the scenes really work.

An astonishing work.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End: I have a formula for determining the absolute suckitude of a movie: Multiply the suck factor of the movie with the cost of making it.

By that formula this may just be the worst movie ever made.

World’s End is a clanking, soulless, CGI nightmare with a plot like somebody put a 100 frat boys in a room, doused them with absinthe, had them write down their hallucinations, and then employed a particularly slow-witted orangutang to cut-and-paste the hallucinations into a script.

Lord, it’s bad. So bad. There can’t be a loving god who would allow something like this to be made.

Rollerball (1975): Yes, it’s from 1975, and no, some aspects haven’t aged well at all, especially the “cool futuristic” sets.

Be that as it may, Rollerball is definitely a classic. The basic premise is that in the future corporations run everything and have created a game called rollerball for the masses to focus on instead of, you know, paying anything to what’s going on around them. Rollerball involves two teams of skaters. To up the brutality, each team also has two motorcycles. The teams chase a lethally heavy ball around the court. It’s an exercise in horrid brutality with bloody casualties a large part of the enjoyment.

The in-game scenes are well executed, and are furiously fast-paced for 1975, which for our jump-cut addled brains in 2010 feels slow and detached. But despite the pacing, they are still rousing and intense.

Apart from the sports scenes, Rollerball is an exploration of dystopia and the corrupt, cynical people who run it.

James Caan does an incredible job as the best rollerballer on the planet, portraying him with both tender sadness in his private life and as a raging menace on the field. It’s a captivating portrayal.

Rollerball is worth watching just for Caan’s performance, but add in the well-executed rollerball scenes, the thoughtful portrayal of dystopia and the weight of malaise and futility that permeates the movie and this one is a classic.

District 13: Ultimatum: Big, dumb, preposterous and fun action movie like Hollywood used to make in the ’80s. Lots of karate, lots of parkeur, lots of stuff blowing up.

If you can put your brain in pause and just go along with it, District 13: Ultimatum is a lot of fun.

The Brotherhood of the Wolf: French thriller taking place a few years before the revolution in which a monstrous beast is terrorizing a remote region.

It’s well made with intense action sequences and, since it’s French, some completely gratuitous boobies.

The Brotherhood of the Wolf clocks in at 2 hours and 24 minutes, which is way too long and leads to spacing issues. Parts of it drag severely. Cut down to about an hour and a half, this could be a taut, intense thriller.

Miracle: I’m not big on either sports or nationalism, but Miracle—telling the story of the 1980 US olympic hockey gold in Lake Placid—is a spectacular feel-good movie.

Watching coach Herb Brookes—portrayed splendidly by Kurt Russell although with a Minnesota accent that drifts in and out—get his ragtag team of athletes ready to compete with and ultimately beat the presumed-invincible Russian hockey machine is spellbinding.

Excellent pick-me-up movie.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: Wow, really? Werner Herzog, aka “I make crazy dark movies about the futility of the human condition” Werner remakes Bad Lieutenant, one of the most hardcore and depressing movies ever and the result is meh? What?

Nicolas Cage, despite the volume of abominable dreck he’s been starring in, is a fantastic actor, but he spends the entire movie channeling Christopher Walken. Which is weird, but not weird enough. In the original Bad Lieutenant Harvey Keitel is frightening and doomed, in this one Nicolas Cage is … well, goofy.

Herzog really phoned this one in.

Very disappointing. Watch the original Bad Lieutenant again instead.

Crazy Heart: I’m sorry, but I just can’t work up a lot of sympathy for a has-been country and western star. I thought being a drunken self-centered loser was part of the job description?

As he always does, Jeff Bridges puts in a stellar portrayal of a pathetic loser with dignity and gravitas, but it’s mind-numbingly boring to watch.

Although there may have been space combat scenes with robots and lasers toward the end of the movie. I wouldn’t know. I turned it off.

It’s probably just me, but this theme Hollywood keeps regurgitating about how you can be a self-centered shit your whole life and make everybody hate you, but as soon as a hot woman young enough to be your effing grand daughter for some reason decides to calms you down everything will be okay and your self-loathing will disappear seems like wish-fulfillment of the highest orders for the sociopathic scum at the top of the totem pole in Hollywood.

Sherlock Holmes: Fun high-energy movie that has more to do with the Bourne Identity than with Sherlock Holmes.

You like Bourne, you’ll like this, even though you’ll have to work pretty hard to get past the über-silliness of the plot.

Crimson Rivers: French thriller about a series of off-the-charts-grisly murders that lead to the discovery of a Dark Secret From the Past™.

Not the greatest thriller ever, and suffers from some overwrought camera work, but worth watching if nothing else for Jean Reno as the Grizzled Detective™ with bags under his eyes that need their own passports. Reno is the man.

And yes, the movie does explain what the title actually means.

Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse: Stunningly bad sequel to Crimson Rivers. This may very well be one of the worst thrillers I’ve had the misfortune of seeing. Oh, dearie me.

Try not to laugh when the monks in robes start doing parkour. Really.

Jean Reno spends most of the movie looking acutely embarrassed, as well he should.

Up in the Air: This is the kind of movie that makes you think. George Clooney pays Ryan Bingham, a man whose job it is to travel across the country and lay people off. As you’d expect from a person who makes a living out of causing people pain, he is emotionally dead and has traded human connection for the service smiles of his endlessly traveling lifestyle, living in hotels and airports, unencumbered by human relationships.

So, he’s a narcissistic shitheel. But at the same time it’s hard to not see the attraction. Binghman is self-contained in his element, smug and untouchable as he goes through the motions of his pointless existence.

Up in the Air is a good movie in that it makes you think—it’s a breath of fresh air to get a completely different perspective on reality. But it’s also painful to watch. If you’ve ever been laid off, the firing scenes are near-unwatchable.

Still, Clooney and the rest of the cast do a pitch-perfect job and the movie is beautifully shot.

For myself, I’ve always loved airports and the sense of freedom and solitude they provide and can certainly see the attraction of Bingham’s lifestyle. Which is kind of difficult to admit since he is an emotional cripple.

Zombieland: Art House movie about the loneliness of the human condition, cleverly disguised as a shlock horror/comedy movie about life after the Zombie Apocalypse, filled with over-the-top action and painful one-liners.

Despite the grisly zombie-killing sequences, the plot is admirably focused and spare, and Zombieland moves to its conclusion with great economy.

It’s always nice to see movies that can be watched on different levels.

From Russia With Love: James Bond movie from 1963. That’s right. 1963.

It’s always great to watch good Bluray transfers from film, and this is an example.

From Russia With Love really hasn’t aged well, what with the entire world view shifting since it was released, but it’s well worth watching as long as you remember that the Bond movies always showcase the absolutely coolest tech and the coolest looks imaginable in an era. So the way people dress and talk was the penultimate of cool back in 1963.

Pinstripe suits, slim ties, and only street thugs and gypsies failed to shave daily and wear a natty hat.

Everybody smoked. Everywhere. All the time.

And the tech … oh, the tech! James Bond had a car phone in 1963! Can you even imagine how totally future it seemed in 1963 that you could talk on the phone in your car.

Darkness, despair, and futility on a stick.

To be honest, I didn’t really know what to make of The Road: It’s written in a style to make it more of a parable than a story. Things like us never finding out the man and boy’s names, never finding out what the apocalypse was, and McCarthy’s strange and to my mind pretentious quirk of leaving out the apostrophes from words like “wouldnt.” No idea what that was all about.

Unnecessary spelling issues aside, McCarthy’s prose is what makes The Road bearable. It’s sharp and honed, often poetic, rendering the story in a fugue state that accentuates the characters’ plight. Or perhaps one shouldn’t look at them as characters but as icons. Again, The Road feels like a parable. I’m really not sure what the parable is about, but if I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s about never losing faith in Deus Ex Machina.

Because I have a huge issue with the ending. This review is spoiler-free, but let’s just say McCarthy completely punked out. I put the book down really angry after I finished it. Like, kicked in the nuts angry.

Nevertheless, it’s a unique book, which all by itself makes it worth reading. And perhaps I’m over-sensitive to bad endings. It’s worth reading for the prose style alone.

Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball tells the story of the subprime mortgage meltdown from the perspective of some of the very few traders who saw through the irrational exuberance of the housing market and actually did the work of figuring out how the Collateralized Debt Obligation machine worked and saw it for the Ponzi scheme it really was.

While the focus of the book is the personal experiences of the traders, The Big Short also does an able job of explaining some of the more baroque financial instruments created by Wall Street, instruments made purposefully as byzantine as possible in order to deceive both customers and ratings agencies. As one of the traders says after he finally gets to the bottom of how the system works, “How is this legal?”

The greed and stupidity displayed by the people whose very job it was to understand the financial instruments will make your blood boil.

The Big Short is a fast, easy read that will make you want to get on a flight to New York to go to Wall Street and stab people in the face.

Read it.

Richard K. Morgan is best known for his Takeshi Kovacs novels where he melded the grit of noir with science fiction. The Steel Remains is his interpretation of classic fantasy—most of the fantasy tropes are there, including a dark prophecy, warring kingdoms, and magic. Morgan overlays the classic elements with thick layers of ultra-violence, cynicism, profanity, and graphic sex. Including, it should be pointed out, graphic gay sex. Very gay, very graphic.

The result is stunning. The Steel Remains successfully brings the fantasy genre into more fully realized—and above all gritty—territory. The plot is turbo-charged, the characters walking the fine line of being interesting while vacillating between being cynics and completely amoral, and the world Morgan has created exhibits a lived-in vastness with lots of room to grow.

In a lot of ways, The Steel Remains reminds me of Joe Abercrombie’s fantastic First Law Trilogy—the same grit, harshness, noir sensibilities, violence and sex. Although Morgan does go one step further by bringing in the hot man-on-man action.

Best of all, The Steel Remains is the beginning of a trilogy, so there’s plenty more goodness to come.

If you’re ready for a fantasy novel that’s a kick in the nuts, The Steel Remains is where it’s at.

Highly recommended.

You can read all Core Dump Richard K. Morgan reviews.

So, yeah, that wasn’t fun. It was interesting and powerful, but not fun.

Up: I can’t say enough good things about this animated movie. Funny and touching, with a rare combination of slapstick and emotion.

I and my seven-year-old daughter both loved it, which should give you some idea of the range of Up.

Belongs at the top of your queue.

Objectified: Documentary from the same people who made the wonderful Helvetica about the designed objects with which we surround ourselves, how the objects affect us, and how the people who design the objects think.

It’s a wonderful documentary, a movie that changes your perspective about everyday life.

Highly recommended.

District 9: South African movie about aliens who come to Earth and are relegated to a segregated slum.

The beginning is filmed in a mockumentary style and drags us into the story. Toward the end the movie becomes more conventional and loaded up with top-quality action sequences.

District 9 is well plotted, gritty, and well acted. If you like sci-fi, District 9 is a no-brainer. As a bonus, it’s the kind of movie that lingers with you, and asks difficult questions.

Coraline: I was nervous about sitting down to watch this with my seven-year-old daughter, but she has a high tolerance for scary stuff. I highly recommend only showing Coraline to children who can handle it. I know if I’d seen it when I was seven I’d have had nightmares for a long time.

From a Neil Gaiman short story, Coraline is a gorgeous stop-animation movie about a girl who finds a secret entrance to a different world that at first seems perfect, but then is revealed to be full of danger.

It’s a dark and quirky enough movie that it’s interesting for adults.

When it was over, I asked my daughter if it was scary. “Yes,” she said and paused for a beat: “Let’s watch it again!”

The Hangover: Strange comedy that’s really a movie about nothing.

The plot is simple and not much more than a tapestry to hang slapstick moments. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Has some laugh-out-loud moments and some seriously cringe-inducing scenes.

Kudos to The Hangover for pushing the boundaries and not pulling any punches.

The Golden Compass: Interesting young-adult fantasy about a parallel world where people’s souls live outside their bodies in the shapes of animals and there is a crypto-fascist organization trying very, very hard to crush some Knowledge That Could Change Everything.

My seven-year-old really liked it, even though some sections were a bit scary for her.

A bit too silly for grown-ups. For young adults, I think it’s a solid movie.

Gamer: Mix Universal Soldier, Escape From New York and Johnny Mnemonic, sprinkle on some Halo, add a heaping helping of dumb, and you have Gamer.

You want some action in your life, just play a game. Seriously. This movie will only annoy you.

As is all to common with big-budget Hollywood fare these days, the concept—modern-day gladiator games with convicts—is pretty cool and interesting and could be a good movie. This probably pitched really well. But then it all went to hell when a script needed to be written. Instead of a script, we get a load of headache-inducing clichés cut-and-pasted together by idiots.

I actually feel bad for Gerard Butler for being in a movie this powerfully dumb.

See also: Death Race.

The idea is that in Eastern Europe—probably close to the Balkans though it’s never specified precisely—exists a city that is actually two cities inhabiting the same space: Beszel and Ul Qoma. In certain areas the cities blend into each other and inhabitants have learned to “unsee” things from the “wrong” city. If a person crosses into the “wrong” city or remembers seeing what exists on the other side, that person is considered in breach. Once that happens, a shadowy entity or organization—we’re not really sure which—also called Breach takes the person away, never to be heard from again. So, it’s important to say the least to not breach.

The novel starts off with a corpse being found in Beszel, which turns out to have come from Ul Qoma. This naturally leads to some consternation.

The novel is told in first-person by a weary, hard-drinking cop right out of central casting. Which is actually not a bad thing, as it gives the reader something familiar to hold on to while Miéville constructs his settings and backstory.

The City & The City starts off slow and ponderous as Miéville builds the setting, but speeds up noticeably once all the pieces are in place, and becomes downright action-packed toward the end.

Well worth reading.

Amazon affiliate link—be a mensch.

Which is an intriguing idea, if one that is hard to prove or disprove after all this time and with the lack of historical data.

What William Rosen has really created with his book is a kitchen sink of the history of Byzantium, which despite being a bit less cool than the Roman Empire when it was based in Rome itself, was a fascinating place at a very interesting point in history, and Rosen does a good job of painting a picture of how Byzantium laid the underpinnings for what would become modern Europe.

Justinian’s Flea is a frustrating book to read in that Rosen has dug up so many facts about the era and especially about the rule of Justinian the Great that he has a hard time maintaining focus—he has so much he wants to share that the book meanders too much and throws way too many people and near-indistinguishable barbarian tribes into the mix. A lot of times reading it I wanted to stop and focus in on a particular event, like Belisarius’s siege of Rome or the building of the Hagia Sophia, only to be thrown into the next thing.

The pacing is a bit odd, too, in that the Black Plague doesn’t show up till the end of the book, almost like an afterthought in the book it is purportedly about.

So, the book has problems, but as a primer on the end of Byzantium that leads the reader to discover areas of interest, Justinian’s Flea does a fine job.

If you buy Justinian’s Flea at Amazon I get a tiny cut, which would be appreciated.

Klipsch IMAGE S4i retail box

I was a bit apprehensive about them being in-ear headphones after having read stories about people with oddly-shaped ear canals not being able to get a good fit, and thus not good sound, but they are comfortable and fit easily. We all have different ear canals, obviously, but as far as I’m concerned, no problems. And they ship with different size cones, so if the medium won’t do it for you, at least you can try the other sizes.

The sound. Well. I’m no audio engineer, and since I paid for these things with my own money, I couldn’t afford to do extensive comparisons with other headsets, but as far as I’m concerned, they sound freaking amazing. The bass stays crisp, even on torture tests like Bill Laswell’s subwoofer-killer Dark Massive/Disengage. Mids and highs have great separation and clarity.

Going to the S4is from the Apple-supplied headset is like going from standard-def to Blu-ray—the difference is huge.

One issue—and I feared this would happen—is that they’re useless for exercising. When your ear canal gets sweaty, the buds slip out like little greased pigs. Seems like it’s an issue with the whole concept of in-ear buds, although I’d really like feedback if anybody out there has found a set that stays in even when the canal gets sweaty. At this point I don’t think there’s anything short of Crazy Glue to be done.

UPDATE Dec. 8: As noted by the indefatigable Joe in the comments, the Comply foam tips work great for exercising, and are also a bit more comfortable than the Klipsch-provided tips. /UPDATE

Another thing with using in-ears for exercising is that since they work by blocking the ear canal you hear your own heartbeat and breathing. An odd sensation.

Actually, while we’re on the topic of headphones, what the hell happened to the neural interfaces we were supposed to get? No buds, just a wireless signal to subcutaneous receptors that feed the auditory nerve.

It’s like I just wasted all my time in the ’80s reading Cyberpunk.

Sheesh.

To sum up: Far as I’m concerned, the Klipsch IMAGE 4Sis are worth the hefty price.

Anathem takes place on a world that is a lot like Earth. After a series of “terrible events,” scientists and philosophers have moved into “concents” (think monasteries) where they spend their lives keeping knowledge alive and running great clocks—basically, time capsules of human knowledge, with the idea that when civilization “extramuros”—outside the concents—goes belly-up as it’s wont to do from time to time, the concent inhabitants will be able to help rebuild.

To this end, the inhabitants of the concents avoid contact with the outside world, instead pursuing their studies and philosophizing. And, oh, the philosophizing! Stephenson has created a whole philosophical and scientific history as a backend for his plot.

Like a lot of Stephenson novels, Anathem takes a while to build up steam, starting out slow and meandering before the plot really kicks in. Which is understandable considering the sheer amount of world he has to build. Once it gets going, though, Anathem becomes very hard indeed to put down.

If you like your fiction erudite and generously sprinkled with philosophy, you can’t go wrong with Anathem. Highly recommended.

The novel also serves as a nice meditation on values—how much of the now do we spend on what’s important, and how much on fluff and vacuousness?

But wait! There’s more! Read other Core Dump Neal Stephenson reviews.

Nerdcore Rising chronicles the first national tour of M.C. Frontalot, considered by many to be the godfather of nerdcore. Frontalot and his band of fellow nerds travel across the U.S. in a crappy van, hustle for publicity, and play for small crowds in dive bars. And it’s a lot of fun to watch, partly because Frontalot and his band are a great bunch of high-energy guys, but mostly because they so obviously love doing what they’re doing.

Nerdcore Rising is the kind of documentary that puts a smile on your face.

Rescue Dawn: Werner Herzog directs this raw, powerful story of a pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. It’s very much a Herzog movie, filled with naked anguish, insanity, and unbearable cruelty.

Christian Bale, while no Klaus Kinski, puts in an strong performance, including a scary amount of weight loss and eating of repulsive things.

This is the kind of movie where the marketing department either didn’t see a single frame or employed some top-level drugs to exorcise reality from their work—a Herzog movie about People Tormented to the Brink of Insanity shouldn’t be marketed the same way as a Rambo movie. It just doesn’t do anybody any good.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Wolverine is the most interesting character in the X-Men universe, so starting out the Origins series with him makes all kind of sense, even though the movie is a bit of a clanking dud.

If you are expecting “feelm” things like character development or an interesting script, Wolverine will disappoint you. It is what it is: a tentpole summer blockbuster with the emotional depth of an ADD four-year-old. Lots of stuff blows up in visually striking ways, but the characters are just props to move the viewer to the next explosion.

Nevertheless, if you can put your brain on pause and not expect anything but a plethora of explosions, it’s competently made in a sad, soul-less way.

Watchmen: Blue schlong.

Just so that’s out of the way.

Watchmen is an incredible technical feat: bringing the comic book graphic novel to the screen as faithfully as this must have taken an incredible amount of labor.

But I don’t understand why Watchmen needed to be made into a movie. It really didn’t bring anything new to the experience. So, shrug. (Obviously it got made because somebody thought they could turn a profit, but there just doesn’t seem to be any artistic reason apart from the director showing off his Mad Skillz.)

There was a lot of Internet furor about the changed ending, and while I was a bit confused about why they changed the ending, the new ending isn’t bad, I guess, but it does seem arbitrary to change just that bit. Oh, well. Blue schlong.

Waltz With Bashir: This is one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. A middle-aged Israeli filmmaker tries to sort out why he can’t remember his involvement in the Lebanon War of the early ’80s, and talks to his friends from the time and other people who were there in order to fill the gaps in his memory.

An animated movie, Waltz With Bashir uses its format profoundly effectively, focusing like a laser on the visual pieces that enhance the story.

And it is such a breathtakingly sad story. This is the kind of movie that stays with you for a long, long time.

Highly, highly recommended.

Defiance: Based on the powerful story of jews in Belorussia during WWII who, after seeing their families murdered by the Nazis, flee into a forest to hide and do their best to live with some human dignity in defiance of Nazi brutality.

And somehow, and I really wish I knew how, Hollywood manages to make it trite.

Which is pretty close to a crime in and of itself.

Defiance isn’t a horrible movie, but when you have the cojones to take on a story like that, you better bring your A-game, and the people involved in this movie most certainly did not. Even my new favorite Bond, Daniel Craig, pretty much phones it in. It’s almost like you can hear him think, “Hey, so I don’t have to take my shirt off in this one, right? Mmmmm … hamburger.”

I mean, really, you have Nazi crimes against the jews and humanity in general, add the uncaring misanthropy of the Soviet state, then add the cruelties of winter and starvation, and most of the movie still feels like it’s made for TV.

In a way it’s mindblowing. How do you manage to work with that kind of material and make it humdrum? And shouldn’t you find another line of work?

The filmmakers also decided to have the dialogue switch in and out of Russian every once in a while without any rhyme or reason I could discern. Thanks. If you hadn’t done that I probably wouldn’t remember the movie was set in Belorussia. Thanks also for having the actors deliver their lines with Russian accents that drift in and out. This also adds to the verisimilitude.

Man, now I’m pissed off. This story shouldn’t have been treated this way.

Gran Torino: This is what happens when you take a great screenplay, great actors, and a director with a keen interest in the human condition: You get a gem of a movie.

Eastwood is, of course, fantastic and intimidating as Walt Kowalski, curmudgeon of the year, who has managed to alienate his entire family and actually growls his misanthropy in a scene.

For some perverted reason, it feels refreshing to have Eastwood deliver every known racial epithet about asians, but do it in such an over-the-top curmudgeonly way it takes all the stings out of the words, rendering them nothing more than armor for a scared old man.

This is the kind of movie that stays with you. Highly recommended.