Dragons of a Fallen Sun, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Ah, finally (working my way through these old Dragonlance novels) one that I quite enjoyed. Basically, the authors seemed to take what was already an expansive setting, and then gave it a similar treatment to what created that grandest of comic book epics, Age of Apocalypse. Everything is flipflopped around - but not as implausibly as a Superman-bizarro world - morality that was starkly clear is now grey and complicated, and though the world is darker (and even creepy at times), the brightness in it is that much more surprising and nice. Which is ironically closer to the end of their first trilogy than any of the subsequent novels up till this point.

Furthermore, the authors took the interesting fantasy tact of getting rid of most overtly 'magic' elements, which in my opinion consistently makes fantasy more interesting in a proportional manner by drawing the focus to the characters and plot. Ironically, however, there is not that much character development for a novel this size, but the setting makes up for it in a Southwest lit. kind of way.

Waiting..., with Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long. I'm quite surprised this movie pulled off an R rating. Vulgar, dirty, and vulgar. But quite funny, especially so if you have experience with restaurants in regards to how the movie is set. There's a good many laughs, but the almost-depth in regards to the apparent main character confused me, I wasn't sure if it was there to have actual depth or give the veneer of it - and if the latter, why bother? But, it was interesting overall nonetheless.

Shu shan zheng zhuan ('Zu Warrors'), with Ekin Cheng and Louis Koo. I can't give a real opinion on this, in all fairness, because we meandered out of the room and promptly forgot that we'd left it on a quarter of the way through. And I was the only one half-paying attention anyway. Why that reaction, one might be tempted to ask? It's not as if the movie was horrendous. It had really interesting imagery. It was just...imagery, however interesting, isn't enough to carry a complete lack of character depth and plot to the point of making those images banal. I find it odd that I would have given this movie more of a chance had it been a well-drawn cartoon, for the amount of energy that seems to have gone into making it quality live-action.