Ultraviolet, with Milla Jovovich and Nick Chinlund (Toombs from Chronicles of Riddick? wtf?). Well. Uh. The trailer looked pretty good. Unfortunately, the pretty cool gadget-concepts and it-had-its-moments martial arts were nowhere near enough to make up for horrible writing, zero character development, and iffy CGI. And a plot that skated close to being incoherent, with a few odd just plain red herrings. Eh, I suppose in the end it's rent-able, if you're in the mood for some martial arts, but disappointing in the theatre; I can't really muster up anything articulate to say about it. It did have a fun opening credits sequence.

The Libertine, with Johnny Depp and Samantha Morton (Maria from Code 46? wtf?). Actually, there's several more actors in there that surprised me, in truth. Anyway, this film was better than Ultraviolet in quality in the order of magnitudes, though they are really too different to compare in any way. In any case, from the get-go The Libertine catches your attention intellectually - stay on your toes, attention-wise. I'll quickly acknowledge that it's very, very....risquee; I was actually feeling a little uncomfortable sitting next to my old roommate (in a slight "*cough, cough*" way), and in our theatre and the theatre a friend went to both, people were walking out. The writing and acting as a whole are filled with nuance and wit, ranging from snipes that you have to think about to running jokes made for snickering. Basically, to cut myself off from rambling, it's quite a combination of character study and period piece.

Dragons of Summer Flame, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Yet again, another Dragonlance novel. This one is a very marked improvement over every previous one I've read lately, though it's still beer and pretzel fantasy - not that that's a bad thing, just something to remember. The authors did take an interesting turn playing with "good" and "evil" and exploring what each really means, or how perception can affect them. In that, however, they made for one quite interesting character that embodied that exploration and its implied conflicts (both internally and externally), and a whole bunch of characters that are just not interesting at all.