The Waste Lands, by Stephen King. First off, Oy is aweso. For true. Oy! The Waste Lands is a continuation of King's Dark Tower epic, and it certainly upholds the very high standards of the novels previous to it. For the sheer amount that happens in the narrative, both in terms of plot and character development, it reads so quickly I actually hardly felt I read a full novel at all. I greatly enjoyed the expansion of setting, as per usual, but I was hoping for a bit more backstory on the main-main character, but the next book seems set up for that, I hope. It may seem like I don't have much to say about this novel, considering my high opinion of it, but it's really more a question of not going on for pages and pages in a close-reading manner, which this isn't really the right place to do that in.

A History of Violence, with Maria Bello and Viggo Mortenson. This film was interesting in that it had an incredibly tight narrative structure - it was like parallel!/parallel!/bam!/bam!, to describe it in a very inarticulate manner - and so would be great to write an essay on, and the acting and cinematography were quite good as well. As much as I was a bit disappointed that there weren't more twists and turns to the story, this is the kind of movie that seems just made for provoking discussion - what are 'good' and 'bad' violence, how much does context matter, what kinds of violence aren't readily apparent as violence (violence by mendacity, for example), what does it mean in how people react to violence....seriously, anyone wants to watch this and have a long talk with me, I'm down.

Wedding Crashers, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. As much as comedies don't usually hold my attention very well, this one was okay. It was a good bit more serious (in relative terms) than I expected, which was mildly interesting, though something about the story had me thinking it was going to end much earlier than it did, which threw me a little. It did have Christopher Walken in it, that was nice.