When you’ve got a newborn, and you want to play video games, you do what you need to do.

Last night, I was bemoaning the fact that a friend had recently attended the Berlinale Film Festival, and that I didn’t know when I’d be able to attend my next film festival. I had completely missed that Nebraska Wesleyan University was having their 2010 International Film Festival this weekend, and the line-up is very solid:

• The Best of Me (Spain, 2007) - 7pm, Thursday, February 25, 2010
• Slingshot Hip Hop (Palestine, 2008) - 7pm, Friday, February 26, 2010
• The Counterfeiters (Austria, 2007) - 2pm, Saturday, February 27, 2010
• Departures (Japan, 2008) - 7pm, Saturday, February 27, 2010
• Let the Right One In (Sweden, 2008) - 10pm, Saturday, February 27, 2010
• Curse of the Golden Flower (China, 2006) - 2pm, Sunday, February 28, 2010
• The Class (France, 2008) - 7pm, Sunday, February 28, 2010

All films are free and open to the public, subtitled in English, and will be followed by a discussion session.

The two films that I’m most interested in seeing are Departures and The Class, both of which have received high praise from a number of friends. (And what’s more, Departures won the 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.)

Many thanks to Aaron and Ryan for bringing this to my attention.

Nippon Cinema has just posted the first Japanese trailer for Hisshiken Torisashi, a new samurai drama directed by Hideyuki Hirayama (Lady Joker, Samurai Resurrection) and starring Etsushi Toyokawa (Hula Girls, Japan Sinks) and Chizuru Ikewaki (Twentieth Century Boys, The Cat Returns).

Because I have a sworn duty to highlight good-looking samurai dramas and, as Twitch puts it so well, “the world can never have enough well crafted samurai dramas”.

Note: Hisshiken Torisashi is the latest adaptation of a Shuhei Fujisawa novel. Previously, Yoji Yamada adapted three Fujisawa novels for his acclaimed “samurai” trilogy, which included The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade, and Love and Honor.

I finally beat Mass Effect 2 this past weekend, and I plan to post some in-depth thoughts concerning the game, a la what I did with the first Mass Effect, relatively soon. In the meantime, though, I leave you with this.

Regardless of whether you agree with him politically or not, of whether you voted for him or not, I think we can all agree that Barack Obama’s campaign websites—that his overall web presence—was quite remarkable, and displayed a use and understanding of the web that no other political candidate had displayed to date. One needed only to compare the look of his website to that of his opponents. Obama’s website was beautifully designed and laid out. Its smooth, elegant look was upbeat, warm, and inviting, and made other candidate websites seem crude, kludgy, and ancient by comparison.

Since then, it’s been interesting to see the impact that the Obama campaign has had on what other political candidates have begun doing with their websites. Unfortunately, I’ve seen some websites where it looks like the candidates in question haven’t really learned anything. Rather, they simply co-opted Obama’s visual style, which just means they end up looking derivative (as if they’d applied some sort of “Obama-izer” effect to their design in Photoshop).

All of which is to say, I’m very pleasantly surprised by the website for John McCain’s senate campaign. The design is clean and thoroughly modern, but doesn’t at all look like an Obama rip-off job. There are all manner of intriguing little details (like the different states of the little buttons that populate the site), the content is laid out nicely, and there’s a nice use of Cufón to introduce some additional typography to the site. And I must say, I love the logo design. Like the design, it’s clean and modern, and its simple, graceful design lends itself well to being iconic.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the site runs on ExpressionEngine and was built with HTML 5.

I do have a few minor quibbles, though. Some of the colors seem a little heavy-handed to me, but then, I’m personally not a big fan of red and orange together. And the header—which I assume to be a shot of the Arizona landscape—is a nice idea, but the actual execution, with its deep blues, feels ominous and gloomy. Which isn’t exactly the tone you want for a political candidate’s website.

The website was designed by Forty, and they have a nice write-up of the process behind the website on their blog.

Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago is the first great album of 2010 for me, a sweeping, grand album that is quite haunting. (If you’ve been looking for the true successor to Talk Talk’s throne, I suggest you start here.)

“Hidden Lakes” is one of the album’s standouts, with Jonathan Meiburg’s plaintive voice paired with shimmering piano lines, delicate toybox-like chimes, and some elegiac cello.

The Omaha World-Herald has done something that I hope the Lincoln Journal Star will do in the near future: they’re updating their line-up of comic strips. More specifically, they’re getting rid of several comic strips that ceased having a point to their existence a long time ago.

The strips getting dropped include: Love Is, Hagar the Horrible, Gil Thorp, Sally Forth, Cathy, Drabble, Adam@Home, For Better or For Worse, Willy ‘n Ethel, Non Sequitur, Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, Gasoline Alley, Prince Valiant and Andy Capp. Dennis the Menace and Shoe will be dropped from the daily pages and appear in the Sunday pages only.

In their place will be Get Fuzzy, Between Friends, Fort Knox and The Flying McCoys, which will all appear in both the daily and Sunday comics pages.

I’ll admit to occasionally chuckling to Adam@Home and Non Sequitur, and I’ve enjoyed For Better or For Worse at times. But overall, I wouldn’t shed a tear for their departure. The only strip whose passing I might lament is Prince Valiant, because it’s struck me as the only strip that’s sought any sort of artistic achievement—has anyone noticed how ugly and simplistic comics have become over the last few years? And the less said about Gil Thorp, Mary Worth, or Rex Morgan, the better.

The only thing that bothers me about this whole transition is that they’re essentially replacing fifteen comics with only four. The comics page is a dying breed in America: over the last few years, it’s become increasingly marginalized. Much of this is due to the general crunch that newspapers have experienced lately, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s also due to the growing number of relics that populate its pages, comics that no longer interest and amuse people but are kept primarily out of what I can only assume is some sort of nostalgia (or maybe cheap licensing rates).

All that to say that the simple math of the transition is a little sad to me, even as I’m glad to see some new blood being injected into the comics page. It’s something I’d like to see more newspapers attempt, especially Lincoln’s. Because honestly, Garfield has got to go.

Related: The 10 Newspaper Comic Strips that Need to F**king End, 10 More Comic Strips That Need To @#$%ing End

At least, that’s what the news going ‘around the intertubes. Of course, news of a live-action remake of Akira has been popping up here and there for years, but this time, the news has more weight to it.

Vulture has learned that Warner Bros. is negotiating to reteam with The Book of Eli‘s Hughes brothers to have them direct a live-action remake of the cult favorite Akira, from a script by Iron Man scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. (Akira is being produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way, along with Andrew Lazar, who’s also currently producing an adaptation of DC Comics’ Jonah Hex for Warners.)

Now, I haven’t seen anything by the Hughes Brothers, aside from a few bits and pieces of American Pimp that I caught on TV a few years ago. But I’ll tell you now, this simply won’t work.

No offense to the Hughes Brothers, but Akira is a labyrinthine work that is deeply tied to its Japanese roots, culturally and spiritually. Indeed, it’s a story that could only have come from Japan, given that country’s history. There’s almost no way that a Hollywood adaptation wouldn’t essentially rip out a good portion of its heart and soul.

I have no doubt that the film could be a technical marvel, given today’s effects technology, but even with two films, the end result will almost certainly be a convoluted and inert mess of plotlines, characters, conspiracies, and psychic battles. (Of course, some might point out that Katsuhiro Otomo’s animated version was that, too.)