I was recently struck by a desire to read everything Mark Twain has ever written. It’s a good thing he’s dead because he was pretty damned prolific when it came to putting the pen to the page and publishing the results. Regardless, I’m already happy with the decision as this was a great story that wildly deviated from my expectation of the sort of things I’d discover in his bibliography.

Hellen Keller was no doubt an amazing person. That she developed an ability to communicate so richly, and make proper use of such a variety of adjectives that were by definition wholly outside the realm of her life experience says something about the universality of the human condition. Otherwise it’s just a fairly interesting story of a girl growing up at the turn of the century who had an enthusiasm for life. I do suspect that she was secretly getting some action from her teacher but her sense of propriety (and a lack of knowledge of that vocabulary) kept even the slightest innuendo from slipping into her story.

Wong Kar Wai is still amazing. He had no trouble finding the same gritty, sweaty humanity in Buenos Aires that worked so well in his Hong Kong films. I can only hope that he lives a long time and continues to indulge his skill for capturing the tragedy and beauty of the human experience on film.

When I was little, I would feel sad when I finished a book, knowing that I would never hear more about those fascinating people and their adventures. At some point this melancholy sort of faded away; probably not long after reading became homework. Somehow in the maelstrom of Murakami’s rhythmic words, nostalgic themes and total disregard for the expected, the little me is lured back to the fireside to hear the tale. And he’s very sad when the story’s over.

I dug the mood of the film, but there were times when the samurai schtick was pushed a bit too far. I admire a filmmaker with the balls to make a film with a strong moral statement but I’d prefer one with more substance. And the scene with the bear hunters should have been left on the cutting room floor.

Twisted gives us a glimpse of the wacky experimentation we’ll be able to do when nanotech allows us all to build our own crazy input devices and incorporate them into our games. Rotating the GBA is great fun and the nature of Wario Ware’s microgames is the perfect place to experiment with ways to turn it into gameplay. Yay for Nintendo, a revolution indeed.