With a plot involving a decrepit Elvis, a black JFK in a wheelchair, and protecting a retirement home from an evil soul-sucking mummy preying on the residents, Bubba Ho-Tep isn’t your typical film. Starring the legendary Bruce Campbell this film is entertaining from the first moody line right through to the great, if predictable, ending.

Although it clearly revels in the surreal setting and characters, Bubba is also very grounded; having a lot to say about growing old and getting wise, preparing for the future and dealing with uncertainty. Damn near poignant if it wasn’t interrupted by mummy crap jokes.

All the roles are excellently cast. You soon won’t be questioning that Elvis is alive and well (apart from that wart).

Funny, smart, crazy. Easily one of the best films of the year.

The main conceit of Saw is a clever one, bringing around a scenario which is both fascinating and terrifying: two complete strangers trapped in opposite corners of a basement room, one having to kill the other within a matter of hours. As would be expected the story begins unfurling the matter of why they might want to kill each other, and who brought them to this place.

The real problem in Saw is the execution. There are some truly woeful directing decisions. Where the film should have kept the detached, cold feel of the opening scenes, we begin getting spinning blipcuts with nu-metal playing over the top. Totally inappropriate and very jarring. This extended into the lighting which, although clearly intended to dehumanise some of the other victims, gave a slightly comical air reminiscent of House Of A Thousand Corpses. Let’s not even get into the hammy acting by Cary Elwes (an actor I previously admired, primarily for his spoof work).

A shame to waste such a good concept.

Metroblogging is a set of location-based collaborative blogs. Bloggers sign up to write about their city, the events and lifestyle therein. A good idea.

It’s about time we got a Glasgow one. Go over and sign up. Apparently it takes about 10 people from a single city to sign-up to get the city activated. Although I’m undecided about joining myself (got a lot of other work to do), I’d like to see a few decent writers from the area join.

A particularly large selection of links this week:

• Gmail Skinning – Through a mixture of Firefox extensions and the browser’s support for user CSS, Gmail is now skinnable. I can see this becoming a very big thing.
• Zip Decode – A demo of zoomable maps, using postcodes to target areas. Takes an age to load but does the job.
• Min-height: fixed – Someone has finally sorted out the problems with minimum height across browsers. Another handy CSS tip.
• Currency And Legal Tender – Some interesting points about how legal tender works in Scotland, and how non-legal tender is still valid currency.
• Darque Dungeon – Amusing reworked comic strip. Very funny stuff. Search around on the site for another similar piece.
• Creating A Mozilla Extension – Something that I want to learn but have never had the time. Another example for writing extensions for mozilla is right there. Not sure if these are new enough to take into account the changes made to Firefox extensions recently but are bound to be decent starting points either way.
• More On The Underground Cinema – In one of the recent links posts there was an article on a secret underground cinema in Paris. This article talks to someone who claims to know the group responsible.
• How To Fold A T-Shirt – Wow. That is an impressive piece of folding.
• Warioware 2 – After the brilliance of the original, I can’t wait for this tilting based sequel (although I wonder how multiplayer games will fit into this new way of working).
• Google Aptitude Test – Google do recruiting in an unconventional way. Some great questions in there, particularly 19.
• Struggling With The Web – The web is easy to use, it just doesn’t hand hold you through every detail.
• Gmail Drive – Set up your Gmail account as a drive in Windows. Absolutely fantastic stuff.
• Zoom – Shockwave zoomed image that goes on for… well, a long time.
• Transformers History – The complete Transformers backstory, from billions of years before the original series to the end of the beast wars. A great deal of information. Read only if you have hours to spare.
• Not Just Usability – Joel argues that usability is not the most important thing in an application. A good idea will win out over bad design.
• BBC News Online Wikiproxy – News Online wired up to wikipedia. Simple but great idea. The BBC should incorporate this into their basic system.
• Understanding Base64 Data – A quick overview of how base64 works and how to implement it in Java.
• Tiny Plaid Ninjas – And finally, tiny plaid ninjas. Aha.

Still a lot more to clear out, but they will have to wait for now since I can’t be bothered compiling the rest of this list today.

Although it is being sold as a spiritual successor to films like Lock Stock and Snatch, Layer Cake is noticeably different. Sure it’s another gangster film set in London with some quirky characters and the odd painful accent, but it plays it all a little differently. Rather than the super-stylised cinematics of the other films, Layer Cake is decidely less brash, eschewing huge amounts of flair for a supposedly more realistic feel (without going for the more gritty styling of American gangster films).

It doesn’t really matter though, as nothing of any great interest happens. The film plods along amiably and never really picks up. Worse, the last third is full of glaring holes, cliched dialogue (“The king is dead…”), an atrocious ending (enough to make people in the cinema laugh out loud at how bad it was – something I haven’t seen since the piss poor Jeepers Creepers), and a twists that are completely pointless. Why, for instance, did the main character have no name? There was a point to that device being used in Fight Club and Hero, but here it just seems to be because the author saw it used in screenwriting 101; it offers no extra value.

Poor.