I’ll say it up front: Kill Bill is a damn good film. Tongue in cheek direction coupled with over the top kung fu scenes conspire to make you laugh and look away simultaneously; disgusted by the gratuitous amount of decapitations, yet undeniably amused by it.

And no, it wasn’t only my occasionally sick mind that thought so (anyone been around long enough to remember the rabbits? Thought not.)

The acting, dialogue and plot are suitably cheesey, the ending perfectly done, and the anime section breathtakingly done. Very bloody, yet artistic.

A definite must see film, certainly one of this year’s highlights.

As Disney films go, Finding Nemo fairs well. It’s the story of an over-protective father who loses his son. Of course, they’re both fish. This much you know from the adverts. I’m sure you can also guess that there are morals and lessons to be learned all over the place.

What you might not have realised is just how funny it is. And that, for once, Ellen Degeneres isn’t very annoying. She, shock horror, actually manages to be funny.

I don’t want to say too much more about the film, just that it’s very funny and very worth seeing.

Here’s a slightly briefer version of the random links post that got tragically wiped yesterday:

• CSS float tutorial – Can’t get your head around floats in CSS? This is the guide. Clear, concise and well illustrated; makes everything much easier,
• Unicode Applications in PHP – A guide to getting PHP applications to use unicode. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks quite good,
• Multibyte String Functions – Or PHP’s built-in unicode handling functions.
• Secure Shell Access Instructions – Everything you need to know about secure shell access (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need to),
• Atom API – Mark lays out a brief history of content management APIs followed by a close look at the upcoming Atom API. A must read for anyone working with content management or syndication,
• Mozilla – The Mozilla website has been redesigned by Dave Shea (of Mezzoblue). It looks great, can’t wait for the rest,
• Death Of A Metatag – It has been done: metatags are now dead. Don’t even think about indexing them (not that anyone does anymore),
• OPML Considered H.. awful – An outline of why the OPML serialisation format is piss poor. My own experiences with it are less than pleasant,
• A 3d House In CSS – An interesting way of making art with CSS. Very clever,
• Example User Stylesheets – Pretty much what it says on the tin: examples of user stylesheets.
• PHP Scalability – An article on how scalable PHP is. If it is good enough for Scott to build Feedster, then it’s good enough for me.

Quite tech heavy; I’ll try to make the next link post a little lighter.

This was going to be a random links post, a fairly lengthy one at that. But before I submitted it, my login session ran out and the entire post got rejected. Ouch. I’ll rewrite it tomorrow (with even more links), but for now I’ll just hang my head and curse the way browsers won’t let you go back to retrieve your precious data.

As mentioned earlier, I went to see House Of 1000 Corpses. Don’t do the same.

Although it has some good (but brief) moments, and one of the funniest lines in cinematic history, it fails to be scary or funny. The horror and gruesomeness are muted by the lack of tension, comedy overtones (who can take rednecks seriously?) and the poor characterisation; you really won’t care when people are being butchered. That said, the comedy isn’t overt enough to be truly funny. Sure, you’ll giggle when the rednecks get angry, but nothing overt.

It’s not worth seeing. Really.