Go to Bruges

The Savvy Cyber Professor's pick of the week in the movie scene is "In Bruges," which he and Dulcie caught last night in the caught-in-a-timewarp Glen cinema, the only reason to visit the ghost town that is Glen Ellyn of an evening, unless you include the Tap and Grill (or whatever it is), which was once the Firkin and Fox before its swift and unexpected demise while we were away last August, and where one can buy a pint of Alpha King for $4.50. I was a little surprised when Dulcie broached the idea since I knew the film to be somewhat violent; amateur online critiques did not bode well either (which we later realized derived from the undoubted dumbness of their scribes). Anyway we went, and enjoyed it unreservedly, laugh-out-loudly. The writing is as sharp as a knife and delightfully lacking in PC, with plenty of jokes about dwarfs and midgets and other protected species. Did I find myself laughing when Colin Farrell decks a woman with a punch? Well she was coming at him with a bottle he would say in justifying the action. The violence is contained and pleasantly predictable, enabling most of the film to be enjoyed by the squeamish. Bruges is a beautiful city (the Venice of Belgium - you what?) and, though I didn't ram it down Dulcie's throat, I did visit it once in my youth and enjoyed a Stella in the square, where much of the action occurs. I was a particular fan of Flemish painting (I hear you skeptical at this point) and there is plenty on offer in Bruges. The joke is of course that our heroes don't want to be there. Bruges is easy to get lost in one suggests, trying to understand why they are there. So is Croydon the other responds. I know. I have. There is a delightful conceit in that the film contains a subplot of our heroes stumbling upon a film being made in Bruges, the star of which is a dwarf - no one's made a film in Bruges one of the staff says (or something like). Fiennes makes a delayed entrance, and is really a relatively minor figure, with a London accent that sounds comically like a cross between Peter Cook and the Geico lizard. See it; it's a definite winner.