Back in Birmingham. I was almost waiting for bad news on the way down here (see previous posts related to my traumatic fly-by relationship with Birmingham). None came. So now I’m calmly bored in a Wetherspoons hotel, not really watching Midnight Run and  hanging on the coat-tails of the notoriously shit wifi service provided by The Cloud.

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I think you should watch The Dark Knight Rises. Unless you hated The Dark Knight. Aside from Bane being a bit depthless when compared to The Joker, the rest of the film is blockbuster entertainment. Exciting, spectacular and not too long. Just.

I bought a box set of Tarkovsky’s films last week. It took me a long time to wake up to the fact that rentals are a rip-off and I can probably buy the same movie in Fopp for the same or cheaper, and now I’m buying a lot of movies and not watching them. I have some early Wenders and rewatches of Haneke’s back-catalog in wait before I get to Tarkovsky (I’ve only seen Solaris, but I imagine it’s all high-concept, ponderous art house stuff, which I used to have a much stronger stomach for). So I estimate, allowing for interruptions from the stuff I end of watching over and over, bad tv-repeat movies that I’m addicted to, and upcoming cinema releases, I should get through all that by 2015. Provided I stay out of Fopp in the meantime.

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Briefly, a few thoughts on Belgium. Gent seemed nice, normal, but I couldn’t see myself living there. Bruges was predictably pretty, full of tourists, boring, and the quietest place on earth when you walk where people actually live. Antwerp looked interesting. It has a comically ugly riverfront walk, nice leafy streets and terraces, some grit and character, and a bar with more than 400 beers (the death-metal-band sounding Kulminator bar). Service at museums and railway stations verged on autistic. The weather was fab. I didn’t eat Belgian fries or waffles from a van. And it was lovely to see my friends.