Osler's Razor

For lack of much else to see, I went to "Mr. Bean's Holiday" yesterday, and it was a very odd experience. The first 75 minutes of the movie were kinda boring and slow for the most part. It did do a good job of showing the elegance of the French, but I know better than to address that issue on this blog (people get upset). Then, out of nowhere, the last 15 minutes of the movie are hilarious. There is a film-within-the-film called "Playback Time," which is produced, written, directed, and starring a character played by Willem Defoe, and once that starts things get good.

Defoe provides a great parody of the type, but it is his movie that is over-the-top terrible. It seems to be a cop movie, but is mostly Defoe ruminating over his old girlfriend in pretentious faux-poetic tones.

In a way, it's too bad that there is the convention that movies have to be at least 90 minutes long, because this would have been a great 55-minute movie.

My other big activity for yesterday was working on my syllabus, which I then emailed by accident to those who took PR in fall, 2006. Thank you to all of those who emailed me back, panicked that you had retroactively failed and would have to return and take PC again. Oops.