Mr Frodo Comes Down to Oxford.

I just watched a film called The Oxford Murders, in which Elijah Wood looked most unlike a hobbit. That was the first disappointment.

It opens with a professor giving a lecture about Wittgenstein, concluding with the statement that there is no truth outside mathematics. ‘Philosophy, therefore, is dead,’ he says. ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ Well, I’ve long believed that philosophy ultimately serves no other purpose than to amuse us as a species, but the statement mostly appealed to my interest in language.

From that point forward, the film went downhill. The best scene, because it was the most amusing, was the one in which the leading lady (?) removed her bra four times without ever putting it back on again. Elijah Wood dropped the spaghetti, and played it straight as he proceeded to eat it off the liberated erstwhile contents of the now unequivocally discarded bra. I suspect he was intent upon proclaiming that being a hobbit was now an unequivocally discarded phase.