Weaving tangled webs

For better or worse, the shift in my movie watching habits these past few years can be illustrated by the following statistic:

Hilary Duff movies I've seen: 5
Hilary Swank movies I've seen: 2
(including 1992's Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

We watched The Perfect Man on DVD last night, and it was fine. Heather Locklear has a perpetual makeunder, so you could say that she's playing slightly against type. Hilary Duff, Chris Noth, and Carson Kressley essentially play themselves. At times the film takes an intergenerational, Freaky Friday-ish dimension, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward.

Surprisingly, the film had some academic merit. An English teacher puts up the following quote and attributes it to Sir Walter Scott:

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.

Wasn't that Shakespeare? In college I was an English major, and probably knew this kind of thing. (Heck, this blog's title is from Shakespeare, by way of The Simpsons.) But I couldn't think of a particular play at the time, so I made a mental note to later check the couplet for its literary source.

Turns out I was wrong, but not alone. This site lists quotes commonly misattributed to Shakespeare. This is sad news for me: I can't remember Shakespeare accurately, much less Mel Gibson.

The experience was not without benefits. That same Google search gave me a list of quotes from the Bush administration justifying their Middle East incursions. Find it here.