The Princess Bride (1987)
Directed by Rob Reiner
In this enchantingly cracked fairy tale, the beautiful Princess Buttercup and the dashing Westley must overcome staggering odds to find happiness amid six-fingered swordsmen, murderous princes, Sicilians and rodents of unusual size. But even death can't stop these true lovebirds from triumphing.
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8 films that influenced The Princess Bride
What critics say influenced The Princess Bride
Reiner's easy pace and camera style hearken back to "The Crimson Pirate" or the Curtiz-Flynn "Robin Hood."
Rob Reiner’s great cult classic The Princess Bride is one of those rare satiric gems, like The Court Jester and Galaxy Quest , that doesn’t just send up a genre, but honors it at the same time, giving us the excitement and pleasure of the real thing as well as the laughs of a comedy.
It has been called the "Generation X's version of The Wizard of Oz ," and, more than any other description, that comes the closest to identifying this movie's impact.
Snippets and overtones of Oz turn up in everything from The Princess Bride and Star Wars (Can’t you just hear Vader saying, “I’ll get you, my Jedi, and your little R2 unit, too!”?) to Earth Girls Are Easy, and the film is the source of many a reference for the wags on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Of course, given that we hardly recall most of those other movies even with the haze of nostalgia, while Ghostbusters remains as iconic a pop culture touchstone as any other movie from that decade (I can wax all the rhapsodic I want to over The Princess Bride , for example, but must always finally acknowledge that nobody - or only a teeny number of people - would be breathlessly excited for a first-person Princess Bride video game in this day and age), I don't mean to suggest that its big-budget somehow makes it a shallower thing: the very reason for its longevity has everything to do with its "bigness", its costly high-concept ambition which lends the film a kind of grandeur and impressiveness that sets off its resolutely intimate, human-sized comedy and makes it seem all the funnier for the contrast (a similar dynamic drives Men in Black , which has long struck me as the last of the great '80s action-comedies, stranded out in the back half of the 1990s).
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Unlike an out-and-out satire like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Princess Bride offers real swashbuckling excitement, real romantic feeling, real villainy and intrigue, real loyalty and heroism.
It's true "The NeverEnding Story" never quite became the classic fairy-tale fantasy that "The Princess Bride," a movie that follows a similar pattern, did a few years later.
Similar to The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), the fantasy story is presented through the narrative device of it existing within a book in the film.
Like The Princess Bride (1987) Petersen's film uses a tale-within-a-tale to draw us into its central fantasy.
Years later, he would comment that he was only fully satisfied with the motion picture versions of two of his scripts: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride.
Goldman solved it much the same way he did in his screenplay to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": by putting a subtle, modern spin on the familiar situations.
(Goldman would later claim that, of all the movies he was involved in scripting, he was only fully satisfied with two: The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy.)
It's sloppy, and it's absolutely brilliant - so let's all be grateful that Goldman was a genius who didn't need to bother with rules (by this point, an incomplete list of his great work would include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , The Stepford Wives , and All the President's Men ).
This witty modern fairy tale by William Goldman (screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men) is resoundingly satisfying.
Goldman, who penned "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "All the President's Men" and "Marathon Man," among others, interweaves fantasy, swashbuckling and humor with an instinctive flair.
This witty modern fairy tale by William Goldman (screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men) is resoundingly satisfying.
It's sloppy, and it's absolutely brilliant - so let's all be grateful that Goldman was a genius who didn't need to bother with rules (by this point, an incomplete list of his great work would include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , The Stepford Wives , and All the President's Men ).
Goldman, who penned "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "All the President's Men" and "Marathon Man," among others, interweaves fantasy, swashbuckling and humor with an instinctive flair.