As a kid, TPB was nothing more than a fairly funny fantasy flick, but it took a few years before I began to catch on to the extreme undercurrent of satire and goofy weirdness that was going on here. Or… I’m just bored and new things pop out at me. The readers got back a long – and again, fictitious – letter about some lawyer who has blocked the release of the scene.)īut enough about the book – we’re here for the movie! I’ve been constantly amazed at how TPB has changed for me over the years as my perspective has grown wiser and more amazingly intelligent. He then urges readers to write in asking for the scene, which they did in spades. (Interesting side note number two: Goldman inserted another practical joke into the text, where he mentions that he himself wrote only one scene, a reunion scene between Buttercup and Westley, but his publisher rejected it. Seriously, as far as we know, Goldman wrote the cliffhanger chapter as one last TPB practical joke on his readers.
Then, it gets even better – as the chapter itself ends with a terrific cliffhanger, readers became eager to know when the sequel would finally hit the shelves. Naturally, Goldman created an even more complex tale of how he was trying to acquire the rights to abridging that text from, of all people, Stephen King. (Interesting side note number one: when Goldman re-released TPB in a 30th anniversary edition, he included the first chapter of the sequel: Buttercup’s Baby. And that’s the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude TPB had when it came onto the silver screen. If you didn’t know better, it was entirely possible to be fooled by this setup.
Westley and buttercup score movie#
Thus, like the movie itself, Goldman continually breaks into the narrative of the novel to mention that he took out, say, 29 pages devoted to a woman choosing which hat to wear. Morgenstern”, and how Goldman took an often-boring novel and boiled it down to what he called “The Good Parts Version”. Goldman felt the need to make up an enormous backstory of TPB’s alleged writing by a guy named “S. Instead of just launching into a subversive twist on the old fantasy/romance genre, he also subverted novel writing itself. It’s funny to think that The Princess Bride spans aaaaaaall the way back to 1973, when author/screenwriter William Goldman ( All the President’s Men, Misery) created this in the form of a giant shaggy dog tale. And it would allow me to vent even more about the sheer idiocy that is Buttercup. It’s a “good” movie, but there’s a lot of fun to be had in analyzing it and generally spewing my unique brand of verbal cologne across its surface. How could I be so incredibly blind? It’s been there in front of my nose for years – a long-loved cult favorite with a rich history of viewing pleasure in my life, spanning back to my early teenage years. He was right, of course, even if he stopped breathing. You know you gotta, yadda yadda, do you know where the nearest emergency room is?” “Here ya go,” said the fairy, hacking a chunk of lung into a hanky.
So, squatting in front of my DVD rack, I considered my choices for a long time, until one day, out of the blue, a little fairy with a nasty cough knocked on my door and thrust a copy of The Princess Bride into my hands. Yet the good movies out there are, as Pooly once said, hard to review in length, because it all ends up with you saying, “Boy howdy, this is great!” They don’t all make for great viewing material. Yes, there were plenty of bad movies to take on and examine under a (hopefully) witty, critty microscope… but I felt like that’s all I’ve been doing, lately. When searching for the next movie to unleash into a full-fledged Mutant Viewing (now with 85% more sodium!), I found myself squatting at a curious crossroads.
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