IMDb #182 Review: The Princess Bride (1987)

Source: Wikipedia

A grandfather distracts his sick grandson from NES Baseball by reading a century-old fairytale book -- the whole thing.

The timeless tale of a dimwit-in-distress inexplicably adored by her masculine fantasy under the guise of T-R-U-E L-O-V-E. The kid entertains himself by injecting sarcastic commentary.

When the perfect stable boy gets all dead, his peasant girlfriend somehow achieves the *other* female fantasy: marry a prince, albeit a total douche immune to karma. A colorful trio of miscreants rescues the Princess Buttercup from certain monotony, via kidnapping. A man-in-black pursues them/ He's ridiculously multi-talented, skilled with a sword and a wicked deadpan sense of humor...

Oh, shut up, me.

If you haven't seen this already, get on with it. It's an icon of American popular culture. The punning sessions, the six-fingered man, the three challenges -- every remotely funny scene has been bastardized into a thousand unfunny memes. In the unlikely event that authorities expunge every physical and digital copy of The Princess Bride, intrepid internetters could scour the image boards and reconstruct the movie in its entirety. Frame. By. Frame.

Probably because the movie runs like a montage of one-scene wonders. The shrieking eels. The Cliffs of Insanity. Iocane powder. The Ancient Booer. Rodents of Unusual Size. Miracle Max. Inigo Montoya. I could go on but won't.

Readers out of the loop, I envy you. The movie isn't perfect (shallow princess, sword dowsing rod, convenient appearance a certain six-fingered man), but it's tremendously fun. The first dozen times. Then it's twice as fun to hate, while still recognizing the great bits you liked about it in the first place.

98 minutes.