The Princess Bride

The Movie...

... And the book...

...Are both my favorite stories in the world.

What are the stories about?  Well, the obvious answer is to look at the title.  They are both about a princess bride named Buttercup who is in love with a poor farmboy named Westley who in order to win her hand (when she's just a girl who lives on a farm in the country of Florin), sails off to seek his fortune and is killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts.  Five years later, she becomes the betrothed of Prince Humperdinck of Florin (against her will in the book) after which she gets kidnapped by and up-and-coming War-Starting Company which consists of: Vizzini, the genius (and a hunchback in the book); Inigo Montoya, a Spanish master of fencing; and Fezzic, a giant from Greenland (he's Turkish in the book) an pro-wrestler.  Hilarity ensues and in the end everything does end happily ever after...

Until everything goes horribly wrong, that is.

However, that's just the story-within-a-story in both cases.

In the movie, a little boy is sick and his grandfather brings him a book to read that happens to be the Princess Bride.

The book is (obviously) far more complicated.  Yes, there is a man reading to a sick little boy, but it's the author (William Goldman) who's the little boy and the person reading to him is his nearly illiterate father who imigrated to America from Florin.  The best part of the book, in my not-so-humble opinion isn't the story of the Princess Bride.  You can get that by watching the movie with only a few key points being left out (like Prince Humperdinck's first attempt at getting a bride and the Zoo of Death rather than the Pit of Despair).  The part of the book which is utterly wonderful is the asides by William Goldman talking about the journey he takes towards abridging the original Florin manuscript of The Princess Bride for the wider audience.

I don't know why, but I eat it up.  Now, you should understand that those parts are 100% fictional just like the rest of the book.  They're fascinating.  They're wonderful.  They are sometimes utterly hilarious.  In fact, part of the fun is slipping into the world and believing that William Goldman is just a guy who's abridging a book originally meant as a satire and written by S. Morgenstern.  However, they are also fictional.

It is fucking awesome... and no one will ever be able to do that sort of plot device well again because Goldman did it so brilliantly... unless someone genuinely abridged a book the way Goldman said he did with the Princess Bride.  My vote is that someone do with with one of the books by Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas.

Anyhow, you may have noticed my pointing out the discrepancies between the book and the movie of which there are plenty, but every change doesn't actually take anything away from the story. That's why I love the movie as much as I love the book. The movie was screenwritten by William Goldman, the author who also wrote the screemplays for: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives (the 1975 version, not the shitty remake), All the President's Men, and Misery. Most recently, he did some uncreditted writing for the screenplay of the movie, Zombieland.  Yeah.  

So this guy not only wrote the book and the screenplay, but he also had experience writing screenplays in addition to his seven previously published novels.  That's a writer.  In fact, I'd probably get fangirlish if I ever got a chance to meet the man because of how awesome he is in every sense of the word.

I love both of these.  Of course, I currently don't own the movie as it went missing along with several DVDs when I moved out of an apartment in Cincinnati while attending mortuary school.  I'd love to get it back, but as I doubt I'll ever see it again, I'm waiting to get myself The Dread Pirate Edition... or the Blue-Ray if people are insistent on switching to those.

Badass, isn't it?