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Rating: I love the Eighties. The more plastic and pop-like they are, the more I like them. It's like an unconfessable fetish, known only to my closest friends, family, and girls I've known for more than two months. While I'm writing this, I'm listening to Talk Talk, and they're thrilling me as if they were Dvorak. And, as expected, I adore Rob Reiner's films, the one who gave us gems like Stand By Me and that great movie This is Spinal Tap. And I confess that, until yesterday, I had never seen The Princess Bride, translated in Italy with that shameful title I refuse to mention here. But I never told anyone, and I pretended to catch the millions of citations on the internet, nodding, smiling, and cheerfully glossing over. That was until yesterday.
The plot is classically fantasy-fairy tale-like: a princess, an evil prince, a brave knight who wants to save her. But it's the way it's told and the characters that inhabit it that make it memorable. We start with a child playing baseball on a delightfully 8-bit console (a very promising start) and is interrupted by his grandfather (Peter Falk, ladies and gentlemen) who, to relieve the grandson's fever, starts telling him a story, that of the Princess Bride, obviously. In the initial minutes, we meet most of the main characters and a series of unforgettable secondary characters. First among these are the swordsman Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) and the giant Fezzik (Andre the Giant, ladies and gentlemen). They take us through a series of adventures filled with love, duels, knights, tortures with suction cups (?), and a myriad of additional characters like the Albino and Miracle Max (Billy Crystal, ladies and gentlemen), creating an engaging and absolutely entertaining spectacle.
As I said before, the film has so many memorable lines that on the internet we've read and reread practically the entire script in the form of quotes. But it's Mandy Patinkin who gives us perhaps the best character in the film, a swordsman with an Iberian accent seeking revenge for his murdered father, whose signature line (Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die) has entered legend. Not to mention Billy Crystal, who in his few minutes on screen delivers memorable laughs, and it's obvious how much Patinkin was struggling to hold back the laughter on set.
Rob Reiner does his dirty work, creating a delightful Eighties party, full of extremely fake and kitschy sets that make everything even more enjoyable. Truly an excellent way to spend an evening, even better if concluded with a deep listening session of Rio by Duran Duran.
Watch it.
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