Movie Review: The Princess Bride

I have always loved Princess Bride. I cannot remember the first time I saw it, probably because I was too young to remember, but it stuck in my mind for years afterwards and I have watched it many times in the last few years.

So why do I love it so much? Well, it has everything that you need in a movie – romance, comedy, action and adventure – and it does them all so well. Even though it was made in the 80s and the effects are absolutely terrible, the storyline makes up for it.

The movie starts off with a young boy sick at home playing videogames. His grandfather comes to pay him a visit and brings with a book (The Princess Bride) that his father used to read to him when he was sick. Begrudgingly the boy agrees to listen, complaining at points about how it sounds like just a gushy romance. But before long, the boy is captivated by the story and so is the audience. The story is about a beautiful woman and the farmboy who she falls in love with. The farmboy, Wesley, leaves to find his fortune early on and is kidnapped and killed by the dread pirate Roberts. The woman, Buttercup, pines over him for five years before agreeing to marry the prince of the country, Prince Humperdink. A few days before the wedding, she is kidnapped by a group of ruffians who want to start a war between two countries. What they don’t realise is that the dread pirate Roberts is on their tail and wants Buttercup for himself.

A few weeks ago we realised that two of our friends (Mike and Vicky) had never seen the movie, and so we invited them and Tom and Danika around to watch. Being the adults that we all are, we also decided to make the movie a little more fun by adding a drinking game to it. The rules of the game (similar to the rules of any other movie drinking game) are that when a character in the movie says a specific line, you need to drink. Some of the lines for Princess Bride include (but are not limited to) the following:

Buttercup
Farmboy
As you wish
Humperdink (the prince)
Boo
Inconceivable
Man in Black
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
True Love
Rodents of Unusual Size

You will find yourself drinking a lot in the beginning and at certain points throughout the movie (at some point, a witch says boo something like 15 times in quick succession). Of course, it’s up to you how much you drink and when, but these are just some guidelines if you feel like watching the movie with a group of friends and playing along.

Either way, drunk or sober, I give the Princess Bride 5/5 as a movie. It has got everything that you need and, even though it is a little bit dated, it is still a lot of fun to watch.

Firefly and Serenity

It has been a rough week. An incredibly rough week actually involving me taking calls from angry customers, one of whom screamed at me for ten minutes, making me cry, demanding that she talk to the owner of the company without even giving me her name. But regardless, I have survived and come back stronger than ever. Well, come back strong at least. Thankfully things seem to be calming down at work a bit, which is why I have the time to write this blog.

When I have been coming home in the evenings, I have not been feeling up to much. I eat dinner (sometimes even make it), have a nice long bath, do a little reading (Terry Pratchett being my author of choice at the moment) and then go and lie in bed for awhile watching an episode or two of a series. And so, I thought that I would write a post about the series that I finished watching recently. It is one that I have always wanted to watch, that I have always heard good things about, but that I have somehow just never gotten into. As I have currently watched most of the series on my computer and Grant was getting round to watching reruns of The Simpsons, I decided that it was time to try something new. And so, I started to watch Firefly.

For those of you who have never heard of Firefly, it is a Joss Whedon which only ran for one season. It is a sci-fi Western revolving around a group of illegal traders who earn their living by ferrying travellers across space and by doing dodgy deals along the way. It has recently been compared to Cowboys and Aliens, and I can kind of see why as the two genres tend to run together more than you would expect, but as I have not yet seen Cowboys and Aliens, I cannot do a comparison yet. I will let you know if I ever get around to it.

Part of what makes this series so awesome are the characters. The series stars Nathan Fillion (of Buffy, Dr. Horrible and Castle fame) as Captain Mal Reynolds the captain of the ship, Serenity. His sense of humour and his one-liners make the series, and despite his attempts to be hard and badass, despite his threats to kick Simon and River (two of the travellers) off his ship or leave them behind somewhere, you know that he has a soft side underneath and that it is simply not in his nature. His crew consist of married couple Zoe and Wash, badass assassin Jayne and engineer Kaylee, while his travellers consist of the courtesan Innara, the priest Sheperd, the doctor Simon Tam and his sister, River. I recongised a number of names and faces when I started watching the series, including Wash (who is played by Alan Tudyk from 28 Days and A Knight's Tale) and Jayne (who is played by Adam Baldwin from Chuck). Summer Glau, who plays River Tam, also became a bit of an icon because of the series, and is fawned over by Firefly and general sci-fi fans everywhere. She was an extra in an episode of Big Bang Theory, where all four of the friends tried their luck with her and all four of them utterly failed.

Another part of what makes the series awesome was the plot. Every character had a very definite part to play, and it was clear that Joss Whedon had a larger plan in mind than the one season that the show ran for. He carefully developed plot lines, from the love stories that develop between Mal and Innara and Kaylee and Simon, to the mystery of what it is that the government were doing to River, to the mystery behind the Shepherd and the way that he is treated by the people he encounters. The fact that the series only lasted one season was highly disappointing, and a huge number of people were disappointed by it. So many that they decided to make a movie to try and seal off some of the loose ends.

Serenity was released in 2005, two years after the series ended, and became a cult hit in the same way that Firefly had become cultist rather than mainstream. Of course, it meant that the characters had changed a great deal in the two years that the series had been finished for, but the storyline picked up quickly, and the differences were not too harsh aside from the occasional hair-style change or weight loss. Most of the movie revolved around River and trying to cover her story, where she came from and what she had been subjected to, while the other loose ends took a backseat and were only briefly referred to. While it was good to see the cast together again and to have a little bit of finality (the series left off on a bit of a cliffhanger, which made it all the more disappointing), I still found myself a little disappointed in the movie. I wanted to know more! I wanted other things to happen! I wanted the series to start again so that they could pick up where they had left off, but I knew that it was never going to happen.

Despite my disappointment, I loved Firefly and Serenity. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is into action, sci-fi, western or comedy series. In fact, I would highly recommend it to practically anyone. The only reason I found them so disappointing was because of the awesomeness. In reality, I am disappointed with Fox - the bastardly network that decided to drop the series. I am glaring at them right now.

Sting or Stink?

“What about How Do You Know?”
“It's already started.”
“Morning Glory?”
“You've already seen it.”
“I know,” I say, shifting around uncomfortably, “but I wouldn't mind seeing it again.”
I wouldn't mind seeing anything but this, I think to myself, but know better than to say it aloud.
“Nope, Green Hornet it is!”
I let out an audible sigh and step up to the counter to pay R65 for a movie that I don't particularly want to see.
Like throwing money down the toilet.

We all get our tickets and make our way up the final escalator at Cavendish Square, arriving at the top of the shopping centre, and stand in another busy line for popcorn and drinks. I'm going to need something to distract me from the boredom, and food seems like the only option. After paying another R35 for snacks, rounding off the outing to R100 spent, we make our way into the theatre with it's armchair-like seats and I prepare myself for the ordeal.

The trailers start and Natasha and I chat loudly about which movies we want to see and those that we don't.
“This is a horror movie,” Natasha whispers as the preview for Never Say Never flashes across the screen, leading to uncontrollable giggling that doesn't stop until the movie is about to start.
Here it goes, I tell myself. No turning back now!

It starts off much the same as any other super-hero movie with a flashback to the past of the main character, some traumatic event that occurred to turn him into the person he is today. Typical. And then you catch a glimpse of the hero that he has become – the handsome, dashing, debonair, amaz... what a minute. Was that Seth Rogen? What's he doing there?

Before I knew it, what I had thought was an action movie has been turned into an action-comedy, a parody of the typical super-hero movies that I had come to fear, with a villainous hero, a far more super side-kick and a leading lady who is hardly wooed by either of the heroes and, in truth, hardly seen throughout the movie. What convinced Cameron Diaz to take on the role, I will never know, aside from her probably being paid a bundle of cash for a grand total of about 20 minutes on the screen.

Overall, the movie was hardly what I had expected. There were some genuinely entertaining bits spread amongst the tongue-in-cheek humour that just made me roll my eyes more than laugh out loud, but I enjoyed it in general. That isn't to say that I would pay to see it again, but I certainly felt like my money had been fished out of the toilet and put to a more deserving use – perhaps given to a car guard who would then go and spend it on some alcohol?