Customer Reviews

The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition

5 star:		(528)
4 star:		(63)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

i was very happy to purchase the princess bride in blue ray for a very good price at amazon.ca
thank you for that we will enjoy this movie around xmas time
sandra sawdon

Excellent movie!! Can and will watch it time n time again!!
Awesome role call of actors, storyline, plot...
Would highly recommend to anybody

My daughter's favourite movie when she was a child. Now as an adult, she still loves it. You have a romantic journey surrounded by scoundrels and good guys. The writer of the story captured it. The dvd is funny, and some of the circumstances seems unbelievable and the way the characters get themselves out of the pickle they are in makes you hoot.

Since the summaries above will tell you about the movie itself, I'll skip over that and just put in my opinion; this movie cheers me up like few other things can.
Whenever I'm upset, or angry, or any negitive emotion, really, I can turn on this movie, and it will instantly bring a smile to my face.
Inigo Montoya is the best character, in my opinion, hands down. I always cry with his bit at the end (don't want to spoil it).

It's special effects and music are pretty dated, but that's half the fun of it. Definately one of my favourite movies of all time.

Every now and then, someone makes one of those rare movies that crosses the lines of romance, action, fantasy, fairy tale, and a story for all ages. And isn't annoying either. With snappy dialogue and lovable characters, "The Princess Bride" is a classic tale of high adventure, danger, true love, screaming eels, and Sicilians who talk too much. And yes, there's kissing.

A bored little boy (Fred Savage) is sick in bed, is told a story by his quirky grandfather (Peter Falk). In it, young lovers Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Westley (Carey Elwes) are separated when Westley is apparently killed. A few years later, the heartbroken Buttercup is unwillingly affianced to the slimy Prince Humperdinck. As if that weren't enough, she's kidnapped by a trio of mercenaries.

But things go wrong for the mercenaries -- a mysterious masked man is following them, and he defeats each of the mercenaries with his swordplay, strength and wits. He also knows quite a bit about Westley's fate -- and Buttercup soon finds that he IS Westley after all. But Buttercup is only a cog in Humperdinck's evil plot, and now it's up to Westley, gentle giant Fezzik (Andre) and vengeance-seeking Spaniard Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) to save her.

If "Princess Bride" had been done in a halfway serious manner, it wouldn't have been even remotely interesting. It would have been just another kids' film. But with William Goldman's tongue-in-cheek script and entertaining characters (Miracle Max, anyone?), it becomes something a lot sweeter and funnier.

Rob Reiner has a deft, wry touch that matches Goldman's story, and he does a superb job of keeping the grim moments lighter than they would have been otherwise ("We'll never make it through!" "Nonsense, you're only saying that because no one ever has"). With scenes like the torture machine, Miracle Max and Westley's three duels, Reiner keeps it deadpan rather than openly comic. But there are also scenes of touching romance and reconciliation, and some very good swordfights for Inigo.

And the dialogue (penned by Goldman) is full of quotables -- lines like "Inconceivable!" "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," "I'm not left-handed!" and "As you wish" are more or less immortalized. At the worst of times it's solid; at the middling times, it's memorably quirky; at the best of times, it's hilarious.

Yes, the title is about Buttercup. But she's a pretty pallid character compared to Westley, Fezzik and Patinkan. Elwes always seems to be winking at both the characters and audience, while Andre is lovable as the sportsmanlike, superstrong giant, and Patinkan as the discouraged Spaniard searching for a six-fingered man. His clash with the casually evil Rugen is a wonderful action-packed climax.

And Billy Crystal makes a brief but insanely good appearance as the Miracle Man, an embittered medieval healer with a very peeved wife (Carol Kane, who steals the scene with her shrieks of "Liar!").

Crammed with adventure, true love, swordfights, pirates, casual villains, and a clergyman with a speech impediment, "The Princess Bride" is an adorable comic classic. A must-see.

It is inconceivable how they could make such a good movie. This is one of those movies that the story is being told and periodically you are drawn back to the reader and listener to see what they think of the story. The reader is a grandfather played by Peter Falk and the grandson that is listening to the bedtime story is Fred Savage. Watch the expressions on Prince Humperdinck's (Chris Sarandon) face as he gets foiled again. Exceptional good story and actors. Lots of mush and unexpected trials.

See Peter Falk again with Cyndi Lauper in "Vibes" (1988).

long to buy this movie -- my boys loved it the first time they watched it. It is timeless, a great comedy, wonderful lines.....
A great addition to our movie selection!

For millions of television viewers who grew up during All in the Family's groundbreaking run (before it became stale in the post-1977 seasons), Rob Reiner will always be remembered as the Meathead, a.k.a. Archie Bunker's ultra-liberal, atheistic, and argumentative son-in-law, Mike Stivic. But Reiner, whose father Carl is one of America's best comedic writer-actor-directors (The Dick Van Dyke Show, Your Show of Shows, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid), is far more than just a good actor with one famous role, for after he left Norman Lear's flagship comedy series after six seasons, Reiner the Younger followed in his father's footsteps to become a well-known and well-regarded actor, writer, producer, and director.

One of Reiner's best films is 1987's The Princess Bride, a witty-yet-sweet comedy/fantasy written by two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman, who adapted his own novel about the beautiful maiden Buttercup (Robin Wright), whose true love, a young farmboy named Westley (Cary Elwes), goes off to sea to seek his fortune, telling Buttercup that he would come back for her.

But when Buttercup learns that Westley's ship has been attacked by the Dread Pirate Roberts she swears she will never love anyone again, an oath she keeps even when she accepts a marriage proposal from Florin's Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), a handsome yet somewhat shady fellow who probably could give Machiavelli some lessons in, well, Machiavellian diplomacy. His plan is simple: take over as King of Florin as soon as his father passes away, get bethroded to a beautiful engaging commoner, then stage her kidnapping and demise to incriminate the neighboring rival kingdom Guilder and start a war.

Aided by the equally heinous Count Rugen (Christopher Guest), Humperdinck hires a trio led by the too-clever-for-his-own-good schemer Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), the revenge-obsessed Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), and Fezzik (Andre the Giant), a brawny hulk with a heart of gold and a fondness for rhymes. The three manage to kidnap Princess Buttercup, but before they reach the Guilder-Florin border they run into an unforeseen obstacle: a dashing swordsman dressed in black.

Goldman's clever way of grabbing the audience's heart and funny bone is to present this fairy tale with a framing story of a 1980s grandfather (Peter Falk) who visits his sick grandson (a pre-Wonder Years Fred Savage) and reads the tale of The Princess Bride to him, following a long family tradition.

Reiner gets wonderful performances not only from the major cast members, but also from Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, who play Miracle Max and his wife Valerie in a short but hilarious scene. He approaches the fractured fairy tale as a comedy/romance/swashbuckling adventure, poking gentle fun at the conventions of all the fantasy/medieval adventure films of the 1930s and '40s without being obnoxious or too sardonic. The result: a film that overcame box-office failure (it had a brief and unprofitable theatrical run in the summer of 1987) by becoming a home video success. (This is not unique to The Princess Bride, either. 1939's The Wizard of Oz was no box office champ when it premiered; only when it became an annual TV staple in the mid-1950s did Oz become a family classic.)

The 2001 MGM Special Edition DVD presents The Princess Bride in its original widescreen format, and features a director's commentary track by Reiner, a writer's commentary by Goldman, English and Spanish audio tracks, a new documentary on the making of the film ("As You Wish"), plus theatrical trailers and two original featurettes.

As Vizzini might have added, to try and find a funnier family film is absolutely inconceivable.

This movie will make you laugh the first time you see it. The second time you see it you will curse it for its sentimentality. But the sentimentality is purely superficial. The third time you see it you will come to know and mourn its sad tragic core. There are a million improbable rescues in this movie. Our heroes confront a million deadly dangers and by sheer fate, chance, or the perverse will of the script writer our heroes always get off the hook. I do not feel I am giving anything away when I say that. The movie demands to be treated like a sublime, beautiful, and humorous joke. But underneathe all of those escapes and rescues, underneathe the jokes and one-liners, underneathe the sight gags and grand visual frivolity is a darker story. There is a scene ( I won't give it away) where that bold swashbuckler Inigo cofronts Count Rugen - the man who murdered his father. They have a duel and in the last instant Inigo finally tells Count Rugen what he really wants. It is, actually, the one thing Inigo ever wanted in his entire life. That mere sentence, what Inigo says to Count Rugen, is one of the greatest lines in movie history. It is, in itself, the true tragic and spiritual center of the film. All of those escapes and rescues and jokes are totally false. They make us feel good but they lie. The movie itself admits openly that the film is merely a fantasy - a fantasy in the good sense that it ignores the grotesquely limited constraints of realism; but also a fantasy in the sense that it is what wounded children ( all of us) had wished had happened. No one who sees this film will have any regrets.

committed, medicated and worked over by the best shrinks money can buy, an exorcisim probably wouldn't hurt either.