The Princess Bride
My all time, ultimate, favorite movie ever is The Princess Bride.
Years ago I was forced to decide upon my favorite movie. There were so many choices that it was especially difficult to arrive at one above all others. I settled on this one, again, for personal reasons. I was 16 when I watched it for the first time, and I was fighting an especially difficult to hide crush on someone much older than me. Such a hopeless romantic I was. And I thought he was my true love.
Within the first ten minutes, I knew it would be a permanent favorite, mostly because the subject of the movie was true love. How perfect. Since I knew my crush would never come to fruition, the fantastic plot of the movie touched me. Many of the scenarios were completely impossible, yet they ended up happily ever after in the end. I suppose that silliness made me feel there was hope for me.
Besides the whole idea of true love, this movie has many other wonderful qualities. Not only do we have the stories of Wesley and Buttercup, but the lives of the Sicilian, the giant and the Spaniard become entwined with theirs. We hear their stories and see how their life journeys have intersected their paths. While some of the stories are unbelievable and don’t really make sense, there is still an ultimate purpose: Wesley and Buttercup were meant to be together.
In the end, they would never have found each other without the help – or interference, however you want to look at it – of the others. Though from their perspective, they weren’t actually helping, they played a necessary part in helping things turn out the way they did. To the giant and the Spaniard, true love was a living, breathing thing that designed a plan to bring the Wesley and Buttercup together.
I love this idea, but don’t necessarily believe it. Unfortunately I have become jaded over the years. To find that hopeless romantic these days, I have to watch The Princess Bride. And however fantastic or unbelievable it sounds, the story always gives me hope that true love does exist and that it can overcome all obstacles.
Even if I reach the point some day where I feel love is a joke (I’m not there yet!!), I will still love this movie. I think I will always be able to remember the feeling I had the first time I saw it. The Princess Bride, however silly it may seem, will always serve as a sobering reminder that love is silly, but I have to believe in it to find it.
Permission to Over-Analyze 
marvelous005 said,
May 3, 2008 at 12:14 am
I know I have written about this before but I can’t help it. I love when movies an inspire such feelings within us. This is when I often define a movie as a good movie. If a movie can inspire hope or give us encouragment the technical aspects don’t even matter in my mind.
For me the whole reason of art is to express yourself and through that make some kind of difference, whether big or small, in someone elese life. If a movie is perfect in every technical way but doesn’t do anything to change me as a person then what is the point. Sure I like to be entertained but I also don’t like the feeling that I have wasted two hours of my life watching a movie that does nothing for me or the people around me.