Movie suggestions?

JHS
Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:23:52 +0000

William Goldman, who wrote both the book and the movie of The Princess Bride, was a very successful Hollywood screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Misery, The Stepford Wives, All The President’s Men, A Bridge Too Far, Marathon Man) who was also a skilled novelist. The Princess Bride and Marathon Man were novels long before they were screenplays, not the other way around, and both are both fun/exciting and fairly sophisticated from a literary standpoint, especially for popular fiction of their time. Very post-modern before post-modern was a cliche.

The Princess Bride, by the way, is not a girls’ movie that boys can tolerate. It is much more a boys’ movie that girls can tolerate. It’s full of snarky sarcasm and potty jokes, and sword fights and dwarf-tossing. It’s really a lot like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but shading in the direction of a Mel Brooks parody like Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men In Tights.