Book and Film: The Princess Bride

So I read the book during the Malaysian trip and I have to say I was incredibly disappointed. The film is one of my favorite adventure movies ever (shut up), so much that people find watching it with me around annoying and pretty much impossible because I recite the lines aloud. I know it's annoying but I can't help it. Reading the book gave me little or no pleasure but I stuck with it because I felt compelled to finish it, and I was hoping it would pick up at some point. It didn't really, at least not for me. I was very irritated to discover that the Pit of Despair doesn't exist in the book; instead there is something called the Zoo of Death, completely different from the story I had grown up with. I realize that film production would have been a logistical nightmare and the budget would have been insane but still. I fell into my own pit of despair even when exciting new things were happening all around me.

Everyone was too chatty for my taste as well. Westley wasn't clever enough and he actually slaps Buttercup when she says, "I have loved more deeply than a killer like you could ever dream". In the film, he just raises his hand as a 'warning'. Some hero! Hmph. Buttercup herself is irritatingly dim-witted, I could not get over it. Even the freaking head of security had more lines than I deemed necessary.

Too unsettled by it, I did some research as soon as I got online at home. This 'classic tale of true love and high adventure' is supposedly written by some Florinese guy (bear with me) named S. Morgenstern and is abridged by William Goldman (he is most famous for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). He also writes the screenplay for the film. It got quite confusing but apparently S. Morgenstern is, wait for it, Mr. Goldman himself. It's supposedly brilliant, the way the book is written, leading readers to believe that places such as Florin and Guilder exist and that the story itself is centuries old. They are, in fact, old (relatively) names for Dutch coins. Yes, it was very silly of me to believe that such places existed but when I grew up, everything was real. I am very impressionable.

Anyway, in light of all of that brouhaha, I grudgingly admit that maybe it is quite clever of the author to have written the book the way he did, I've never read anything like it, but I found it too distracting. There I was, engrossed in the story, hanging onto every word, and then--bam--the author inserts a silly footnote about his fictional son (he has two daughters in real life) smack in the middle of a particularly intense scene. There were so many times I bolted upright in my seat thinking, wtf!

I'm going to watch this film again very soon to get rid of the mental anguish that I've been subjected to and restore the story to the way it is in my head, the way it's meant to be: A classic tale of true love and high adventure with no freakin' running commentary.