'Life is pain, Princess' - or, yes, I've seen The Princess Bride

Thanks for the correction, Jenners.

But, isn’t it wonderful to reach that stage of life at the Dope (the third, perhaps fourth stage) when you don’t bother to Google every time you quote a line from a movie? I’m luxuriating in this stage at the moment before I graduate to the higher stages.

And, don’t you just know it, some of the most famous movie quotes never actually happened. I should know. My alter ego in She Did Him Wrong (I’m not gonna Google that either, although it doesn’t sound quite right) was given a rather racy invite by big Mae, but NOT the invite everyone (apart from a hard core of anoraks, who, incidentally, would never get an invite from the pneumatic one becau they’re so nerdy) remembers.

Or, perhaps, didactic.

Indeed. It’s didactic when I do it; pedantic when everyone else does.

You see, they never understand the tone, or the context, or the illocutionary force. Not to mention the irony.

If I was ever going to change my user name, I think I’d have to go with Didactic Pedant.

Or Princess Buttercup.

But then you’d be really crazy. And no one would tell you.

Is that want you want? Really want? To live in denial the rest of your life? To spend the rest of your virtual existence in Schiavoland, having self-interested groupings using you as a punchbag, and lawyers and politicians falling over themsleves to shake your limpid hand? And all the time you able to feel the blows as they rain down, and to hear the platitudes of Hillary and Michael Moore as they drip off their honeyed tongue via their balmed lips, and yet unable to lift so much as a finger or raise an eyebrow to tell them to go and feel their own pain.

Being mostly dead is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

I cannot believe it. I understand that the OP requested that we not bring up a sting of quotes. I see that others have quoted. There was a time, on the 'net, when one could not post without referencing the following line from TPB, which, I must agree, is one of the most compelling lines ever committed to film (and totally meaningless without you have seen the movie).

I have (small) tears in the corners of my eyes just thinking about it.

No, but I’ll look for it next time I watch the film.

I did notice when [spoiler]during the sword fight above the Cliffs of Insanity, Westley, while stepping backward and up the steps, faltered.

Just before he falls, they cut to another another shot. [/spoiler]

Has anyone else noticed that?

If I quoted my favorite lines from the movie (against the OP’s request), I’d end up reciting the whole damn thing. So I’ll just say that I loved it.

I was in the happy position of watching the flick for the first time without having cursorily (right form?) read anything more than a) a review by Ebert (which I’d forgotten) and b) one or two threads on the Dope about favourite films, in which The Princess Bride figured prominently.

Thus, when the Patinkin character said this for the first time, I duly noted it as an ironic intertextual type of reference to avenging movies and Don Quixote-style romantic Iberian heroes. Second time round it functioned to draw a smile from me; after that, it became rather boring. It had, even for a first-time viewer like me, too much of the “this is designed to become a catchphrase” about it.

Having said that, I though Patinkin (who I hardly know since I don’t watch ER - or was he in the other one, and Clooney in ER?) was excellent. But even I could have made a decent fist of that part! Sufficiently over the top without becoming self-indulgent. Something all the characters managed. Thank goodness they didn’t cast Williams or Carrey!

It was as an ensemble piece that the film really worked. The parts were good; the sum of the parts even better. Can’t wait to watch it with my 8 yr-old, so long as I can drag her away from re-runs of Ab Fab and Sex and the City. Girls will be girls, I suppose.