"The Princess Bride" (1987)

I was ten or eleven years old the first time I saw The Princess Bride.  We were spending our summer vacation in Iowa, visiting our relatives, as our family always did.  My aunt invited my mom and brother and I over for the afternoon to watch a movie with her, and with her youngest son, who was two years older than me and the cousin I always got along best with.  They had a good collection of movies on VHS for us to choose from, lots of things we had never seen before, and they usually let us borrow some to watch at my grandparents' house while staying there.  This was the first and only time we actually went over to their house to watch something with them -- I don't know if there was a special occasion I've forgotten, if it was just a rainy day and we were all bored, or what.

While trying to decide what to watch together, my aunt and cousin discovered we had never seen (or heard of) The Princess Bride, and they insisted we had to watch it.  I have such lovely memories of sitting on the floor in front of the TV with my brother and cousin (I can still remember their variegated brown carpet!), with my mom and aunt sitting on the couch behind us, all laughing and cheering through the whole movie.  It was my first experience with a live-action fantasy movie, and my first swashbuckler.  I was enchanted.  

On the drive back to my grandparents' house where we were staying, I heard the Supremes song "Stop in the Name of Love" on the radio for the very first time, and that song has been indelibly linked with The Princess Bride forever in my mind.

I had read just enough fairy tales and adventure stories to understand a lot of how this movie was spoofing and subverting them.  And I loved the framing device (though I didn't know that name for it) of the story being read to a little boy by his grandfather.  But, most of all, I loved Westley (Cary Elwes).  In fact, a year or two later, we named our new dog Westley after him.

The Princess Bride is based on a book by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay.  It's about a sick little boy (Fred Savage) whose grandfather (Peter Falk) visits to cheer him up by reading him a book, The Princess Bride.  The boy is skeptical about a book ever being fun, but grudgingly agrees to try not to fall asleep.  And then, of course, gets increasingly invested in the story of Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Westley (Cary Elwes), to the point where he doesn't even mind having to listen to the kissing parts.

I'm not sure if I should even try to summarize this movie.  It's so hard to do without ruining surprises and funny things!  Buttercup and Westley fall in love, but he's poor, so he goes to sea to earn some money for their future life together.  The Dread Pirate Roberts attacks his ship, and everyone knows the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners alive, so Buttercup is consumed with sorrow.  Eventually, Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) sees her and decides she's the most beautiful girl in the kingdom, and that means she's the best, so he decides to marry her.  Buttercup doesn't care what happens to her now that she has lost Westley, so she agrees.

And then Buttercup gets kidnapped by a giant named Fezzik (Andre the Giant), a swordsman named Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), and a wise guy named Vizzini (Wallace Shawn).  And then she gets kidnapped by the Dread Pirate Roberts.  And then she gets rescued by Prince Humperdinck.  And then she gets rescued by the Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo and Fezzik.  It's a very busy time for Buttercup.

It's full of sword fights and Rodents of Unusual Size and torture Machines and battles of the wits and double crosses.  And I haven't even mentioned Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) and his wife (not witch) Valerie (Carol Kane), who are so funny that Mandy Patinkin reportedly cracked a rib during filming because he had to try so hard not to laugh during their scenes together.

If you have never seen this movie, you should.  If you have seen it before, you should probably watch it again.  It's a pure delight from beginning to end, unless you happen to be my BFF, who is the only person I know besides my dad who has seen it and not liked it.  So... you might not love it.  Or like it.  Or find it funny.  But it's such a cultural touchstone, you should see it at least once.

Is this movie family friendly?  It has two cuss words in it.  It has a non-gory torture scene, which we fast-forwarded through when my brother was little because it was too intense for him.  It has a couple of kisses.  It has a bit of swashbuckling violence, but again, nothing gory.  I'd say it's great for ages 10+, and for younger viewers with a parent to fast-forward if their kids are sensitive or squeamish.

This has been my contribution to the Adventure-a-Thon hosted by Cinematic Catharsis and Realweegiemidget Reviews!

A Realm Awards Finalist? Me?!?

I can barely believe I get to say this:  my book A Noble Companion is a finalist for this year's Realm Awards!!!  

::cue all the squees::

This little Ugly Duckling retelling was such a challenge to write.  First of all, it's the first time I have been part of a multi-author project.  Second, I really had never written fantasy before, and I struggled with that aspect of the book a lot.  Third, every book in this series focuses on a side character of the fairy tale being retold, not the usual main character, and... there aren't really any other named characters in The Ugly Duckling.  

I'm not a fantasy writer, I'm a historical fiction writer, so I did a lot of praying that God would help my imagination and writing skills grow and change to suit this new project.  And I did find ways to make it truly a fantasy book, but one resting solidly on a foundation of historical research for the setting.  But I never really expected that it could compete against more obvious fantasy books for the Realm Awards, which are for Christian fantasy and sci-fi.  The fact that it made the long list last month felt like a really amazing honor, and I really didn't even hope that it would go farther.  But it did!  It's a finalist now!  Wow.

If you want to see who all the finalists are, you can find the official list here.  If you want to know more about A Noble Companion, check out my page about it.

Announcing the Back to 1985 Blogathon

Sour Patch Kids.  Cherry Coke.  Microsoft Windows.  Pictionary.  Chex Mix.  The year 1985 was a whiz-bang year for launching new products... and new movies.  This summer, my friend and frequent co-conspirator co-host Jim/Quiggy of The Midnite Drive-in and I are celebrating the movies released in1985.  We invite you to join us!

The weekend of June 7 and 8, let's all get in our own imaginary time machines and revisit the cinemascape of forty years ago.  So many amazing and often iconic movies were released that year, and we want you to help us celebrate as many of them as we can.

We do have a few rules:

1. You can write about any movie, TV show, or specific TV episode that was released in the calendar year of 1985. We will make an exception to include films that came out in December of 1984, since they most likely would still be in theaters in 1985, but we draw the line at Dec. 1, 1984. And nothing that was released after Dec. 31, 1985, will be admissible.  Sign up by leaving a comment on this post, or on Quiggy's post.

2. Only new entries please. No fair reposting something you've already written.  Post your review sometime during the blogathon. 

3. Grab one of the banners here and use it in your post to promote the blogathon.  We'd also love it if you added one to your blog beforehand to spread the word!

4. Let one of us know when your post goes live, with a comment on one of our launch posts so we can include it in the official list. 

5. As always, have fun!  It's not necessarily a bad thing to be preoccupied with 1985, after all...

Sign-up List:

+ The Midnite Drive-In: Science Class 1985 (an overview of Weird Science, Real Genius and My Science Project)

+ Hamlette's Soliloquy: Clue and The Young Sherlock Holmes

+ Whimsically Classic: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer

+ Dubsism: Brewster's Millions

+ Taking up Room: Jewel of the Nile

+ RealWeegieMidget Reviews: Letter to Brezhnev

+ Thoughts All Sorts: The Goonies

+ Any Merry Little Thought: Back to the Future

+ Angelman's Place: Private Resort

+ 18 Cinema Lane: The Bride and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

+ You!

My Ten Favorite Val Kilmer Movies

My heart is still heavy over Val Kilmer's death.  I've been rewatching some of my favorites of his movies, and today, I'm sharing the list of my top ten favorites with you.  

1. Tombstone (1993)

A free-wheeling recreation of that one time Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) and his friend Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), plus Wyatt's brothers (Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton), had a showdown with Ike Clanton and his pals, and Tombstone, Arizona never got over it.  This movie is a wildly good time, particularly every scene Val Kilmer is in.  And the score by Bruce Broughton is one of my all-time favorites.

2. Willow (1988)

A small farmer (Warwick Davis) reluctantly teams up with a big braggart (Val Kilmer) to save a baby princess from a wicked queen (Jean Marsh).  Along the way, the braggart falls in love with the queen's daughter (Joanne Whalley) onscreen and off.  It was one of the first fantasy movies I ever saw, and it's still a dear favorite.

3. Spartan (2004)

When the daughter of an important American government official is kidnapped, an impressively capable agent (Val Kilmer) is sent to retrieve her before she's sold into slavery overseas.  It's a tense thriller that makes plain the all-too-real ease with which human trafficking occurs here in the U.S., and the difficulty in rescuing someone from it.  And it's cool seeing Clark Gregg work with Val Kilmer.

4. Real Genius (1985)

A teen genius (Gabe Jarrett) enters a school for the scientifically gifted, where he and his offbeat roommate (Val Kilmer) try to stay sane while also solving a mystery surrounding just what their scientific discoveries and creations are being used for.  My college roommates and I were obsessed with this movie for a while, and we used to wear these funny headbands around campus (even to classes) as a nod to Val Kilmer's character in this movie.

5. Batman Forever (1995)

Bruce Wayne/Batman (Val Kilmer) tries to stop Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and Edward Nygma/The Riddler (Jim Carrey) from taking over Gotham, while also mentoring an orphan (Chris O'Donnell) and romancing a psychiatrist (Nicole Kidman).  Is this movie a dayglo comic book extravaganza?  Yes.  Does it also have a compelling storyline and some really good character development?  Also, yes.  I just rewatched it this week for the first time in a while, and was excited to find I still really love it.

6. The Saint (1997)

Simon Templar (Val Kilmer) is a professional thief who gets involved with Russian spies and a beautiful scientist (Elizabeth Shue) while just trying to do his job: stealing some nuclear macguffin or other.  The real treat here is all the disguises Templar uses, which lets Kilmer transform himself again and again in ridiculously fun ways.

7. Thunderheart (1992)

An FBI agent (Val Kilmer) with Native American heritage is assigned to solve a murder on a Sioux reservation, despite the efforts of others to either cover up the truth or use the crime to pursue their own agendas.  The fact that Val Kilmer had Native heritage himself (he was 1/8 Cherokee) is a total bonus for how perfect he is in this role.  The story is based on true incidents.

8. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

A professional hunter (Michael Douglas) teams up with a British engineer (Val Kilmer) to take down two man-killing lions that have been attacking workers trying to build a bridge in Africa.  It often feels like a throwback to the adventure movies of the '50s and '60s, but with more realistic violence.  Maybe that's because the screenplay is by William Goldman, who wrote The Princess Bride (book and screenplay both), as well as screenplays for movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Maverick (1994).

9. Prince of Egypt (1998)

Animated take on the life of Moses (Val Kilmer), growing up in Pharaoh's household and being tasked by God with leading the Jewish nation out of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land.  Excellent take on the historical account from the Bible, and the songs are really cool, too.

10. Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

An Air Force pilot (Tom Cruise) has to train the wild son (Miles Teller) of his fallen wingman for a dangerous mission.  Val Kilmer gets a small scene as Tom Cruise's former rival and current superior officer, and it's a moving one.

Please note that Tombstone, Spartan, Thunderheart, and The Ghost and the Darkness are all rated R, so you may want to investigate their content levels further before watching them if that is of concern to you.

Good Night, Sweet Prince

We have lost Val Kilmer.  I'm so broken up over this.

Val Kilmer was my first modern Hollywood crush, thanks to Batman Forever (1995).  I was fifteen when that came out, and I fell for him immediately, and then watched both it and Willow (1988) repeatedly throughout my teens, followed by a deep obsession with Tombstone (1993).  Over the years, I have loved so many of Val's movies.  I also really enjoyed his memoir, I'm Your Huckleberry.  

I'll be posting a list of my top ten favorites sometime soon.  For now, I'm just really sad.

"The Avenger" (Bonanza) 1960

I will be blunt: the reason this is my favorite Bonanza episode is because of the guest star.  Vic Morrow is a dear favorite of mine, and I absolutely love getting to watch him play a good guy in a western.  He was in quite a few classic western shows, but almost always playing the heavy, sometimes playing very sinister and nasty baddies indeed -- and I enjoy those in a certain way, but not in the way I enjoy seeing him play a good guy.

I remember watching this episode for the first time in my teens, watching it with my whole family as part of our weekly Friday Night Movie Night family time.  I went in knowing he was the guest star and being pretty sure he was going to be the bad guy because that was how it had gone with all the eps of other westerns I'd seen him in.  You can imagine my delight when he proved to play not a bad guy, but not even an antagonist!  He plays a hero!  Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

A stranger (Vic Morrow) rides into a town that positively drips ominous foreboding.  No people on the streets.  A saloon filled with toughs who are raucously celebrating the completion of a gallows in the middle of town.  Bad stuff is about to happen here.  Bad stuff has already happened here.

And then we discover that the two men in jail who are going to be hanged that night... are Ben and Adam Cartwright (Lorne Greene and Pernell Roberts).  Those yahoos in the saloon are eager to dance and spit all over their graves.  The stranger finds this disturbing, but he's a quiet guy not looking for trouble.  At least, not looking for this particular trouble.

Actually, he's looking for a group of men who lynched his father and killed a lot of other innocent townspeople a few years ago in Lassiter, Kansas.  Because he never shares his name in this episode, folks take to calling him Lassiter after the town he keeps talking about.  

Thanks to his family history, Lassiter is very sensitive to wrongful hangings, even when they're carried out by the law and not by a lynch mob.  He becomes convinced that Ben and Adam are innocent.  Their conviction hinged on the testimony of one scared hired man and one angry young woman -- and the hired man has been murdered, while the young woman is seeking to punish the Cartwrights for her father's death whether they were actually guilty of killing him or not.

Vic Morrow plays Lassiter with exquisite gravitas.  He's calm, steady, soft-spoken, and unflinching in his quest to find his father's killers and bring them to justice.  He doesn't waste a single movement; every flicker of his eyelids, every sideways glance, every raised eyebrow speaks as much as his dialog ever does.  This is a man who will not fail, and the audience knows it.  The people of this town know it.  Even Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright (Dan Blocker and Michael Landon) realize it, and agree to let Lassiter try to save their father and brother first before they start throwing lead at everyone in sight.

Obviously, Ben and Adam don't hang.  Obviously, the guy trying to get them hung is one of the men Lassiter is trying to find.  Obviously, Lassiter's calm logic and insistence on seeing truth and justice served are what save the Cartwrights.  There aren't any huge surprises here... unless you are used to seeing Vic Morrow play baddies in westerns, and discover to your great joy that he is playing a very good guy indeed here.

Honestly, "The Avenger" doesn't really feel like a typical Bonanza episode... because it wasn't.  It was supposed to serve as a pilot for a spin-off series starring Vic Morrow.  Another pilot of sorts was filmed as an episode of the lesser-known show Outlaws, with Morrow playing the same character and tracking down another of his father's murderers.  But the network never picked the show up.  

Part of me is sad about that, because Lassiter is really cool, and I would love to have a whole western show starring Vic Morrow to watch over and over and over.  But part of me is okay with it, because if Vic had made a success in that show, he might have been under contract when they started casting the series Combat! (1962-67) and unable to be in that.  And that would have been horrible, because that is my favorite TV show of all time, and his character, Sergeant Saunders, is my favorite fictional character ever.  So, I just keep enjoying this episode every now and then and don't mourn too much over the series never happening.

You can watch this episode basically anywhere because it's in the public domain.  It's easy to find on streaming platforms, YouTube, DVD, etc.

This has been my contribution to the 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted this weekend by A Shroud of Thoughts.

A Little Kitchen Project

I made a coffee bar in my kitchen!  When my mom started living with us part-time last fall, I bought a Keurig because that makes it really easy for her to get her first cup of coffee even if she wakes up long before me.  But the Keurig and its coffee pod storage took up a lot of space on my counter -- space I couldn't use for anything else anymore.  Not only that, but reaching coffee mugs in the cabinets was tricky for my mom, since she has Parkinson's and that affects her balance and movements.

So, I decided to make a coffee bar to make coffee and mugs more accessible for my mom, and also for any guests.  Now that she lives here part of the time, we get a lot more guests because her friends from near and far like to come out and spend some time with her.  I figure it's nice to not make guests wonder how your coffee maker works, where you keep your coffee grounds, if you have creamer, and so on.  Everyone can figure out a Keurig pretty quickly, especially an ultra-simple one like mine.

Long, long ago, when our first baby was less than a year old, we bought a huge old dry sink at the Salvation Army.  It was a perfect changing table for many years.  Once my kids outgrew diapers, it became a combination extra kitchen storage space below, and a catch-all for my stuff above.  In the past few years, it's transformed into a sort of strategic planning zone where I could keep my bullet journal, stickers, letters that need to be answered, and random things I needed to deal with in the immediate future.

In other words, it had become a giant mess:

I knew it could be ideal as a coffee bar.  It's a little lower than my counters, so my mom can easily reach everything there.  It's not huge, so she should be able to stand in one place and access everything.  It was originally a dry sink, so it's easy to clean and not a stranger to moisture.  All I had to do was clean it all off, rehome everything that I had been storing on top of it, and pick up a few small accessories!

Yeah, it took me about two weeks to do all that.  But, it's finished at last!

I already had the cute sign that says "Coffee and friends make the perfect blend."  I picked up a rubber mat to go under my Keurig and make cleaning up spills easier.  I bought a mug tree online.  I picked up a couple of new mugs at the thrift store so that Mom and guests could have some drinkware choices.  And I used a gift card that I won in a giveaway to buy a cute little mug-shaped basket to hold flavored coffee creamers.  So, now I have a coffee bar!  

I also ordered a mini table-top trash can, but that has been delayed in shipping, so I'll have to change this up a bit once that arrives.  Still, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope it makes mornings easier for my mom when she's staying here and more fun for our future guests.