The book, unlike the movie it describes, struggles at times to balance a tone of charming over cheesy. But Elwes’ case—that...
With the assistance of Layden (The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death, and Redemption, 2013, etc.), Elwes shares tales of the making of the 1987 film The Princess Bride, in which he starred in the role of Westley.
By the time Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andy Scheinman decided to make a film version of William Goldman’s book, Goldman’s screenplay adaptation had become legendary in Hollywood as an unproduced script. Robert Redford, Norman Jewison and even Francois Truffaut had all tried and failed to get the movie past development stages. Elwes gives a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie and theorizes on how an infamously unproducible script became a cult classic. The book is driven by the author’s thoughts and memories but is complemented by rich quotes featured in pop-out text boxes from Reiner, Scheinman, Goldman and other stars of the film, including Christopher Guest, Robin Wright and Billy Crystal. Elwes’ description of how Reiner’s simple stage directions helped achieve his tongue-in-check vision, or Scheinman’s thoughts on how today’s special effects may have overwhelmed and ruined the gently satirical tone of the movie, are interesting from a broad cinematic perspective. But the book is intended less for film aficionados than simply for lovers of this specific movie. As a rookie star in his first big production, Elwes often felt “like a kid at theater camp who has been suddenly plucked from the ranks of the ordinary and tossed onto a Broadway stage,” and while his observations ooze with positivity, they come across as genuine.
The book, unlike the movie it describes, struggles at times to balance a tone of charming over cheesy. But Elwes’ case—that the film has endured because it was made with a lot of heart—is made persuasively enough that readers will entertain the sentiment even if they aren’t totally convinced by it.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476764023
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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