How do I love this movie? Let me count the ways. The story-within-a-story with the grandfather reading the book to his grandson ("Is this a kissing book?"), "As you wish," the fire swamp with the Rodents Of Unusual Size ("R.O.U.S.'s? I don't think they exist"), the battle of wits between Vizzini and the Man in Black ("Never go up against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line!"), "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," Andre the Giant as Fezzik ("Anybody want a peanut?"), the bishop who marries Buttercup and Humperdinck ("Mawidge is wot bwings us togevvor today," Miracle Max ("You see, he's only mostly dead")...okay, okay, the entire movie is terrific as far as I'm concerned! But there's more to my love for this movie, and I can't explain it simply through quotations and a plot summary. I have to look back into my childhood for you to understand why it stays with me to this day.

I want you to come with me back to 1988, when I was six years old and extremely impressionable. I want you to imagine a cold Wisconsin Saturday night in late fall, when the sun goes down about 6 p.m. and you awaken the next morning to find everything covered with a thin glaze of sugary crystalline frost. This evening my parents rented a video for our new VCR. I know they had seen it before, since I remember them talking about it beforehand, and they told me I could stay up and watch it with them. I remember jumping around the house laughing and grinning because I was so thrilled to be staying up late (until 9 p.m.) to sit on the couch with my parents and eat popcorn and watch a movie I'd wanted to see ever since they told me about it.

That movie was "The Princess Bride," and I watched it with the open-mouthed wonder that only a six-year-old can muster. I was completely in awe of its exciting swordfights, its cast of courageous characters and terrifying monsters, the sweet love story at its center. I told my parents how much I loved it, and when Christmas came there was a copy of it under the tree. I watched it a few more times and then set it aside, to forget the specifics and remember only that it was good.

A few years passed, and one summer evening as I sat at home I found "The Princess Bride" again, at the bottom of the stack of videos next to our record player. I watched it again in our darkened living room, curled up in the brown recliner, and laughed and cried and remembered its beauty all over again. As I rewound the video, my only thought was, I have to tell someone about this movie.

"Someone" turned out to be my best friend Katie. The next time she came to my house we watched it, and seeing her reaction was even more fun than the movie. Together we reenacted all the best scenes, traded all the best lines, watched it over and over and never got sick of it.

The next summer Katie's older sister Sarah babysat my sister Angie and I, and Katie came along much of the time. The four of us must have watched "The Princess Bride" every day that summer, to Katie's and my delight and Angie's terror. (The movie was a little too intense for her, and she maintained a lingering fear of it until recently, when she saw it again and learned to love it as much as I do.) The video box got crushed, the tape got worn and the picture wobbly, but we kept on watching. We watched it until we could recite the entire movie by heart, line for line, word for word. (And I still can!)

After that summer we found other things to do and didn't watch "The Princess Bride" quite so often. Soon my sister and I didn't need a babysitter anymore. Katie and I moved on to middle school and then high school. I'd still watch it once or twice a year, whenever I needed a quick pick-me-up. Even then, I found things wrong with it. Wait a minute--didn't he open that book once already, before the camera angle changed? How could Fezzik and Inigo know so much about the Man in Black? This movie isn't as good as I remember.

Those days are gone now. I have college and a summer job and a career and a future to think about. I don't have time to watch the same movie every day. When I go to the movies I find myself ripping them to shreds, picking nits, never satisfied to simply sit back and be entertained. I can't shut off the part of my brain that says, "Go no further. Gaping plot hole. Clunky dialogue. Continuity problems." I think I've seen it all--nothing surprises or amazes me anymore. Sometimes I look back and wonder what happened to that little girl, the one who skipped and jumped around the house for the sheer joy of movies, unable to sit still or to keep her excitement inside.

So it's at times like that when I set aside an hour and a half of my time and go into my basement with tortilla chips and salsa and a Cherry Coke to watch "The Princess Bride" again, to mouth all of the dialogue along with the actors and laugh again at the same jokes I've laughed at for more than ten years. For awhile I can be six years old again and seeing it for the first time with my mouth hanging open, or ten and laughing myself silly at the "mawidge" speech with my best friend for the fifth time that day. When I'm done, I always feel as though I have regained the capacity to enjoy a movie for its own sake, that my sense of wonder is safe and intact.

And to those people who disagree with me, who weren't able to like this movie, who perhaps saw it too late in life and can't get over its imperfections and its sentimentality, I leave you with the grandfather's words to his grandson, which for me have come entirely true. "Who knows, maybe one day you won't mind it so much."

(c) 2000 by Beth Kinderman. This is my original work, so please respect it.