Modern day fairy tale

It's very strange, but just about every film review I've ever read gets details about the movie wrong. I'm not just talking about matter of interpretation--I'm talking about easily-verifiable facts that anyone with a half-way decent memory ought to get right to begin with.

It's not even that I have such a superior memory in comparison to the Eberts of the world. Rather, I think that if you 'get' a film, it's easy to remember things about the film--there tends to be an interior logic to things, especially if the film is well-crafted. And even for bad films, things tend to be bad the same way, so wrong details in reviews still jump out.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up Roger Ebert's review of a film I just watched for the first time, The Princess Bride. Which, incidentally, I liked--it's a good mix of sweetness and silliness, with lotsof quotable lines. I don't think it's an astonishing film; perhaps if I'd seen it aged 10 I'd have been bowled over. But I doubt it; it's too self-referential and clever, actually, to really be deemed astonishing.

Anyway, Ebert's eight-paragraph review gets scads of things wrong:

""The Princess Bride" begins as a story that a grandfather is reading out of a book. But already the movie has a spin on it, because the grandfather is played by Peter Falk, and in the distinctive quality of his voice we detect a certain edge. His voice seems to contain a measure of cynicism about fairy stories, a certain awareness that there are a lot more things on heaven and Earth than have been dreamed of by the Brothers Grimm."
-I think this is wrong; the grandfather isn't cynical at all, it's his grandkid who is. The grandfather has a certain roughness to him, but it's feigned and instead conveys great affection.

"The story he tells is about Buttercup, a beautiful princess (Robin Wright) who scornfully orders around a farm boy (Cary Elwes) until the day when she realizes, thunderstruck, that she loves him. She wants to live happily ever after with him, but then evil forces intervene, and she is kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands, while he is killed."
-I don't find her tone scornful at the beginning, it's more indolent or this faux high-handedness, like she's practicing being nobleborn. He's not really a farm boy--there's really no such thing, that's just what she calls him (it'd be like saying Chewbacca is a 'fuzzball' since Han Solo refers to him that way); he's more like farm hand. She's not really thunderstruck when she discovers she loves him, it's not such a huge gap to overcome, they've constantly been around each other growing up. Her wanting to live happily ever after isn't interrupted by evil forces and she isn't kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands--he goes away to make his fortune so they can afford to get married, she stays on the farm, then she hears he's been killed by pirates, and then she's selected to be princess and goes willingly because she thinks he's dead and has given up. After that, she's kidnapped, but the stuff in between is pretty key.

"Is this story going to have a lot of kissing in it?" Falk's grandson asks. Well, it's definitely going to have a lot of Screaming Eels.
-Well, there are two screaming eels in one one-minute scene, so that's not really a lot.

"The moment the princess is taken away by agents of the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), "The Princess Bride" reveals itself as a sly parody of sword and sorcery movies, a film that somehow manages to exist on two levels at once: While younger viewers will sit spellbound at the thrilling events on the screen, adults, I think, will be laughing a lot. In its own peculiar way, "The Princess Bride" resembles "This Is Spinal Tap," an earlier film by the same director, Rob Reiner. Both films are funny not only because they contain comedy, but because Reiner does justice to the underlying form of his story. "Spinal Tap" looked and felt like a rock documentary - and then it was funny. "The Princess Bride" looks and feels like "Legend" or any of those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies - and then it goes for the laughs."
-This is kindof true, but not particularly apt, I feel like there's too much sweetness and purposeful fantasy in PB to be compared to Spinal Tap.

"Part of the secret is that Reiner never stays with the same laugh very long. There are a lot of people for his characters to meet as they make their long journey, and most of them are completely off the wall."
-This is partly true, but one of the noted things about the PB is the same lines do come up again and again, to the point that one of the characters in the movies comments upon it at the end.

"There is, for example, a band of three brigands led by Wallace Shawn as a scheming little conniver and including Andre the Giant as Fezzik the Giant, a crusher who may not necessarily have a heart of gold. It is Shawn who tosses the princess to the Screaming Eels, with great relish."
-This is totally wrong--the princess jumps into the water to get away from the 'brigands,', the whole point is Shawn wants her to die on the border--not in some dark sea--so that he can start a war between two kingdoms. Andre the Giant at all times illustrates he does have a heart of gold, and ironically it's him who saves her from the eels, so that's made up too by Ebert or at least very clumsily written.

"Another funny episode involves Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, a heroic swordsman with a secret. And the funniest sequence in the film stars Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, both unrecognizable behind makeup, as an ancient wizard and crone who specialize in bringing the dead back to life. (I hope I'm not giving anything away; you didn't expect the princess's loved one to stay dead indefinitely, did you?)"
--Montoya has a secret to the extent he reveals it early in the film as soon as he gets a chance to talk a little--it's not something he even tries to keep secret, if anything he insists on broadcasting it. And his character is not defined as heroic--he's driven by a desire for revenge, while heroes generally are more selfless. The Crystal sequence is no way the funniest--and he (let alone they) doesn't specialize in bringing the dead back to life, it's miracles he specializes in. Ebert makes it seem that the princesses' beloved stays dead from when he's 'killed' by pirates until Crystal shows up, but that's not true either. And Crystal isn't unrecognizable behind makeup, his voice is the most distinctive thing about him and comes through loud and clear.

""The Princess Bride" was adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, which he says was inspired by a book he read as a child, but which seems to have been cheerfully transformed by his wicked adult imagination. It is filled with good-hearted fun, with performances by actors who seem to be smacking their lips and by a certain true innocence that survives all of Reiner's satire. And, also, it does have kissing in it."
-I mean, given that Ebert gets things wrong that I saw with my own eyes, who knows if these additional 'facts' are properly copied from the film's press packet or not....

I actually generally like Ebert as a reviewer because he watches interesting movies, and he doesn't get details wrong any more than any other reviewer. And in the grand scheme of things, it's not such a big deal that film reviewers make mistakes.

It's just odd--and it does make me wonder when I read things other journalists write about things that are not as easily independently verifiable.

Are we living in an age when most people, even those supposedly masters of their craft, lack the ability to closely-read/watch/listen?

Princess Bride production still of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn from Yahoo Australia movie page.