While I visited my girlfriend in Iowa this weekend, we happened along an advertisement for a screening of \The Princess Bride."" After consoling her (we'd missed the screening by a couple of days), she realized that I hadn't said anything about it.
""Have you seen it?""
""Yeah.""
""... and?""
That's right. I admitted it. I don't like ""The Princess Bride.""
Argue all you want with me about the magical fantasy, or Cary Elwes' ability as a comedic actor, or Andre the Giant as the endearing Fezzik. Point out that director Rob Reiner, who was on a roll that began with ""This is Spinal Tap,"" was at his finest with ""Bride.""
I don't care.
I can easily acknowledge that it was a good, even great film. Very few movies can dance between satirizing a genre and embracing it so effortlessly, and the fact that it is so overwhelmingly considered the modern ""Wizard of Oz"" speaks volumes on just how many of people of our generation have an attachment to it.
I'm just not one of them. What I'm getting at is simple-no matter how many movies you watch and how good you consider your taste to be, the most important part of a film is an intangible connection made when you first see it.
Maybe I was repeatedly interrupted the first time I watched ""Bride."" Maybe the people I saw it with weren't laughing, or weren't in the mood to be watching a film. Or maybe I'm just a heartless bastard for never really caring what happens to Buttercup and Westley.
No matter what the problem was, I have never been able to really bring myself to watch the entire movie again. I get bored, I get irritated and I turn on something else. I don't think I'll ever love that movie as much as other people do. And that's regrettable.
Then again, I also have a serious love for some very, very sub-par films simply because of who I was with when I first saw them. ""Little Nicky"" and ""BASEketball"" certainly fit the bill. I'm almost positive that if I had seen either film on my own, I would have walked out of the theater. Instead, they've become a source of bad jokes-my friends and I take the ill-conceived punchlines and treat them like comedic gold. It works because it's so bad that you have to laugh or you'd probably cry.
So the next time you and some friends gather to watch your favorite movie, make sure you know who hasn't seen it yet. If there are some first-timers with you, keep in mind how great the movie was the first time you saw it-and respectfully give them the chance to enjoy it too.
William Temby is a junior majoring in the radio/television/film discipline of communication arts. He can be reached at wwtemby@wisc.edu.
