When it came time for the movie's release, no one had any idea of how to sell it. Was it a fairy tale? Was it a swashbuckling adventure? Was it a love story? Or was it just a nutty satire? The fact is it was, and is, all of the above. Not easy to capture in a two-minute preview trailer or a thirty-second TV ad.#6290•
Introduction
Instead of a bouncy techno-pop sound track, you have the elegant slide guitar of Mark Knopfler; instead of big hair and shoulder pads, you have the period style of a swashbuckler and a princess. Perhaps the only thing that serves as a time stamp is Fred Savage's video game at the very start of the movie (which, by the way, is where the film gets its first laugh).
It is, of course, a movie within a movie.
A story within a story, much like the book itself.
Even in the scenes between Peter Falk and Fred Savage, a grandfather reading to his bedridden sick grandson, there is a timeless grace and elegance to the filmmaking.#6291•
The fact is, it was all of those things and more. But Hollywood abhors that which is not easily categorized, and so the film didn't quite gain the kind of traction it might have deserved#6289•