What I'm Reading: AS YOU WISH

Like many people out there, I'd read and loved The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. Its subtitle says it's "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure,"which is the framing device Goldman used to make his novel that much more off-kilter.

The story Goldman told, with the beautiful Princess Buttercup and her dashing Man in Black swashbuckling their way through a fire swamp, pirates, giants, swordsmen, evildoers and Rodents of Unusual Size, was hard to define -- Was it children's adventure? Satire? Fantasy? Romance? -- but it found an audience with the right slightly snarky frame of mind to embrace it. But that was as far as it went for a long time. The Princess Bride script became famous as, year after year, it landed on lists of the best undeveloped properties in Hollywood.

I remember discussing it with the friend who gave me a copy of The Princess Bride. My half of the conversation was something like, "I love this book. I love this book. I want a movie! How can it not get picked up?" But there it sat, until Rob Reiner decided he wanted to direct a movie of The Princess Bride. With all the challenges inherent in the material, it got made and released in 1987. And it was beautiful.

The Princess Bride, the movie, did OK at the box office, nothing major. But after it came and went in movie theaters, The Princess Bride came back to life, not unlike Westley in the hands of Miracle Max. Suddenly it had cult status. It was revived in film festivals, it made lists of the best movies ever, and fans held conventions where they could dress up as their favorite characters and run around telling people, "Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!"

Cary Elwes has a unique perspective on The Princess Bride. He was immersed in it. A young actor with only a few credits when he was cast as Westley, the boy who is smitten with Princess Buttercup and will strive to do whatever she asks, he approached it with awe and excitement, as well as a sense of joy, that he got to work on this particular film with these particular people. As he says in As You Wish, the book he's written about his behind-the-scenes (actually inside-the-scenes) experience, "I think we all knew knew we were part of something special. Did we think the movie would become an enduring pop-culture phenomenon? Of course not. But did we feel involved in something truly unique? Definitely. For myself I just felt enormously grateful to be there. To be involved in a project with so many gifted people, not to mention getting to be in a film written by the legendary William Goldman an directed by the remarkable Rob Reiner. Life is good, I thought."

Elwes talks at length about how much he enjoyed each of his colleagues, coming back to his appreciation for Reiner again and again, with lovely stories about Reiner and Goldman as well Andre the Giant, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Carol Kane, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Fred Savage, Wallace Shawn, Robin Wright, and the experts who taught them fencing as well as a diminutive stuntman who played a Rodent of Unusual Size. Quotes from most of them are scattered throughout the book.

Elwes' tone is congenial and charming throughout, even when things get sticky, like his experience sitting immobile and covered in plaster of Paris with straws up his nose to get a mold for his pirate mask, the laborious process of learning to fence like an expert for the Greatest Swordfight in Modern History, or having to rescue his leading lady after she's been set on fire and dropped into a pit of quicksand. Elwes himself comes off just as "fearless and elegant, romantic and brave" as the character he's playing. Well done, Cary.

As You Wish takes the reader past the filming of The Princess Bride into its initial lukewarm reception at the box office and through its rebirth, all the way to the 25th reunion of the cast when it was screened at Lincoln Center, with love flowing from the crowd of fans shouting along to all the lines. It's the happy ending you wish for all for favorites, and not unlike the ending in the movie.

As You Wish is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, and there is still just enough time to get it for Christmas for The Princess Bride lovers on your list.

Oscar's Best Pics: "Moneyball"

On paper, "Moneyball" ought to be perfect for my household. We love baseball, we love baseball movies, and my husband is a computer programmer who loves statistics and was on-board with Bill James and SABR ages ago. I think he even wrote for some of SABR's publications back in the early 80s. SABR, by the way, is the Society for American Baseball Research, and it provides the SAB and R in "Sabermetrics," which is all about using statistics and empirical evidence to analyze baseball players to figure out who has helped and can help your team win.

It's what Jonah Hill's fictional character Peter Brand brings to the table in "Moneyball," opening the eyes of a desperate Billy Beane, GM of the then-hapless Oakland Athletics, helping the team rise from the cellar of the American League West.

Billy Beane is real. Peter Brand is not. Most of the other characters in "Moneyball" are real, even though in various cases, they're Hollywoodized, prettied up, made more conflicted or drawn in sharper lines to create drama. Obviously, that process worked for somebody, as the film has done very well and earned not only a Best Picture nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but a Best Actor nomination for Brad Pitt, playing Billy Beane, and a Best Supporting Actor nod for Jonah Hill as his schlubby numbers guy.

Frankly, I'm mystified as to what all those Oscar (and AFI, BAFTA, Golden Globes, SAG and various guilds and critics groups) voters are seeing. "Moneyball" is okay. Brad Pitt is okay. Jonah Hill is okay.

But what should be an exciting story about how technology changed baseball, how the people who ran a very old and traditional game came to accept something new and different, instead feels soft and sluggish. Brad Pitt is playing the same world-weary, down-on-his-luck, sad sack you've seen a million times in better movies, from better actors. He coulda been somebody. A contender. He screwed it up with his ex-wife. He has a cute kid. He wants to do better, to show he's not just a nobody, a loser.

Yeah, well, that line forms behind Terry Malloy, Roy Hobbs, Rocky (Balboa), Rocky (Graziano), Jake LaMotta, Bull Durham, Jim Piersall, all those Angels in the Outfield, and that guy in "Field of Dreams."

The real Billy Beane is a perfectly nice looking guy, if not a Golden Boy like Brad Pitt. But he also has intelligence, intensity, energy... None of which holds true for Brad Pitt's Billy Beane, who mostly plays like... Brad Pitt. He's sweet. He looks a little scruffy, I'm guessing so that we can see that his Billy Beane is down on his luck. In general, he acts kind of hang-dog and depressed. We mostly see him driving around, staring into space or kicking furniture (to ramp up a little intensity, I suppose.) If you're thinking I found this Billy Beane less than compelling, you would be right.

As his sidekick, Jonah Hill is amusing. Slightly. But no more than that. His real-life counterpart, Paul DePodesta, is better looking than Hill, in a weird Hollywood reversal. But DePodesta supposedly didn't care for the way he was represented in the first drafts of the "Moneyball" screenplay, so he opted out, and they created "Peter Brand," an amalgam of several different people, instead. Hill does well personifying a nerdy computer guy stereotype and looking befuddled when called upon to talk at scout meetings where they discuss players' potential. And he and Pitt create a nice buddy chemistry.

But it's all so dull... So soft-focus... So slow...

I liked the scenes with the scouts, who I think must be real-life scouts drafted to act as themselves in the film. They seemed gruff and hard-boiled enough to be the real thing, plus they offer a nice contrast to pudgy sweetpea Peter Brand and world-weary Brad Pitt-Beane. (I have a hard time calling the character Billy Beane, since there is a real Billy Beane who is so little like this one.)

And Chris Pratt, who is so good as a doofus on "Parks and Recreation," does fine as Scott Hatteburg, a player only a Sabermetrics guy could love. They even did a decent job intercutting footage of the real Hatteburg with Pratt at the plate.

But the talents of Robin Wright, who plays Beane's ex-wife, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as a very fictionalized version of Athletics' coach Art Howe, and especially Tammy Blanchard, as the mostly invisible wife of a player, are wasted. And Spike Jonze, the director, seems truly bizarre as Beane's ex's flaky new husband.

"Moneyball" strikes me as a movie with no there there. It's all mood and no content, all hunches and no statistics, and it runs at 2 hours and 13 minutes, which is about 40 minutes too long to establish Beane the character and show us how he turned around the A's against the opposition of baseball's entrenched money men.

In case you're wondering, the Sabermetrician in the house also votes thumbs down. He thinks the numbers are far more interesting.