I’m jealous of anyone who hasn’t yet seen The Princess Bride. Some movies turn life up to 11

2 months ago 14

Opinion

December 19, 2025 — 11.00am

On a 1987 Sunday night at the Valhalla in Richmond, I first saw This Is Spinal Tap. For 82 perfect minutes, my BFF Pies and I laughed until we pretty much wet our stirrup pants.

Rob Reiner’s masterpiece – best mockumentary ever, best rock movie ever and it’s not even about a real band – was wrongtown. Smell The Glove, the tiny Stonehenge, “Hello Cleveland!”

Harry Shearer, left, Christopher Guest, centre, and Michael McKean portray members of the spoof British band Spinal Tap, created for Rob Reiner’s cult favourite 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.”

A la Nigel Tufnel, Reiner turned parody up to 11. It felt like shorthand for life at the time. I was 20, living out of home in the inner-city, high on self belief, making fun from nothing. Spinal Tap met me there.

So when the awful news broke that Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner had been killed, I felt sucker-punched and so sad. Beyond the legal process now unfolding, the human horror of it is unbearable. A family story curdling so completely.

Reiner’s death is also a jolt because his films have been more than coming-of-age stories, courtroom dramas, psychological thrillers. They’ve been emotional pegs hammered into different eras of my life.

I saw When Harry Met Sally at 23, in love with someone I madly hoped loved me back. I was figuring out if men and women can be friends (emphatic yes), if timing matters more than compatibility, if love is something you fall into or choose.

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan appear in the end credits of “When Harry Met Sally”.

The talking, the arguing, the stubbornness all felt recognisable. And Billy Crystal’s line about “when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible” wrapped up yearning and inevitability.

Gave me permission to stop overthinking and trust the feeling of when you know, you know.

A Few Good Men passed me by – pregnant, I was living in a different reality. Misery was terrifying because it tapped into something primal about vulnerability. But The Princess Bride became something else.

I found it at the local video shop when my daughter was about five and getting over a tonsillectomy. To this day, I’m jealous of anyone who hasn’t seen it and still has that experience ahead.

Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride.

True love, exploding swamp rats, revenge, a feisty heroine, Mandy Patinkin swashing his buckle, a six-fingered villain (yes, Tap’s Christopher Guest). We watched it a dozen times in as many days.

The boys got sucked in too. The whole family sometimes still intones, “I am the Dread Pirate Roberts, there will be no survivors” a la Andre the Giant, just because it’s a thick vein of nostalgia that links us all.

In 2023, an orchestra performed The Princess Bride score live to the film at the Plenary Theatre at South Wharf. When Cary Elwes, aka glorious non-soppy hero Westley, bounded on stage after the film, Sadie and I both teared up.

It was physical recognition that this ridiculous, fabulous film had been ours for so long. It took me back to early motherhood, to a life that balanced adventure and challenges like the movie. I hope it took my girl back to a safe, happy childhood where love lasts.

One winter afternoon this year, Pies and I saw Spinal Tap II in an Adelaide cinema. We were the only people in the joint. We wore glasses to see the giant screen, nursed water bottles, debated getting ice cream on the way home and laughed our arses off.

The symmetry – same friend, same franchise, four decades later – felt like grace. We weren’t kids anymore, trolleyed on Jim Beam and independence. But sitting in that cinema, we were also still those kids.

Reiner understood that. How we carry all our previous selves around.

At 19, he gave me faking it ’til you make it. At 24, he gave language to the mess of modern love (and faking it again, in a different way.) In my thirties, The Princess Bride became a touchstone for belief.

And in midlife, Reiner’s last movie reminded me true friendship survives all else. He made movies that marked a time and place, that we could return to and find new meaning in.

That’s the mark of something real. Thank you, Rob Reiner. Sleep tight.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.