Need a Space Western? Try "Defiance"

I have subjected myself to so many mainstream pandering, emphatically mediocre science fiction series lately, it is a tremendous relief to find one like Syfy's new show "Defiance," that is classic geek bait. Here we have a show with not just one or two very human-looking aliens, but at least half a dozen species of them living alongside humans, ranging from the albino-looking Castithan race, to a big guy who looks like an orangutan. And we don't just have a standard post-apocalyptic future, but a future where the entire planet Earth has been terraformed by alien colonists so that Antarctica is now rumored to be a tropical paradise, and a couple of major wars between the humans and the aliens have made a lasting impact.

The action centers in and around the city of Defiance, formerly St. Louis. It's known as a place where human beings and many of the newly arrived alien races decided to stop fighting and live side by side, banding together against the myriad threats posed by the rest of the world. Theirs is a frontier-like existence, and the whole series definitely has a lot of Western vibes. The pilot episode is all about how newcomers to Defiance, former soldier Joshua Nolan (Grant Bowler) and his adopted alien daughter Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas), end up becoming the new sheriff and deputy, after a raucous adventure that involves a hand-to-hand fighting match, getting involved in a family feud, solving a murder, a visit to the local bordello, and turning back an invading army of machine warriors called the Volge.

What I have always loved about science-fiction shows like this is the characters. "Defiance" has a lot of the types that you'd expect. There's the inexperienced mayor Amanda (Julie Benz), steadfast deputy Tommy (Deshane Williams), the sultry bordello and bar proprietress Kenya (Mia Kirshner), no-nonsense Doc Yewll (Treanna Keating), and a pair of feuding families, the McCawleys and the Tarrs, with offspring that turn out to be lovebirds, of course. But when you've got characters like Datak Tarr (Tony Curran) and his wife Stahma (Jaime Murray) under a couple of layers of makeup, you can buy them acting broader, and larger than life than if they were human characters. The Tarrs are the show's mob family, clearly devoted to each other and their son Alak (Jesse Rath), but they handle a lot of unsavory business, and have the temperament to match. Datak Tarr in particular gets to chew a lot of scenery. This makes them a lot more fun to watch than the human McCawley family, comprised of father Rafe (Graham Greene), son Quentin (Justin Rain), and daughter Christie (Nicole Muñoz).

I was surprised at just how much "Defiance" gets done in its two-hour premiere. There's a lot of backstory missing - we don't yet know where the aliens came from or why - but the show's creators do a great job of establishing a very weird and interesting status quo. It was very encouraging to note that one of those creators is Rockne S. O'Bannon, who also worked on the similar "Farscape" series. I don't think that "Defiance" is as visually distinct as "Farscape," but it's definitely aiming high. You've got several major alien characters in complicated makeup, a setting that may as well be on another planet, and loads of special effects for everything from the vehicles and weapons to the drinks at the bar. This isn't anything that we haven't seen before in science-fiction television, and it's certainly not pushing any new boundaries, but the execution is so good, I'm already invested in the show. I got a real kick out of how fast it managed to set up all these different relationships and conflicts while hinting at many more to come.

There are some elements that I think could use some work. One character who didn't come off very well is Irisa, who is a familiar sulking teenager for most of the pilot, and doesn't say much. Even though we know from the start that Irisa considers Nolan her father, it takes longer than it should to work out how they function together. Hopefully she'll open up a bit more in the coming weeks - she's already got a potential love interest lined up. Also, I'd really appreciate a little more worldbuilding information like timelines and better introductions to the different races to start getting a clearer picture of how the "Defiance" world operates. There's something to be said for being thrown into the deep end like this, but only if the show is able to follow through on its ideas.

I have a really good feeling about this one though, for the simple reason that "Defiance" has so much action and humor and cheeseball fun. This is the first new show in a while that feels like the lighter, weirder, more adventurous science fiction I always liked best.
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"A Beautiful Day" Years in the Making

Remember "Rejected"? Don Hertzfeld's surreally violent cartoon was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short back in the year 2000, and has become an influential cult favorite. It's striking not just for its inventive visuals and unusual level of blood and guts (inflicted primarily on minimalist pen doodles), but its particular existential and philosophical bent. In "Rejected," the discarding of the animator's rejected drawings is depicted as a horrific apocalypse, dooming his terrified creations to an unspeakable void.

This level of cheerful nihilism was only possible because Hertzfeld is one of those rare independent filmmakers working in animation who is essentially a one-man studio. By doing nearly everything himself, he retains a high degree of creative control, which ensures his work retains his mature, challenging voice and point of view I encountered more of his darkly funny shorts over the years, like "Billy's Balloon," where balloons become sentient and turn on their owners, and "The Meaning of Life," which charts a twisted version of human history. Then in 2006, he produced something quite different.

"Everything Will be OK" is the seventeen-minute story of a man named Bill, depicted as a stick figure wearing a little rectangle of a hat, who is losing his mind. Bill is meant to be a real world person, though a highly abstracted version of one, who goes to work every day, keeps in contact with an ex-girlfriend, and has relatives who worry about him. He watches a lot of TV and likes ice cream sandwiches. At first his journey involves a series of absurd little episodes and funny observations on daily life - an everyday conversation gone awry because neither participants remember who the other person is, inappropriate fantasies, and the boredom and emptiness of the daily routine. But then Bill starts forgetting more and more, and his condition goes from annoying to frightening, and it becomes clear that something is very wrong with Bill.

"Everything Will be OK" was followed by two other Bill shorts, "I Am So Proud of You" and "It's Such a Beautiful Day," completed in 2008 and 2011 respectively. Last year, Hertzfeld edited all three shorts together into a feature film, running a little over an hour in length, also titled "It's Such a Beautiful Day." The latter installments delve deeper into mental illness, dysfunctional families, and finally the very nature of life and death and human existence. Though it retains the same sense of humor and penchant for the gruesome as Hertzfeld's shorts, the approach is much more serious and even-handed, to reflect the more ambitious material. The result is such a weird and wonderful film, incredibly personal and very touching. What makes it all the more astonishing is that despite the occasional use of live-action film elements and some special effects, "It's Such a Beautiful Day" is primarily comprised of simple stick figure drawings and Hertzfeld's narration.

Yet the animation is so evocative, and the storytelling with these simple tools is so strong and so compelling. It's easy to relate to Bill, who comes off as a real, sympathetic person suffering from some terrible unnamed mental ailment, constantly questioning the nature of his existence. Because he has no defining visuals characteristics beyond his hat, he is instantly a universal figure, and you automatically feel for him as he struggles against delusions and disorientation. The hand-drawn animation also allows a closer degree of shared experience with Bill's tenuous state of mind, visualizing it in ways that live action film and other, more complicated kinds of animation would be unable to match. And you realize how little it takes - a few simple ink lines on paper, really - to evoke such powerful reactions.

Their's something tremendously heartening about the existence of a film like "It's Such a Beautiful Day." Theatrical and-drawn animation is supposed to be dead in the U.S., economically unfeasible and out of fashion (Disney Animation announced a new round of layoffs last week). And yet here's Don Hertzfeld, toiling away with his doodles and stick-figures, who has created a film of real emotional depth and insight on the human experience, and has managed to support himself through his work. Hertzfeld self-distributed "It's Such a Beautiful Day," currently offering it for $2 online downloads through Veoh and other platforms.

I've always been a big fan of animation, but over the last few years I've found the output of the big studios creatively wanting. Sure, last year's "Wreck-It -Ralph" and "Madagascar 3" were a lot of fun, and you can't deny the creators of "Brave" and "Paranorman" had some serious artistic chops. However, when it comes to advancing the art of animation, "It's Such a Beautiful Day" leaves them all behind in the dust. This is the first animated film in years I can justify saving a spot for on my annual "Best of" list.
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"Unico" and Childhood Movie Trauma

When we're very small, all movies are darker and more frightening than they are intended to be. Even if a character is only a year or two older than you are, that difference feels huge. Threats linger longer, and danger feels more real. It's rough to be a little kid, when emotions aren't tempered, and often feel out of our control. I think that's why the movies and television that we see at that age tends to hit a bit harder, why we experience them more strongly, and fixate on them.

On the internet, you often find people popping up in movie forums or message boards trying to identify something that they saw as a kid, that stayed with them over the years. I've gone through this myself a few times, trying to connect vivid recollections of old cartoons and B-movies, like "Prisoners of the Lost Universe," "The Adventures of Mark Twain," and "Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome" with their correct titles. And when I went back to watch them, they were barely anything like I remembered, usually much lighter and sillier and fake-looking. I have some positively horrific memories of the two "Care Bears" movies, which upon later review as an adult, turned out to be embarrassingly benign.

So it's a rare treat to find one of those half-remembered old movies that really is a scary and strange and weird as the child you thought it was. Thanks to the internet in the late 90s I figured out that an old anime movie I'd been especially fascinated with as a kid was "Unico in the Island of Magic," which had been dubbed in English the early 80s, released on home video and played a few times on the Disney Channel before it promptly disappeared. Surviving video cassettes were sold for ridiculous prices on Ebay. It wasn't until I was in college many years later that I worked out how to acquire a secondhand copy. An official Region 1 version was finally released last year by an indie distributor.

After the "Care Bears," I was expecting "Unico" to be just another piece of cheap kiddie pabulum, but it wasn't. Oh, the film was certainly made for consumption by children, including comic characters with exaggerated toon-y designs, and a main character, Unico the baby unicorn, who is cuteness personified. Unico was created by Osamu Tezuka, best known for "Astro Boy," and the idea is that Unico's magic powers and goodness have troubled the gods of his world, so he has to hide from them on Earth. The friendly West Wind takes him from place to place, where he has various adventures, beating back evil where he finds it.

If "Island of Magic" is any indication, Unico's world is a very dark place. Like Astro Boy, Unico is very simple and innocent, but the threats he faces are anything but. Shortly after the West Wind drops him off this time, Unico is adopted by a little girl named Cheri as a pet. She takes him home to meet her parents, right before they're paid a visit by Cheri's estranged older brother Toby, who ran away some years ago to become the apprentice of an evil wizard. This wizard is Lord Kuruku, who discovers Toby with his family, and promptly turns them into "living puppets," identical human-shaped blocks. Toby helps Cheri and Unico escape, but has to turn all the rest of the people in his village into more living puppets. Then Kuruku takes them all back to his island, where he's building an ever-growing nightmare castle, using the transformed people as building blocks.

And that's not the most disturbing part of it. I haven't even gotten to Lord Kuruku himself, who is this floating, ever-shifting paranormal creature, able to change himself into a variety of geometrical shapes and colors, always with a pair of mad, bulging eyes. The American dub of "Island of Magic" is clumsy stuff, as most dubs were in the 80s, but the voice they created for Lord Kuruku is this electronically enhanced, barely human sounding thing, full of screeches and warbles and distorted sounds. Upon rewatch, it was actually creepier than I remembered. I've found that most people who recall seeing the movie as kids, like I did, remember it chiefly for Lord Kuruku and the living puppets.

"Unico and the Island of Magic" is actually quite a hidden gem. It was the second of a pair of "Unico" movies produced by Sanrio, back when they were trying to make a name for themselves in anime production. The animation is surprisingly good, especially the effects work for Lord Kuruku and a finale that involves a lot of large-scale destruction. Still, I don't think the movie would have had quite the effect on me that it did as a grown-up if I hadn't seen it first as a child, and I didn't have those memories of being freaked out by the scary, screaming puppet man.

Seriously, what demented, twisted mind came up with this guy?
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My Favorite Zhang Yimou Film

Imagine if there was pressure from the American government to avoid negative portrayals of the Vietnam War on film. Imagine if because of that pressure, directors would be denounced and penalized, and their most important films subject to censorship or outright bans. Now imagine the American film landscape without "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Born on the Fourth of July."

That's why out of all of Zhang Yimou's films, "To Live" strikes me as the most vital and important. It was one of small wave of films that came out of China in the 1990s, along with "Farewell My Concubine" and "Blue Kite," that directly addressed the negative consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, major attempts by the Maoist government to impose Communism on the Chinese people, affecting millions. Government pressure had previously stymied any attempts to examine these events in any depth. So when these newly critical films emerged, the government banned and un-banned them, vocally denouncing their content even as they racked up festival awards around the globe.

Zhang Yimou probably had the least to worry about. By 1994 he was the most prominent and successful Chinese filmmaker in the West, after a dizzying run of films including "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern" that had received unprecedented global recognition. "To Live" was his fifth collaboration with leading lady Gong Li, and contained all the elements that Zhang was famous for - bold visuals, picturesque locals, and particular emphasis on the lives of common people. Many of his earlier films had been torrid love stories, pitting the individual against the inescapable constraints of family and tradition. In "To Live," the struggle is simply for survival in tumultuous times.

We first meen Xu Fugui (Ge You) and his wife, Jiazhen (Gong Li) in the 1940s. Fugui is a good-for-nothing with a weakness for gambling. After he loses his entire fortune and the family estate, Jiazhen leaves him, and Fugui is forced to go on the road performing shadow puppet operas in order to earn a living. However, by extraordinary luck, he and his partner Chunsheng (Tao Guo) come out on the right side of the war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Fugui is able to reunite with his wife and children. However, this is only the beginning of their struggles, as the world around them is changing very quickly, and Fugui's luck never stayed very good for very long.

When I watched "To Live" a few months ago, it wasn't until about halfway through the movie that I realized that I had seen it before, way back in high school. My parents rented a lot of Chinese films, but I didn't appreciate many of them back then. "To Live" left an impact though. All of a sudden I remembered in vivid detail how the rest of the story was going to play out, and I was getting emotionally distraught just at the thought of it. The film's tragedies are extremely affecting, not just because of their particular circumstances, but because they happen to these characters, and because we see the consequences of them over the long years of their lives.

The performances of Ge You and Gong Li are not particularly flashy, but they are extraordinary. We follow their family through the 50s and 60s and beyond, and see the weight of years accumulate on them. I was very familiar with Gong Li, who often played headstrong, doomed heroines. Here she gets her moments of pique, but tempered by stronger expressions of love and devotion. Ge You, however, was unfamiliar. In his early scenes of spoiled indulgence, it was easy to view him as a comic villain type, but fate and necessity soon require him to transform, gradually, into a sympathetic everyman who just wants to keep out of trouble and protect his little family.

From how I've described the movie so far, you'd probably expect "To Live" to be some kind of deathly serious, harrowing cinematic experience, and it's not. What I found on rewatch was that the film was much funnier than I remembered. Xu Fugui is a bit of a fool and a bumbler, who occasionally has to be taken down a peg by his wife and kids. Society may be cruel at times, but each individual we meet is shown to have a good side. The film is full of wry observations and little ironies, culminating in a thrilling, devastating, and somehow terribly funny sequence involving a poor doctor who incapacitates himself by eating too many steamed buns.

The government, despite all the controversy, doesn't come off all that badly for the most part. Yes, their policies definitely play a part in causing the family's sorrows, but those sorrows are just as much a product of luck and fate. I wonder if they were really more upset by the irreverence with which they were treated in a few scenes. Zhang Yimou is famous for his use of color composition - the drying silk skeins in "Ju Dou" and the famous lanterns of "Raise the Red Lantern." Here, he gets a lot of mileage out of the Communist iconography from the propaganda that is plastered everywhere, and incorporated into daily life to ridiculous extremes.

I think "To Live" resonates more with me now that I'm older, and I've seen the world change for myself. The events of the movie are far more dramatic and compelling and beautiful than most people's lives, but at its core it captures an essential truth: after enough time and enough history, everyone's life is an epic story.
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Media Burnout and How to Avoid It

Don't worry. I'm not feeling burned out from watching movies and television, or writing about them in the slightest. However, the issue of media fan burnout is a very real thing that I've experienced before, and I thought it would be appropriate to devote a post to the subject.

I consume an awful lot of media, including movies, television shows, podcasts, and more. Occasionally I get carried away and overdo things, marathoning entire seasons of a show in one day, or piling on the major contenders before the Oscars, so I can get in on the fun of the predictions. When I was an anime fan I used to be much worse. I'd fast-forward through episodes of repetitive action shows, and plow through masses bottom-of-the-barrel titles that I expected would be terrible, in order to keep up with the wider fandom conversations. As a result, I've gone almost completely cold turkey on anime for over four years. I burned out so completely, that I'm still extremely hesitant about taking a look at any new shows. I expect I will, eventually, but it's going to be a while.

Everyone engages with media differently, and everyone has different experiences. I can only really comment on my own, but I suspect that many of you hardcore movie and television fans out there will find this familiar. I can't keep up a consistent level of interest and enthusiasm for media if I'm not constantly exposing myself to different things. That doesn't mean I have a short attention span, or that I can only watch new media. It means that I have to be careful to avoid falling into ruts or overly familiar patterns. To a certain degree I have to plan out what I'm going to watch and when I'm going to watch it. There's a lot of time management involved, and I make sure I pace myself - no more marathons unless it's for a special occasion.

This year so far, for instance, has mostly been devoted to watching the classics. After the flurry of new movies at Oscar time, I needed a break from the breathless, breakneck entertainment news cycles, so I started working through William Wyler and Zhang Yimou and Fritz Lang movies. I finished "The Wire" and caught up on shows like "Elementary" and "Merlin." A few weeks ago I eased up on the classics and started renting my way through some of the more obscure 2012 titles that had reached DVD, the movies that weren't the best of the year, but I figured were still worth a look. And it's all been very easy and laid back and I go at my own pace.

And now things are just starting to pick up again. "Mad Men" is back, one of my favorites, so I'll be following that weekly, with "Breaking Bad" to follow afterwards. In May, it'll be in another busy period. I'm planning to see the next "Star Trek" and "Iron Man" movies in theaters, and maybe "The Great Gatsby" depending on how the reviews shake out. My next round of Netflix Instant is scheduled for May too, so I can watch "House of Cards" and the new episodes of "Arrested Development." And "Venture Bros." will finally be back on the air. And Season 7 of "Dexter" will be on DVD, so I can go catch up.

There's a lot that I'm looking forward to, and working in the down time gives me a chance to work up anticipation. With anime, I was going so fast and so hard that I stopped being able to enjoy what I was watching. The more I watched, the less I would get out of it, until I found it simply wasn't worth the time and effort anymore. I was too overwhelmed to enjoy the good shows when I found them, while the bad stuff just grated on my nerves more and more. I didn't look forward to anything, because it all started to look the same.

I've been able to avoid this since I quit anime for other media. In addition to a much slower pace and more down time, I take pains to cycle through mainstream entertainment, art house and indie movies, and the oldies so if I get tired of one category, I can move on to the next. Television shows usually aren't as much of an issue because they're cyclical by nature. They go away long enough every year that you're glad to see them again when they come back. Why yes, it is time for "Doctor Who" again.

I've enjoyed my last few months wearing my pretentious movie fan hat, but over the last few weeks it's been a struggle to work through more serious, politically charged movies like Nikita Mikhalkov "Burnt by the Sun" and Chris Marker's "Grin Without a Cat." So yesterday I set aside the next big epic on the list, Warren Beatty's "Reds," and watched a bunch of "Project Runway" episodes instead. It's about time for blockbuster season again, and I'm ready for it.
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The Specs of "Robot & Frank"

Epic scale space operas have always been a weakness of mine, but lately I've found myself preferring the smaller scale science-fiction stories that look at how we interact with new technology closer to home. A great example of this sub-genre of is "Robot & Frank," which stars Frank Langella as curmudgeonly ex-convict Frank, who is starting to experience worrying gaps in his memory.

Frank lives on his own but has two grown children, Madison (Liv Tyler), and Hunter (James Marsden), who are busy with their own lives, but worry about Frank's condition. Hunter, in a last bid to avoid sending Frank to a retirement home, purchases a robot health aide to help keep his father out of trouble. Frank, stubbornly determined to stay independent, doesn't appreciate the gesture. You can probably guess that Frank grows used to the robot, and comes to rely on his useful skills and companionship. However, the twist here is that Frank is a former jewel thief, and manages to convince the robot that helping him to plan and execute various burglaries is a great way to keep him mentally and physically fit.

Langella is excellent as Frank, a man we suspect has always enjoyed behaving badly, and reveals great pride in his old profession, as he dusts off the old skills to show off to his new friend. However, with the return to lockpicks and architectural blueprints come the consequences that his felonious career has had on his relationships with family and friends, and the uncomfortable truths that he's been trying to avoid facing. His struggles against the memory lapses are so affecting, because of Frank is so relatable. He bristles at being helped or looked after, and there's something admirable about his stubborn insistence on paying regular visits to a diner that no longer exists. Perhaps he is terribly selfish, and enjoys corrupting his robot friend a little too much, but it's hard not to root for the old rebel when he see his enjoyment at returning to the old game.

I really liked the robot in the movie, which the filmmakers were careful not to anthropomorphize too much. It's functional, rather than flashy, resembling a large, blocky Lego man with a astronaut's helmet where the face would be, and a soothing voice provided by Peter Sarsgaard. And though it's at the center of a few very emotional scenes, this is not one of those stories where the robot becomes a real boy, or reveals a secret vein of humanity. Everything it does and says could conceivably be the result of clever programming. At one point it even reveals that it can be as tricky and manipulative as Frank is, in the name of doing what is best for him. Thus Frank's affection for the robot may be entirely one-sided, and the robot may only be reflecting Frank's needs and wants. It's telling that even though Frank comes to care for the robot, he never gives it a name.

There's an underlying conflict in the film about the adoption of new technology. Frank courts Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), keeper of the town's very old and analog library, which is on the brink of being shut down and converted into something compatible with the digital age. It's an awful shame, but an inevitability, as progress always is. Yet progress also brings Frank and the robot together, and their partnership lets Frank get into the kind of trouble he never could have managed on his own, and reach necessary revelations on his own terms. After so many science-fiction cautionary tales, it's nice to see a film where robots and artificial intelligence aren't remotely sinister at all, though the complicated implications of using them as companions are addressed several times.

This is clearly a low budget production, but that's appropriate for a story like this. New technology is present, but it's not overwhelming. There are only two robots that appear in the film, but that's enough to give us a sense of how they function in society, and how people regularly interact with them. First time director Jake Schreier creates a version of the near future that is very recognizable and far likelier than most others I've seen in these kinds of movies. You get a good sense that the old way of doing things isn't so easily set aside or forgotten.

I found "Robot & Frank" very light and easy to watch, occasionally touching without being too sentimental. Sometimes the themes are hammered home a little too hard, but the writing maintains a great sense of humor and the filmmakers stay as grounded in reality as possible. And most importantly, they play fair with the premise. This is a character piece first and foremost, and Frank, we come to understand, would never stand for something as boring and cheap as a happy ending.
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The Movie Gender Switch Project: The Princess Bride

YAM Magazine, an online publication about cultural media, came up with this interesting little prompt: The Movie Gender Switch Project. Simply take a movie with prominent male and female leads, swap their roles, and see how the story would play out as a result. I'm doing "The Princess Bride," which I guess becomes "The Prince Groom." Spoilers everywhere!

First off, the rules of the challenge specify changing the genders of the lead characters only, so the big stumbling block right off the bat is the original story would have Westley marrying Prince Humperdinck. I know society is more progressive in this area than it used to be, but this just isn't going to happen when you take into account that royal marriages are all about the procreation. However, Humperdinck could still appear to ally himself with Westley without the whole marriage thing, and then set him up to be killed off to start that war with Guilder.

Oh, I've got it. You can have the old king adopt Westley into the royal family as a prince for, let's say, saving his life. That keeps the title intact, puts the people on his side, and gives Humperdinck a reason to want to get rid of him. Of course he has to appear to play nice with Westley in order to respect his father's wishes, but truthfully he doesn't want any competition around even if he's next in line for the throne anyway. So Humperdinck has Westley kidnapped and has to make a big show of getting his new brother back. And you could switch out the wedding for a big coronation ceremony for the climax scenes.

On Buttercup's side of the equation, she probably wouldn't be going out into the world to make her fortune if Westley was a landowner with his own farm in the beginning. So she's traveling to visit relatives, her ship is boarded by the Dread Pirate Roberts, and she is presumed to have been killed. This gets a little tricky because Roberts is still a man, but Buttercup could feasibly find a way to disguise herself and replace him. There are always girls passing themselves off as boys in pirate stories, and of course there were real life women pirates. The disguise just wouldn't be as convincing to the audience, but we all knew that the Man in Black was really Westley from the beginning anyway, right?

So Buttercup follows the kidnappers, beats Inigo Montoya at swordfighting, Vizzini at the game of wits, and Fezzik - oh dear. Is it plausible for Buttercup to beat Fezzik at wrestling? Well, maybe it is. I mean, Westley was completely physically outmatched by Fezzik in the first place, and the tactics he used probably could be used by Buttercup effectively. Yeah, let's go with that. Buttercup beats Fezzik at wrestling, reunites with Westley, and they almost escape until Prince Humperdinck intervenes. Buttercup ends up with the albino and Count Rugen in the torture chamber, and Westley is back at the castle with time running out before he has to be... coronated. Oh, that doesn't sound right, does it?

What do we replace Buttercup's anxieties about getting married to Humperdinck with? A big part of her character arc was rejecting the prince and deciding not to go through with the wedding. No matter how you cut it, becoming royalty doesn't have the same amount of emotional heft as deciding whether or not to marry somebody. Well, we can turn a negative decision into a positive one. Westley can turn down the prince gig because he decides he wants to marry Buttercup, and he can't do that if he's royalty. And Humperdinck's plotting by that point would be too far along to allow Westley to decline the honor, so he tricks him into it. We can leave out the suicide business, I think.

Then the rest of the story plays out as usual. Storm the castle, rescue the new prince, Inigo Montoya gets that awesome revenge scene, and happy ending.

It's interesting how putting Buttercup into the typically male storyline, with the adventuring and the physical feats isn't nearly as hard as trying to work Westley into the typically female one, where the conflict is mostly about relationships and emotions. And it feels very strange to have Buttercup doing so much action-wise, while Westley doesn't get to do anything rougher than name-calling. The most affirmative thing he does is to save the king, which I invented to make the plot work. Buttercup was originally chosen by Humperdinck for being the fairest in the land.

Buttercup being an action heroine works pretty well, but I think some of the later scenes with Count Rugen in the torture chamber, and being dragged around as a corpse, end up with some additional naughty connotations that may raise some eyebrows. Miracle Max would likely be suspicious of Inigo and Fezzik for entirely different reasons and the tone of the comedy would be very different.

As for all the emphasis on true love, you end up with a very forceful Buttercup who may be coming on too strong, and a Westley who is very passive, and not too smart. More than anything else, I was surprised at how the characterizations that seemed so classical and sweet one way, play very, very differently when they're switched.
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