#11: Moonstruck (1987)

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

Last week made a refreshing change — one film was quite good, the other was fantastic. But neither won me the lottery. And so, I continue, hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.

Why, as suggested in the Dean Martin song “That’s Amore”, would the moon hit your eye like a big pizza pie? I mean, I get that it’s a metaphor and not really about the actual moon hitting you in the eye which depending on where it happened could be anything from a personal to a global disaster. I think it just means “when the moon looks really big” but I don’t see why that’s romantic. The biggest moon I’ve ever seen was when I was walking along a canal on my own, swigging beer out of a tin. Is that what Dean Martin thinks romance is?

Anyway, Moonstruck seems to broadly agree on this moon/romance theme, even taking Dean Martin’s song as the music for the opening titles. The plot of the film is that there is a big moon and it’s making loads of Italian Americans be in love/want to do sex. The main ones who are in love/want to do sex are Loretta (Cher), who has just gotten engaged to a dull bloke called Johnny because she wants a baby, and Ronny (Nicolas Cage), who is Johnny’s estranged younger brother.

Johnny leaves the country and asks Loretta to persuade Ronny to come to their wedding. At first she does not get on with him at all, but in a shocking unforeseen twist, they end up banging.

Surrounding this is a series of loosely connected ‘comedic’ vignettes — Frasier’s dad from off of Frasier keeps having glasses of wine thrown over him by inappropriately young women, one or more of Loretta’s indistinguishable elderly relatives is having an affair, and so on. It would be tempting to describe Moonstruck as being something along the lines of a lesser Woody Allen work, if not for the fact that the main love story about an older woman falling for a younger man which would obviously never happen in a Woody Allen movie.

The most notable scene is that in which we meet Cage’s character for the first time — whilst he is called upon to do some quality emoting, he ramps things up to provide some QUANTITY EMOTING, which is so over the top as to be laugh out loud funny. As he details the history of the feud with his brother, gesticulating wildly with his ‘wooden’ hand (the real one having been chopped over for tenuous plot-driving reasons) and managing some truly interesting ‘interpretations’ of the Brooklyn accent, he’s so wild that you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s taking the piss.

This is, unfortunately, about as good as Moonstruck gets — after this peak it rapidly slides back into varying degrees of interminable, if occasionally amiable. ‘Crazy’ Ronny ends up falling for ‘dowdy’ Loretta, who dyes her hair and puts on a nice dress and — SURPRISE — ends up looking like Cher. The film drifts towards a conclusion like a fancily shot soap opera (via an actual opera — DO NOT PUT A TRIP TO THE OPERA IN A FILM UNLESS THERE IS GOING TO BE SHOOTINGS), and everyone appears to live more or less happily ever after.

Apparently I’m an outlier in not finding much of interest in Moonstruck — it won three Oscars, including one for the screenplay and one for Cher (fair enough, she’s pretty good in it), and is generally pretty well-regarded — people especially seem to like the bit where she slaps Nicolas Cage in the face for some reason. Philistines.

THE NUMBERS

2 — A priest tells Loretta that banging Ronny means she must pray two rosaries as penance. I don’t know what this means but it doesn’t sound that bad.

5 — There has been 5 years of bad blood between the brothers because Ronny cut his fingers off in a bread slicing machine whilst his brother was… nearby? And that made his fiancée leave him?

19 — Loretta’s apartment is located at 19 Cranberry St. It’s now worth over $4 million. Maybe I will buy it if I win the lottery. People will be so impressed that I live in the Moonstruck apartment — “Look over there, it’s where Cher pretended to bang Nicolas Cage!”

25 — In the light of the moon one of the old men looks like he is 25 years old, according to one of the old women. He doesn’t, he still looks well old.

28 — Loretta was 28 the first time she got married. Her husband got hit by a bus.

50 — Loretta meets a weird old lady at the airport who tells her she’s cursed Johnny’s plane because her sister is on board. Her sister stole her boyfriend 50 years ago, apparently. Everyone in this film should calm down.

THE RESULT

1 number again. What do you want, the lottery? Do you want me to cut my fingers off?

Stuff the stupid moon up your arse.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Never On Tuesday, which is so good that it has never been released on DVD because that would be unfair to all the other films.