Moonstruck

This has to be the best 3-day romance since Romeo & Juliet.

Director: Norman Jewison
Written by: John Patrick Stanley

Oh my God where do I start with this. I loved pretty much everything about this film and normally I completely hate romance films. I really do, they're often cheesy and a bit naff and always tend to play towards the female demographic, but not this movie. I feel like this could win over just as many men as it would women. It's adorable, charming, cute, funny and has intelligent conversations about male infidelity and a lot of chemistry between the leads that's so believable. Of course it has it's stupid moments and of course, Cage has to get his (for lack of a better word) Cageyness out when he's performing but it's just so entertaining that you let it slip, as you would with a lot of Cage's performances.

As always, negatives first but there's so little of them it's gonna be in one paragraph. Loretta (Cher) wears her engagement ring on the wrong finger, slight nitpick but it's there and I'm gonna point it out. She also is more concerned about luck within her relationship and for her wedding than she would for her fiance's dying mother, pretty dick move of a character but it's pretty understandable with her previous marriage starting off in the registry office and ending with her husband under a bus. Johnny's (Danny Aiello) supposedly dying mother practically tells him to get gone by waving him away while he's crying at her door then all of a sudden making a miracle recovery when he tells her he's getting married. I swear she was trying to pull some sort of scam. And finally, Rose (Olympia Dukakis) calling her husband Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) out for his affair at the breakfast table right in front of their daughter, the guy her daughter is having an affair with and his father. This could have been better if there was just a small scene where they're lay in bed together in silence and just brings it up quietly, not sure whether she should because her husband may be happy with this other woman and if he's happy then she could just pretend to be naive to it and go about the rest of her life. Like Joey's parents from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. And before I forget, Ronny's (Nicolas Cage) worst timed proposal in the history of cinema.

Now to the good stuff...if I even knew where to start. How about dialogue. More or less every word spoken in this is as if a specific family was studied and their words were taken from them and put in a script. It doesn't feel like it's a script, it feels very real. Aside from Cage's speech about love but I'll get to that later. The mild insults they throw at each other felt as if they were from my own family. For example;
Quote: Pop - "I don't like his face Loretta, when he smiles I can't see his teeth. What does he hide?"
            Pop - "I don't like him."
            Ma - "You're not gonna marry him Cosmo."
If I said to someone that me and my mother had that conversation at some point, and said it to somebody who had never seen this film they would more than likely believe it. Obviously, I'd have to change the names around but you get my drift. I don't think I could say anything else about it other than it was very realistic and relatable. For me at least.

Another great thing about the dialogue was the interesting conversations about why men chase women. Rose has made an educated guess that her husband is having an affair with another woman. She goes to a little restaurant where a couple breaks up, the woman is definitely a lot younger than her partner and it's revealed he's her teacher at her university. That's a little unprofessional if you ask me but each to their own. She asks him to have dinner with her and I'm not going to give away details here but it is a fairly interesting conversation that takes place between them. She then asks "Why do men chase women" to Johnny when he gets back from seeing his miracle mother, and he gives her a different answer to the previous man along with a similar answer her own thought on the subject. It's pretty interesting and I don't want to cloud any judgment here with it so I'm gonna encourage you to at least see these specific parts of the film if not the whole thing and think about the question and your own answer to it.

Onto the acting, and we got some good some acting to talk about here. We'll only go through the leads because obviously there's more to talk about there and in all honesty, I barely wrote any notes on anybody else. Cher, is probably one of my favourite actors, ever since I first saw her in Burlesque (Note to self, talk about that one sometime.) I fell in love. How could anybody not, though no matter what she plays on screen she plays it strong, confident and sassy and that's exactly the character we get for Loretta. She, of course, changes it up enough for her style to always seem different and never seem stale. That's good acting. Moving onto the impressive style of Cage, we first see him acting a little mental in his own Cagey way. I sort of got the feeling, when he was having his little breakdown at the start, that this could be what it's like if Christopher Walken had a baby with Nic Cage creating a performance complete with the weird freak out and accompanied weird inflexions. My favourite line that would also demonstrate this point would be the bread line.
Quote: Ronny - "What is life? They say bread is life, and I bake bread, bread, bread!"
Each time those final breads were said, they were punctuated by Cage throwing bread sticks down, getting more and more aggressive with each throw. I loved it. I really did. Eventually, he mellowed out and became so charming and lovable that at one point I even wrote a note stating that if Loretta didn't take the opportunity to go with him to the Opera, then I'd find a way to put myself in this reality and take her place. These two shared a genuine chemistry that I found myself thinking that these two could have possibly made it as a couple in the real world, not as characters, but as Cher and Nic. How nice would that have been?

Looking back on my notes I made a weird one but I think I should share it. Cage and Cher have similar face shapes and bone structures. Not sure if it was the angle of the shot or the lighting or whatever but if they were to play brother and sister in something else then I could believe it.

I really don't know what else I could say about this that wouldn't come across as gushing over the film. Yeah it's a 3-day romance and the film has that going against it but the chemistry between these characters is so powerful that you just buy it. I've fallen in love with this and I couldn't possibly recommend it enough. Please watch this film.

I'm going to end this post with the speech I mentioned earlier, where Ronny is talking about love. I think it's beautiful and really captures what love is for a real human being. Not everyone. Just maybe a select few.

I love you. Not...Not like they told you love is. I didn't know either. But love don't make things nice, it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect...The snowflakes are perfect...The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and...and to break our hearts and love the wrong people. And die. I, I mean that the storybooks are bullshit!"

This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this particular film please go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.