Moonstruck during Lockdown - A Review

 Everybody was saying to watch Moonstruck. They were saying it's the perfect spaghetti romcom for global pandemics. I mean, there are articles on this topic with a lot of custom web design. They call for Cher to get an Oscar for her role in this film for chrissakes.

Cher was 41 when this movie
was filmed in 1987.

So, ok. We rented it. And when I say "rented it" I mean that due to it's trending status, we paid $4.99.

So the movie starts out with boring Cher The Accountant getting proposed to by boring Danny Aiello whose hair is really itchy. 

Then like a thunderbolt, comes the scene where Cher, in a fit of moxie, meets young Nicholas Cage. Except you don't know it's Nicholas Cage yet because his back is to the camera. He's sweaty and manhandling an underground bread oven fire pit. Flames shoot everywhere. These flames, like all flames, represent light and darkness, the uncertainty of life and its delicacy. It also represents Nicholas Cage's penis.

When he finally spins around in a breathless long camera shot, Nicholas Cage is skinny and wild-eyed with a fake hand. This fake hand looks like it was lovingly crafted by Nick's elderly Italian uncle in his mancave workshop out back his place in Queens. Contrast this with Woody Harrelson's fake hand in Kingpin, which looks like came from Oriental Trader in a box with a couple of loose party snappers.

Nick Cage's fake hand

Woody Harrelson's fake hand

So points for the fake hand, is all I'm saying.

My favorite part was when Cher's Hair finally makes its appearance:

Cher's Hair finally makes its appearance

It is large and in charge.

Nick Cage has trouble maintaining a Brooklyn accent consistently throughout the film. It comes and goes, just like a lot of the plot which I had trouble keeping track of. There's the moon as a recurring theme, but honestly I couldn't quite catch the drift of all the lunar zoom shots and sidebar scenes of the old couple who run the bodega stumbling out of bed to catch a glimpse of it.

There was also this whole thing with Cher forgetting to drop off a bank deposit. Why was this subplot included? If it was supposed to be suspenseful, it had about as much tension as one of those rubber bands you find in a drawer after eight years and pretty much just disintegrate if you try to use them.

I was dead sure that the movie was based on an opera. Operas are notorious for their melodrama and lyrical tuberculosis. Nick Cage and his fake hand love the opera, so this seemed like a plausible theory that would explain a lot. 

Many others had the same exact hypothesis because when I typed in "Is Moonstruck based..." "ON AN OPERA" auto-filled.

Turns out, we were all wrong Moonstruck is not based on an opera.

I guess the writers were just feeling the whimsy of the late eighties is all.

Anyway, Tom was flummoxed throughout the better part of the film. I didn't not enjoy it. I wouldn't recommend it full-throatedly or anything, but it probably was a good film if there's a pandemic. 

Sure. 

It has a kind of hot and smarmy pandemic vibe.