I'm trying to think of a way for a movie to be more Italian than Moonstruck.
Let's try a thought experiment. I'm going to show you a few pictures, and you're going to imagine that all of the people in these pictures make up both the cast and the production crew of a movie. We'll see if imagined scenario can produce a movie that is more Italian.
Here we go.
Nope. Still not Italian enough.
If I'm honest, by 35 minutes into this movie, it'd already firmly established itself as the first true test of mettle in this project since Best of Times. Quite apart from the fact that the whole thing plays out like a Mel Brooks-level parody of Italian-American culture, the writing is genuinely terrible.
'Terrible?' you say? Yes. Terrible. So terrible that even if the acting was spectacular to the max, it still would have fallen flat.
And the lead actor in this movie is Cher.
Just as a for-instance, to give you an idea of what the dialogue in this film is like, here's what Cher's character (Loretta Castorini) says to Nic Cage's character (Ronny Cammareri) by way of pillow talk, on the day they met.
Oh, did I mention that Ronny is the brother of the guy (Johnny) who Loretta got engaged to the day before? And Ronny and Johnny haven't spoken in five years since Ronny lost his hand in a bread-slicing accident at work after being 'distracted' by Johnny, following which Ronny's fiance left him? Yeah, all that happened. Nic Cage has a wooden hand in this movie.
See?
Anyway, so as Cammareri (Ronny, not Johnny - who is in Sicily watching over his dying mother) takes Castorini to bed (immediately after he's flipped over the table around which they were pounding whisky in the middle of the day), here's how Loretta responds to Ronny's question "what about Johnny?":
"You're mad at him, take it out on me. Take your revenge out on me. Leave nothing left for him to marry. Leave nothing but the skin on my bones."
It goes on like this.
And yet, at about the one-hour mark, something positively amazing happens.
John Mahoney comes back. You may not know him at all. Or you may know him as possibly the best part of the '90s sitcom, Frasier.
But if you decided to subject yourself to Moonstruck, you will forever know him as the guy who pulled off the only thoroughly uplifting, genuine, captivating and talented bit of acting in the entire film.
Up to that point in the movie, he seems like a one-off character - a guy who gets a drink thrown in his face by a much younger woman in the background of the proposal scene that kicks off this monstrosity. But then he's back, and he and Mrs. Castorini (played by the also-surprisingly-awesome-for-the-movie-she's-in Olympia Dukakis - mother of Loretta who's dining aloneIdon'tevencareenoughtogointotheactualplotofthisstupidmoviethatledtothescene...) are sitting together after he gets another drink from another pretty young lady, and he talks about why he chases women.
And it's the only time in the movie that you forget you're watching actors. It's amazing. It's so inexplicably amazing that it's almost worth watching this garbage just to enjoy Mahoney in it. There's no fake Italian accent, there's no accordion music in the background, nobody mentions Italian food, and he just is this character. I could go on. It's just amazing. I think, just for what he's managed to accomplish in this film, that Mahoney has become one of my favourite actors. Instantly.
Anyway, as you may have guessed, I don't like this movie. Up till now, this project hasn't felt like work - it hasn't actually felt like an accomplishment to get through it. This took work. But it's done now. What a crappy movie.
And we're almost out of the '80s, too.
Alright, so here's the danger of writing the review on the fly: it turns out there was an almost-halfway-decent resolution to this otherwise steaming pile of crap, and it did involve a single line that made me genuinely laugh out loud. For the first time in this "comedy", mind you, but I felt that it deserved a mention, in all fairness.
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