Okay, enough of that depressing fare. On to something more cheerful. Anyway, Norman Jewison passed away earlier this year, so I guess it’s fitting that I have a few of his movies on this list. Twenty years after he made In the Heat of the Night, and nearly fifteen years after he did Fiddler on the Roof, Jewison came out with Moonstruck, an Italian-American romantic comedy that’s as goofy as it is romantic. Cher and Nicolas Cage star as the moonstruck couple, a clever story-telling device to make it conceivable that Cher and Nicolas Cage would ever get together. The movie is funny and heart-warming and beyond odd, but that’s what makes it so endearing.

Loretta, a widow living in New York City, spends time with her boyfriend Johnny before he flies to Sicily to tend to his dying mother. Before he leaves, he proposes marriage, which Loretta agrees to on the stipulation that they do it “right”, as she fears her previous untraditional courtship is what killed her husband. Also before he goes, Johnny asks Loretta to reach out to his estranged brother, Ronny, to get him to come to the wedding. Later, to her mother, Rose, Loretta admits that she does not love Johnny but agreed to marry Johnny anyway. The next day, Loretta goes to call on Ronny at his bakery. Ronny is standoffish and claims that his brother is the reason he lost his hand. Loretta convinces him to talk privately at his apartment. She cooks dinner and over dinner, they talk and get to know one another. They end up sleeping together and witnessing a bright moon that evening that is similar to the moon that shone on the night Loretta’s parents got together. Loretta wakes up the next morning feeling guilty and Ronny agrees to keep away from her forever if she’ll go to the opera with him that evening. She agrees and goes to confession to admit to her infidelity, but later, she decides to get her hair done and a new dress before the opera. After the performance, Loretta and Ronny run into her father, Cosmo, who is with his mistress. Loretta angrily confronts him, but Cosmo basically says, “I won’t tell if you don’t.” Meanwhile, Rose eats at a restaurant alone and invites a man who she just witnessed being dumped to join her. The man walks Rose home and asks to come up, but she rebuffs him, claiming she is faithful to her marriage. Johnny returns to NYC, saying his mother made a miraculous recovery. Cosmo and Rose, and Loretta, Johnny and Ronny air out their grievances over the most awkward breakfast in film history. Johnny backs out of his engagement to Loretta, superstitiously believing it will make her sick again. Loretta berates him, but Ronny sees the opportunity and proposes marriage with his brother’s engagement ring. Loretta accepts.

I guess it’s true what the songs say: “If you get caught between the moon and New York City, the best that you can do is fall in love.” Cher is not a good actress, but she fits surprisingly well in the NYC Italian, “fuhgeddaboudit” environment. Nicolas Cage performs as if he himself is in an opera. The first scene where he and Loretta meet, he lifts his hands and head toward the sky and bellows, “I lost my hand!” The only thing missing is him laying the back of his other hand against his forehead as if he’s about to swoon. But that campiness is what makes the movie so enjoyable. Love makes us do crazy things, not all of them good, and the events of this film act as a declaration to embrace that crazy with fervor. By doing so, it makes the film even more romantic.

Bonus Bonus Review: Peggy Sue Got Married

Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and The Outsiders directed this oddball romance as if he was made for the genre. This time, Nicolas Cage is paired with Kathleen Turner, and while Cher gave the filmmakers of Moonstruck an ultimatum to make Cage her costar, Turner would have liked to throw her weight around to have Cage removed from Peggy Sue Got Married. But what are you gonna do when he’s the director’s nephew? We’re gonna assume Coppola gave Cage free range too, because otherwise his goofy, nasally voice and cartoonish overacting probably wouldn’t have made the cut either.

Peggy Sue attends her 25-year high school reunion without her husband, Charlie, whom she married right out of high school when she found out she was pregnant, as they are now separated due to Charlie’s infidelity. Peggy Sue is surprised when Charlie arrives at the reunion, but ignores her. Peggy Sue is pronounced the reunion’s queen, while Richard, who was the class nerd but now a rich inventor, is crowned king. Peggy Sue faints onstage, overwhelmed by the events, and wakes up in 1960, her senior year. Peggy Sue tries to correct her previous mistakes, so she attempts to get close to Richard and breaks up with Charlie, eventually briefly settling for Michael, an artsy loner with a motorcycle. After they sleep together, Michael asks Peggy Sue to go to Utah with him and another woman so they can live polygamously and he can write. Peggy Sue declines and instead visits a music club where Charlie and his friends are performing as a doo-wop group. She realizes that her getting pregnant stopped Charlie from chasing his passions of singing, and wants to return to her own time so she can stop ruining people’s lives. She discovers her grandmother claims to be psychic and the family, believing her story of time travel, decides to perform a ritual to get her back to 1985. Charlie shows up and swoops Peggy Sue away in the middle of the ceremony and confesses he still loves her and is giving up singing to pursue the family business. He gives her a locket that has their baby pictures in it, bearing a resemblance to photos of their children in the future. Peggy Sue realizes she genuinely loves Charlie and would make the same decisions again, given the opportunity. When she wakes up in her own time, Charlie is right by her side, begging her for forgiveness. She invites him to dinner.

Peggy Sue Got Married is sappy and not in a tongue-and-cheek way like Moonstruck, but it’s a fun, blast-from-the-past, inverted Blast From the Past kind of film. And Coppola does well with the material, giving him his biggest hit until Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992, which, at the time of this review, is his last successful movie. Watch it because it’s a rom-com, or watch because it’s nostalgic for the 60s. Also watch for an earlier role of a young Jim Carrey as one of Charlie’s singing buddies.