Moonstruck
Moonstrucki re-does the same trite old story of say Terms of Endearment : that by the 1970s actual men were nowhere to be found, disappeared to be replaced with some despicable sort of cvasi-boyish fungus.
Why the fuck would anyone take a lover that's a lesser woman than his wife at home ? Leaving aside the more pointedly plain and duly obvious "why the fuck would anyone not introduce the younger to the elder, 'here, she is your mistress, kiss her feet' ?", ambiguously, like men do, leaving aside the proper form and substance of manhood, how about an answer as to the smallest possible token of non-idiocy ? Who takes a lover that's less than his wife!
Who asks his fiance to patch things over with his younger brother he fears ?! Who the fuck flies over to be with his mommy as if it's somehow no longer women that follow camp wherever camp goes or else die alone in the woods like the animals that they necessarily are for having failed to follow camp like women must ?! Who the fuck produces the contorted reasoning of "Mr." Johnny Cammareri, whereby telling his mother of his engagement produced a miraculous healing and therefore actually going through with the implicit marriage would mean the mother will die ? Think of it, doesn't it stand to the plainest logic that if the woman came back from the dead at hearing of the engagement it'd be the breaking of it that'll undo the miracle ? But then again, an incapacity for logic is the fundament of the neotenic abominations, isn't it.
Moonstruck has no Jack Nicholson to do it with, and no Danny deVito either, but then again Cherilyn Sarkisian is actually quite the competent actress and she holds up some beautiful scenes. Cage is utterly retarded, and I mean this without remainder -- much like the case of Brad Pitt he's only fit to play golums and other accidentally-animated objects. Fortunately the director has the intelligence to cast him in quite such a role -- because Johnny's a soggy mop therefore Loretta ends up fucking a perambulating dildo, that's the whole story. Poor Loretta...
Moonstruck doesn't have the Arthur Miller / Emile Zola -ian carnality of pressed smegma and liquefied puss that Terms of Endearment unabashedly oozes. It is altogether more Proustian an affair, filthy in a dessicated, crumbly manner ; yet it argues just as convincingly for the obliteration of the entire failed Petri dish. The truth about art is that it always finds it very difficult to elude the truth, whatever be its auctorial intention.
As you perhaps intuit, I fully sympathize with the sentiment. There's altogether no reason to continue the experiment, simply burn down the entire angloworld and start over at a moment well prior to this failed "civilisation".
———- 1987, by Norman Jewison (seriously now), with Cher, Danny Aiello, Nicholas Cage. And Nadja Despotovich, fancy that wonder. Jewison and Despotovich made a movie about New York life. [↩]
