Product: Moonstruck (1987)
Rating: 5.0
Cher and Cher alike
Even thought I'm not the biggest of Cher fans, this movie was her crowning achievement. She won the Academy Award for this one, this was before all the tabloid stuff and her awkwardness of the 90s set in. Still, I like Cher. She's made something out of nothing, and she always lands on her feet.Cher plays someone very un-Cher in this movie, a dowdy young widow named Loretta living in New York with her extended family. They're Italian-American, loud and always at each other in someway. She has been going out with Johnny Camarary for a while, a nice mamma's boy man, and he asks her to marry him. She says yes. I loved her mom's questions: "Do you love him Loretta?", "No.", "Good. If you love him he'll drive you crazy because they know they can. But you like him then?", "Oh yeah, he's a sweet man Ma". When Johnny goes off to Sicily to care for his dying mother, he asks that Loretta make contact with his brother who he's been estranged from for years.Loretta meets Ronnie, Johnny's rough and bitter brother who holed himself up in the basement of a bakery shoveling bread dough into the coal stove. While he shows her that he's a big brute and obnoxious, he also decides once she shows her chops as a sparring partner that this is the woman he loves. After sleeping with him, Loretta wants to run away. But Ronnie pursues, and after a night at the opera together in secret, Loretta falls hard for him.This was a phenomenal movie in so many ways. It's about love, to be sure, but it's also about infidelity, secrets, lonely people, and strange behavior brought on by lunar cycles. The characters from the frumpy BoBo at the favorite restaurant, the aunt and uncle, her parents and their problems, the ancient grandfather and his dogs are all well developed characters and likable. It's somewhat of a chick flick, as it's how Loretta stops being a dowdy stuffed shirt and awakens the flower of the inner vamp. It's a Cinderella story in many ways, and that is every little girl's dream to emerge from the ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.Moonstruck is a delight and leaves you laughing everytime. Love it. And you don't have to be a Cher fan to appreciate it.