WORDS: LES DUNN
MOONSTRUCK (1987)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
While a full moon shines over Brooklyn, Loretta Castorini, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Cher, agrees to marry Johnny, a man she doesn’t love, before falling in love with his estranged brother Ronny, played by Nicolas Cage. Will Loretta stay with staid Johnny or choose the wild Ronny? Meanwhile she discovers her father is similarly moonstruck, while her long-suffering mother quietly wins a younger admirer.
That’s pretty much it, but the whole thing is done with charm. Plus there’s a slew of quotable one-liners, and you get opera too – the scene where the lovers are caught up in the drama of La Bohème at the Met is a lump-in-the-throater.
WHY THIS MOVIE?
A quirky romantic comedy is ideal Friday night fare, and this Eighties classic is larded with good food – and wine. Set in Brooklyn’s Italian-American community (but refreshingly free of gangsters), the film stages several key scenes in an Italian restaurant, the Grand Ticino. There’s plenty of action around the family’s dining and kitchen tables too, including a memorable breakfast-time finale involving porridge and champagne with a sugar cube in it (an Italian old wives’ tale says the sugar keeps the devil away, apparently). The dish of the movie, though, is breakfast ‘egg in the hole’. A slice of toast with an egg in the cut-out centre, topped with red peppers, it became popular as ‘Moonstruck eggs’.