At the Movies in the Age of Coronavirus: Moonstruck (1987)

Adding onto our series of “At the Movies in the Age of Coronavirus,” is the 1987 classic that is enjoying a well-deserved surge in popularity: Moonstruck. If you haven’t watched it recently, you really should. It has that special magical, loving, family-centered something special that we are all longing for in this moment.

This academy-award winning movie, which stars Cher and Nicholas Cage (with fabulous supporting performances by Danny Aiello and Olympia Dukakis), features Cher as an almost 40-year-old widow who falls in love with her fiance’s younger brother. The film is also a great fit for ImmigrationProf Blog because it is also about the Italian-American immigrant experience in south Brooklyn in a time when the area was still recognizable as a thriving immigrant enclave.

The movie has gotten so popular over the past year that it was just re-released in November in full 4K digital restoration glory, with an enhanced soundtrack to make the film’s Italian opera music pop. 

Caity Weaver of the New York Times recently called for the Academy to give Cher a second Oscar for sustaining us with her enduring performance in Moonstruck. One of the reasons why the film is special, as Weaver quotes Cher saying in an interview, is that the cast “never felt like we were acting.” They just “really, really got along. We just loved each other.” You can feel it when you watch it.

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