When There's a Full Moon Over Brooklyn

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"Love don't make things nice — it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die."

Ronny (Nicolas Cage)

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Love triangles are, by their nature, complicated.

They become more complicated when all the parties are friends — and even more complicated when some are related. Most of the time, I suppose some of the parties are related by marriage, but sometimes they are related by blood.

Norman Jewison's "Moonstruck," which premiered in New York on this day in 1987, had both — well, kinda. There were several romances going on, and sometimes they overlapped. And all that got complicated, too.

The primary love story in "Moonstruck" involved a widow named Loretta (Cher), her boneheaded fiancé Johnny (Danny Aiello) and Johnny's brother (Nicolas Cage).

I liked a description that film critic Roger Ebert wrote several years ago. The story, Ebert wrote, "exists in a Brooklyn that has never existed, a Brooklyn where the full moon makes the night like day and drives people crazy with amore, when the moon–a hits their eyes like a big–a pizza pie. The soundtrack is equal parts 'La Boheme' and Dean Martin, and Ronny Cammareri's feelings are like those of an operatic hero, larger than life and more dramatic, as when he tells Loretta why he hates his brother Johnny."

So there's that.

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Johnny proposed to Loretta before departing for Sicily to be with his dying mother. Loretta accepted the proposal but said she wanted to be sure they followed tradition. It was her failure to do so the first time, she believed, that put the curse on her first marriage, leading to her first husband's death. Following tradition was OK with Johnny, and he told Loretta to be sure Ronny was invited to the wedding.

Loretta did not love Johnny; convinced that she was unlucky in love, Loretta was content to marry him even though she did not love him, but everything changed when she met Ronny.

Life can be funny that way, you know?

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Further complicating things were a couple of extramarital affairs in Loretta's own family.

Her father (Vincent Gardenia) was having an affair and so was her mother (Olympia Dukakis).

Cher and Dukakis took home Oscars for their performances. Jewison was nominated for Best Director, and Gardenia was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. And the movie was nominated for Best Picture.

'Agnes of God' Came Up Short

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"Smoking is an obsession with me. Maybe someday I'll become obsessed with something else and give up smoking."

Martha (Jane Fonda)

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Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God," which premiered on this date in 1985, was a difficult movie to watch — especially in the last 30 minutes. In fact, I have only seen it once. I've never been able to watch it a second time.

It was painful to watch Meg Tilly's tortured performance as a simple young woman manipulated and abused by the people in her life, much as it was painful five years earlier to watch "The Elephant Man" — yet both were ultimately rewarding. The only problem was you had to experience all that misery for the payoff to really ... pay off.

And "Agnes of God" never really paid off as handsomely as it should have. There were, I suppose, many reasons for that.

"Agnes of God" began as a stage play, and the film adaptation made little allowance for the shift to the big screen. "But that's just the beginning of this film's problems," observed Roger Ebert. "It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of 'Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent.'"

Meg Tilly played Sister Agnes, a young nun who gives birth and allegedly kills the child, then faces manslaughter charges, which draws Jane Fonda, as a court–appointed psychiatrist, to the convent to examine Sister Agnes and her surroundings. Sister Agnes, you see, had no idea who the father might have been. She even had doubts that there had ever been a baby.

"It is never made quite clear what specific problem Sister Agnes suffers from," Ebert wrote, "but she clearly has parts on order."

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Still, it was Tilly's riveting performance enabled "Agnes of God" to rise above the mediocre in its pursuit of its objective — establishing that miracles do happen. The material may have produced, in Ebert's words, "a very badly confused movie. ..."

However, "(g)iven dialogue that sounds as if it were written to be read, given characters who consistently avoid asking the obvious questions, given a story that refuses to declare what it is about, [Anne] Bancroft, Fonda and Tilly use their craft to give the illusion that they know where they stand. It is service in a lost cause."

The acting really deserved to be recognized, and it was. It received three Oscar nominations. Two were for acting; the third was for Best Original Score.

Bancroft was nominated for Best Actress but lost to Geraldine Page. I thought Tilly really should have been nominated for Best Actress — not necessarily at the expense of Bancroft, who was great, as always — but she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress — and lost to Anjelica Huston.

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Fonda turned in her usual workmanlike performance and received no nomination. She had already won two Oscars, anyway.

When the Inmates Ran the Asylum

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Ralph (Robert Christian): I was in that taxi cab, but I didn't rob it. It was my cousin. He's crazy.

Arthur (Al Pacino): What's his name?

Ralph: I don't know. I mean he lives out in Hillsberry.

Arthur: You don't know your cousin's name?

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In many ways, Norman Jewison's "... And Justice For All," which debuted on this day in 1979, was better suited for current times, given its focus on corruption and injustice.

There is always an audience for that sort of theme, I suppose, because some people are predisposed to believe they have been victimized in some way, and I don't really see that changing. No matter how much we may reach for what we believe is a utopian society, human nature (being what it is) will pull in the opposite direction.

The story of "... And Justice For All" could have been written in the early 21st century. A longtime judge (played by John Forsythe, who really did look like a judge), the very picture of establishment privilege, was accused of rape. And the fact was that he was guilty, although he didn't say so to anyone.

He was already loathed by just about every lawyer who worked in his courtroom, including Al Pacino's character, a defense attorney. The judge asked for Pacino to defend him because he thought it would be good public relations. He believed he would be acquitted if the attorney who was defending him in court was also known to hate him.

"Inevitably, it's going to look as if the fix is in," Roger Ebert wrote, "unless the defense is conducted by a lawyer who's clearly on record as despising Forsythe."

That's a pretty cynical way of looking at things — unless you happen to be the product of a corrupt system.

It's also kind of daring for director Norman Jewison, given the many characters and subplots competing for the audience's attention.

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As Ebert observed, the movie "has so many characters doing so many things to, with and against Pacino that it's a triumph of film making when all the stories end in the same movie."

When I say there was a lot going on, you can take that to the bank.

Perhaps the wildest character was played by Jack Warden. Warden played another judge who was as crazy as any character you'll find in the movies. He was a bit of a thrill seeker, spending his lunch breaks sitting on the ledge of the courthouse's fifth floor and flying helicopters, carefully calculating how far he could travel and return safely on the fuel he had — and then flying a little farther than that, just to see if he could make it back.

He took Pacino on such a ride — and, on at least one occasion, he fired a gun in his courtroom.

"Gentlemen," he said, "need I remind you you're in a court of law?"

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I never have figured out the purpose of Warden's character in that movie. His helicopter flight with Pacino may have been good for a little comic relief, but, otherwise, I saw little relevance to the story.

Unless the point was that the lunatics were (and still are) running the asylum. Of course, that could have been it — or there could have been more to it, and I just didn't notice with all the competing subplots.

"... And Justice For All" received two Oscar nominations — Pacino for Best Actor and Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson for Best Original Screenplay — and lost both.