' ' Cinema Romantico: Friday's Thursday's Old Fashioned Flashback to the 80s Freeze Frame

Thursday, August 06, 2015

Friday's Thursday's Old Fashioned Flashback to the 80s Freeze Frame

There are several grandly heightened shots in Norman Jewison’s “Moonstruck” of the inimitable Manhattan skyline illuminated by a moon the size of a giant pizza pie. It’s a sumptuous means of illustrating the romanticism pervading the entire picture. Yet there is another shot infused with just as much romance, a shot of the Manhattan skyline not at night but dawn. It is the morning after Loretta and Ronny have attended the opera, and warmed by that I-Think-I-Just-Fell-In-Love glow, Loretta kicks a can down the empty street.


They say New York is The City That Never Sleeps. And maybe that’s true. But it’s still a city that rests, because all we need to rest, and so in those first few hours of the morning are when the behemoth that is New York City is having its own version of siesta. There is something about the light in a New York morning that feels refreshingly lightweight, as if the skyline is briefly unburdened of carrying the hopes and failure of so many citizens. It’s the metropolis as a cloudless sky, before the day begins and the storm clouds gather in the form of people stirring, moving to and fro, running errands, screaming on cell phones, honking horns. It matches Loretta’s mood exquisitely; it’s when you can still believe anything is possible before those storm clouds open up and rain down.

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