September
10th,
2012
Racing with the Moon, (1984)
Nicolas Cage is
Nicky
All
this talk of nostalgia is a perfect segway into Racing with
the Moon, another film that
looks to the past to explore how youth slips away. It's the story of
two young men killing time during the Christmas of 1943 awaiting
induction into the US marines. The debut film of writer Steve Kloves
- who would go on to write Wonder Boys
and all but one of the Harry Potter movies – Moon
has such a lived-in specificity of place and time that I was
surprised to learn that Kloves was born in 1960. Maybe some of that
credit goes to director Richard Benjamin who was born in 1938 and would go on to direct The Money Pit
and, um, My Stepmother is an Alien.
Anyway,
Racing with the Moon kicked
up my own memories of times gone by - namely, Fast Times
and The Best of Times.
Which is an irritating way of saying that it stars Sean Penn and
features Crispin Glover as an asshole rich kid that Nic Cage clocks
in a bowling alley before wiping the blood of Glover's girlfriend's
blouse. It's kinda pretty awesome.
