"Love don't make things nice; it ruins everything!"

October, 4th
Moonstruck, (1987)
Nicolas Cage is Ronny Cammareri

"I lost my hand! I lost my bride!"

Italians can make me uncomfortable. Big Jewish and Irish families, too. All those raw emotions just out in the open being shared; all those expressions of familial love. Deep in my blood flow the puritanical genes of my ancestors that reject any big display of emotion if it could potentially make anyone else uncomfortable. My people bottle that shit up for everyone's safety.

Watching the family in Moonstruck was like watching a nature doc on TV. I recognized it as being real to some people's experience but the characters I identified most with were couple whose bathtub Vincent Gardenia fixes. My people!

 

"Hit! Smash! Hit! Make it all bloody! He sure did a good job with that beef!"

August 23^rd, 2012

The Best of Times, (1981)

Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Coppola

I've known about The Best of Times for years and years but have never been able to find any information on it besides the basics: in 1981 teenage Nicolas Cage and Crispin Glover co-starred in an ABC pilot for a Laugh-In-style variety show. For a collector of weird pop culture ephemera could there be a more tantalizing sentence? It's just too weird to be true. I'd searched all the legal and illegal places on the internet I knew and inquired with people and places that collect such things but no luck! How could I start a zine about Nicolas Cage without seeing this? Surely it would be the crown jewel! 

Is it a sign from Heaven? Today, the day I finally decide to do this zine and skip right to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I run into the Best of Times pilot just sitting on YouTube waiting to be watched. God has given his blessing to this Nicolas Cage blog.