Racing with the Moon (1984)

So that was the trailer for Racing with the Moon in all of it's monophonic, low-resolution glory.

Oddly enough, with a title like Racing with the Moon you think there would've been a lot more racing and/or moons in this film, but this was not so. There's maybe two or three races the whole movie. And only, like, one moon. Actually, I don't think there was even a moon in it at all. Maybe in the background or something, but no one ever talked about it. At the very least they could've interjected some brief moon-related dialogue. Something along these lines:

Sean Penn: Hey, Nic Cage, check out the moon tonight. Have you ever seen anything so...moon-like?
Nic Cage: Oh yeah, there it is. In the sky. Like always.
Sean Penn: Hey man, do you want to race it?
Nic Cage: What is that supposed to mean?
Sean Penn: I mean, like, let’s get in a car and start driving really fast and we’ll see who wins – the moon or us.
Nic Cage: What do you mean by 'race' though?
Sean Penn: Shit, man. I don't know. I just thought I'd be fun to win a medal or something.
Nic Cage: Right, but, like, the moon is about 480,000 miles away and is traveling around the Earth at 2,288 mph. I drive an ’36 Pontiac and my curfew is at 11. Even if we were to 'race' it, I'm pretty sure we'd lose.
Sean Penn: Hey, how do you know so much about the moon anyway, Nicolas Cage?
Nic Cage: Why do you keep calling me that? Who’s Nicolas Cage? That person doesn’t exist in the reality of this film, and even if he were to exist, the year right now is 1943 and he hasn’t been born yet.
Sean Penn: Oh right.
Nic Cage: Anyway, let’s go hustle some pool or something.
Sean Penn: Yeah, fuck the moon.
Nic Cage [laughing and flipping off the sky]: Yeah, fuck you moon. Go eat a dick.  

This movie stars Sean Penn as Hopper, Nicolas Cage as Nicky and Elizabeth McGovern as the bonerific Caddie Winger. The story is about Hopper and Nicky goofing off and getting laid in the weeks before they ship off to WWII and Sean Penn's character falls in love with Caddie, or something like that. There's probably some subtext and shit in there too. I don't know. Look, if you want a better synopsis than the one I just gave you, go watch the trailer I posted above or check out the Wikipedia page or whatever. I'm not going to spend 20 minutes here rehashing the plot of this dumb movie to you. I've got a lot of shit to do today. Like laundry. And napping.

This movie was rated PG by the MPAA because it features such family-friendly fare as prostitution, larceny, alcohol and tobacco abuse, sex, nudity, gambling, and abortion.  Yes, you read that right - there is an abortion subplot in this movie. For some reason it seems that whenever you stick Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn in a movie together, someone is getting an abortion. This is probably because Nic Cage is so crazy awesome that he causes every women he meets to become spontaneously pregnant with a Christ child:

I think I felt the tingle of new life in my balls.

I wonder why things like prostitutes, bare tits and alcohol abuse were acceptable under the PG umbrella in 1984, yet PG movies today are all Shrek 2 and shit. Were kids more mature in 1984? Were we, as a society, more enlightened? I'm arguably a product of that time. And I do love tits and cigarettes. And gambling. And abortion. Okay, maybe I don't love abortion, but I do love contortion and extortion and they both rhyme with abortion so that's pretty close. Does this mean all my problems and  perversions are a product of once seeing a nipple in a PG movie when I was a child? Can I blame every single one of my failures and shortcomings on this motherfucking Racing with the Moon movie???

The answer to that is, of course, no. But not because I'm not totally influenced by the movies I've seen as a kid (which probably explains why I only respond when people call me The Keymaster.) I can't blame Racing with the Moon for influencing me because I had never seen it before. Yes, this movie managed to slip completely beneath my radar until I began this whole Nicolas Uncaged project. It's weird because I tend to consider myself a hip and cultured sort of dude. Like, you know that thing that happens when you're talking to someone 15+ years older than you and they make some joke or pop culture reference about some no-longer-relevant thing that happened in the world from when they were younger and then they turn to you and say something like "but you probably don't know what that is" like you're some kind of stupid-ass goldfish who can only remember things that happened in the past 3 minutes. Well I USUALLY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

Look, I'm not bragging here. I just like to thing of myself as the kind of guy who know things about stuff and shit.

But then a movie like Racing with the Moon comes along and plops a fat steamy turd right on my carrot cake. It reminds me that I don't know everything. That nobody knows everything. And it makes me wonder how many other movies are out there that I may have missed. How many movies out there YOU may have missed. Think about it, there may be movies that literally everybody may have missed. I imagine there's a whole secret cinematic library somewhere that NO ONE in the world has ever heard of. Extrapolating further, if you've never heard of it, it means that these unseen movies could be about ANYTHING. Or EVERYTHING. Because how would you know? You haven't seen it. And extrapolating on that even further, that means this secret library in which the are shelves filled with movies that are based off of every idea that everyone may or may not have have NEVER made, every thought you've ever thought and every thought you haven't is and isn't recorded on some celluloid somewhere. Or nowhere. Entertaining someone. Or no one. If you consider that as the very logical possibility that it is, this may be why Racing with the Moon managed to elude me for 29 years. It's not because I'm out-of-touch. I'm just living out the plot to the movie where I didn't seen Racing with the Moon for 29 years.



This has all been scripted.

2 Cageheads out of 5.