As I mentioned, I have until the end of this week to write 5 posts and I listed off my 5 topics. As there is no rule as to what order I have to write them in, I'll start with #2, my review of Rocky Balboa, per V's request.
***** Spoilers Ahead (although, if you've ever actually seen a Rocky movie before, they won't be ALL that surprising *****
I'm a fan of the Rocky movies, but I came to them fairly late. I was a kid, but more of a young teenager. The first one I saw was Rocky IV and it was the first movie to give me chills. It was, to my mind, the single greatest ending to a movie I had ever seen.
<embarrassing admission>The "Greatest Ending" title was previously held by The Best of the Best, the Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones martial arts flick. You know, the one where the US Olympic team fights the Chinese Olympic team in an exhibition, and Eric Roberts has to go up against the man who killed his brother a few years before. Roberts gets his man on the ropes and one more kick will put give his team the points lead, but will most likely kill his opponent, so he lets time run down. The Chinese team wins, but at the medal ceremony (why was there a medal ceremony in an exhibition? I dunno), the Chinese team limps over to the US team and gives their medals over. I cried. I'll admit it.</embarrassing admission>
As Bill Simmons says, Rocky really did end the Cold War, didn't he? "If I can change, and if you can change, then maybe we all can change," seriously. It doesn't get much better than that.
I quickly caught up on the other films, and was ecstatic when the fifth installment came out. Of course, that has become infamous as one of the well known film abortions ever, and it was a real letdown for the series.
So, it could only be said that I approached viewing Rocky Balboa with a cautious excitement. I expected very, very little from it, but deep down inside I hoped that it would be great. As I told my roommate, Eric, when we went and saw it, "If this movie flops, then that's what it was expected to do, but if it's great, then it becomes a legendary movie."
Well, It's not a flop, but it's not legendary either.
The film has the overwhelming feeling of nostalgia down to the tools it uses for the film-making minutiae. Some of them worked, and some of them didn't. For instance, I didn't like that Little Marie was brought back and became the quasi-love interest in this film, but I did like that Spider was back, sitting in Rocky's restaurant and living the washed up life of a formerly great boxer who has nothing but his 15 minutes to hold on to (and a nice counterpoint to Rocky's current status). I didn't like the nearly identical storylines (it's like Stallone took Rocky 1-4, cut them up, put them in a hat and picked out random pieces and said, "Ok, here's the first 80 minutes of the movie." But I did like that the film looked and sounded like the 70's-era original.
Anyway, for those who don't know (or haven't been able to ascertain from the previews), Rocky, in his mid-fifties, is put into a computer simulation against Mason "The Line" Dixon (played by Antonio Tarver, in a wasted role... this could have been so much more). Dixon, the current heavyweight champion in a depleted sport where even the fans boo when the champ knocks out the challenger, is put into the simulation at his prime along with Rocky at his prime. ESPN (who gets their money's worth in product placement) shows the simulation, and Rocky wins in a knockout.
This spurs interest among fans who don't just want a challenging contender, but one who has heart and vibrancy. (It's an interesting point: Say what you will about Mike Tyson, but boxing hasn't been the same since he left it. You know before he even stepped into the ring against Holyfield that his time had come and gone and that he wasn't anywhere near the powerhouse he'd once been, but there was no chance in hell you weren't going to watch it. There hasn't been anyone even remotely interesting in boxing in 15 years).
Predictably, Rocky decides to do it, figuring that he's got one good fight in him, and what good is a fighter who doesn't fight. At least he can prove to himself that he still has that same heart.
Rocky Jr. is a the worst character on the screen, not because Milo Ventimiglia (of NBC's Heroes) plays him badly, but because he's there for the sole purpose of being the only person to tell Rocky that he shouldn't do it. It's a badly written character (and a risky one, when you think about it: Ventimiglia is coming off the smash hit of the television season and he takes this movie. If it flops, then his career becomes almost an instant joke before it even takes off. Think David Caruso. It's taken him 20 years to balance that out).
It's a scene, however, that gives Stallone his best chance to shine. Instead of contemplating the fact that he might be too old, he immediately turns on his son, calling him a spoiled brat and explaining that this is the last chance he's got to do something, and if you aren't doing anything, you might as well be doing nothing. It's not, Rocky explains, as if the fact that he's old hasn't crossed his mind in the first place.
As in all Rocky films, however, the training and fight scenes eventually come. The training scene in this one is boring and cliched. Think about what Stallone had to overcome though. In Rocky IV, Stallone lifted logs in Siberia with his bare hands after running up a 40,000 foot mountain while Ivan Drago trained on the highest tech equipment available. In order to beat it, you might as well have taken the Brando footage from the original Superman and had him speak them to Rocky ("You have great powers, some of which you have as yet discovered"). They've already done it in one film this year.
But the fight sequence... well... this is my favorite of all the Rocky fight sequences.
An aside (as if you needed another one): My boxing knowledge comes almost exclusively from HBO Boxing. I've grown up watching Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant call the fights. Whenever I watch a fight on Showtime or any pay per view fights, they feel somewhat foreign. I feel much the same way about Fox's football broadcast.
So it's a unique idea to basically show the first three rounds of this fight in their entirety, as though they you are watching the HBO broadcast. Mostly, though, it's because it gives Stallone a rather sly (no pun intended) opportunity to do something fantastic with the last rounds. As Rocky gets more and more wobbly, and as he is forced to stand up to blow after whithering blow, he does some things with the camera that are Raging Bull/Pulp Fiction/Cinderella Man like. There's nothing original here, but it serves the story well. Stallone, knowing he's not a director with the skills of Scorsese, Tarantino or Howard, takes cues from them in a ways that are familiar to all of us. In a film where nostalgia and familiarity are the stock and trade, that's a pretty shrewd move.
Which I think is what I'd ultimately say about it. This is a silly, sometimes laughable little movie, but one that provides a proper ending to an iconic character. You get the sense that it was important to Stallone to do it up right, considering how badly the series was going to fade away because of the fifth film. To that end, he accomplished his goals.
Recent Comments