I actually just watched Rocky last night, and it was better than I remembered it. A huge part of that is that the first time I saw it I felt like "oh, this is just another dumb sports movie" - but it really isn't. It's a character study. The actual fight doesn't take place until the last fifteen minutes and until then Creed and Rocky never meet; the fight is barely mentioned in the first hour; and nobody ever seriously says that Rocky can beat Creed until right before the fight when Mickey, the manager, says it - and he might just be saying it to try to hype up Rocky. The tension isn't between Creed and Rocky, its between Rocky and himself
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The first Rocky is a clear exception to the Stallone-as-crap rule, it's probably his best movie. The real strength of Rocky Balboa was that it went back to the simple endearing model laid out in the first one: Rocky is a mumbling idiot who barely loses a match he was supposed to utterly lose because of his hard work, determination, and heart. The other Rocky movies really don't have anything to do with the first one and the last one.. sure, they continue the story, but they go off on stupid tangents. but they do have their moments, and some parts are so stupendously awful that they're great, like Rocky IV, where he wins the cold war. That one is definitely worth a viewing.
Last week I watched Robin Hood: Prince of thieves, and my friend and I were talking about how Kevin Costner is pretty good at doing totally earnest but pretty lackluster at anything requiring fortitude or wit, the same way Keanu Reeves is great at doing confused, but lame at anything else.
Stallone, I think, is in the same vein. He seems like he actually is kind of an egotistical semi-idiot, and Rocky really plays off that well, because he's always trying to tell people what-for and sounding like he has no clue how to string together a sentence. But his other films try to make him seem daring or bad-ass or semi-witty and it just falls flat, I think. The first Rocky just seems like its more in his range than say, Judge Dredd, where at times he had to seem like he could possibly be interesting or have an emotion or be competent.
A friend and I came to a very similar conclusion about Stallone after seeing John Rambo, he's really in his element when he's drooling, mumbling, and killing people. I read a few interviews with him about that movie though, and he sounded like a guy who knew exactly what he was doing. It sounded like he had grown to know his strengths and weaknesses, and he decided to make a few movies that played to his strengths.
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The other Rocky movies really don't have anything to do with the first one and the last one.. sure, they continue the story, but they go off on stupid tangents. but they do have their moments, and some parts are so stupendously awful that they're great, like Rocky IV, where he wins the cold war. That one is definitely worth a viewing.
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Stallone, I think, is in the same vein. He seems like he actually is kind of an egotistical semi-idiot, and Rocky really plays off that well, because he's always trying to tell people what-for and sounding like he has no clue how to string together a sentence. But his other films try to make him seem daring or bad-ass or semi-witty and it just falls flat, I think. The first Rocky just seems like its more in his range than say, Judge Dredd, where at times he had to seem like he could possibly be interesting or have an emotion or be competent.
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I read a few interviews with him about that movie though, and he sounded like a guy who knew exactly what he was doing. It sounded like he had grown to know his strengths and weaknesses, and he decided to make a few movies that played to his strengths.
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