Happy Post-Fourth of July everybody, hope you all had a great 250th celebration of our country’s birth. In all honesty, a side from blowing off fireworks and having to listen, mediocre to overrated country songs about America. See of all movies to talk about that would describe the American dream, and really Rocky kind of caught my eye and I've seen this movie before as well as watched the Rocky films through the ages and thought the first film stands the test of time, more importantly was the first sports film to win Best Picture. And strangely enough it's reached its fiftieth birthday. So, here we are now talking about the greatest boxing film.
Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), a small-time boxer from the working class of Philadelphia, is arbitrarily chosen to take on the reigning world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), when the undefeated fighter's scheduled opponent is injured. While training with feisty former bantamweight contender Mickey (Burgess Meredith), Rocky tentatively begins a relationship with Adrian (Talia Shire), the wallflower sister of his meat-packer pal Paulie (Burt Young).
Sylvester Stallone at the time was living the same life as majority of actors trying to score big in Hollywood, he was of course broke and working dead end jobs to pay the rent, later on learned that of course he was a certain type of actor in his own words to the point that it would almost limit his work abilities as an actor. And so, between the mid-seventies is when he fell back on his writing albitites for which the iconic boxing legend Rocky wrote. Strangely enough, it was the year 1975, in which a Championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner, furthermore, brought Stallone inspiration to write Rocky in Sly brought a tone of great themes of wanting to dream big as well as being ready for the moments of opportunity and being challenged into taking a leap of faith. It's really fascinating in going back to some of Stallone's earlier work, and he does a fantastic job as both an actor and a screenwriter in that you can see Rocky as a down on his luck type of character that we as an audience member can relate to as well as follow through the course of the movie moreover one of my favorite scenes is the day of the fight and Rocky can't go to sleep and tells Adrian that he has no chance in beating Apollo, and wants to make it his goal to go the distance and that's just symbolizes all of us in terms of having the sense of fear and dread of knowing you’re not going to win but making a personal goal in our lives that even if we don't win, we can at least reach this goal to know that we're actually worth something in this life or the next. Granted this movie came out in a time when there weren't a whole lot of heroes or legends to look up to and Rocky does fit that mold, and especially if you look at the setting in which the film takes place, Philadelphia was in a shambles in terms of economics as well as every working class citizen not making ends meet, more importantly fearing to keep their jobs, and if you don't think that was bad, the sports teams besides Philly's hockey team won two cups at that time, but all the other teams were horrible so, having a local boy taking a shot at the heavyweight champion of the world, almost as a David vs. Goliath, that's Hollywood magic in the making. The surprising factor about the movie is yes, it was a one-million-dollar budget, but it was a low budget filmmaking at its finest. Great example, Rocky jogging all over Philadelphia was all gruella filmmaking (filming without permits), where they had to select certain parts of Philly where they find intriguing to film and have Sly run a good portion of that route and even in the market ally that was all gruella filmmaking too, and director John G. Avildsen would film Sly Jogging while on the side door of the van with a camera. The first Rocky is a perfect American story about rags to riches and chasing a impossible dream and I think if you want to watch anything that symbolizes America, Rocky fits all those perfect themes and I would highly recommend watching the film from start to finish. Though granted at times it does feel slow but once it hits the gas pedal it's a fantastic story, though I will say the internet does ruin things because of some scenes where they take it out of context and sure make it funny but is also annoying as well. With all of that said, Rocky to me is most certainly in my top ten list of the greatest sports movies of all time. And so, if you have either Netflix or MGM+ then I would highly recommend sitting down and watching a movie about getting an opportunity as well as chasing a dream and second chances furthermore if Rocky doesn't get to feeling proud of being American, I don't know what does.
Speaking about the land of opportunity and chasing a dream, here is a special moment for Rocky meeting Muhammad Ali.
