Let’s do away with our little backlist of the 2006 curriculum. Rocky is a nice and entertaining film, but with little that will make it an evergreen. One reason is that every element is some kind of mirror image of earlier Rocky ventures and adventures: the fight he cannot win but that he thinks he needs to take on, the girl with which he develops some form of clumsy relationship, the atmosphere of run-down Philadelphia… all of it. I really liked the way Rocky is so very inarticulate, not just trying to be, but actually being a real boxing-man’s philosopher. Short sentences, easy messages, no pretention to be and know anything beyond that. But in the first Rocky film he was even more clumsy and more inartuclate, and the girl was even uglier, and the training area messier. The fight is ok, of course again massively overvdone and unrealistic in every detail, but that’s, I guess, the fun about it. And this lack of technique, and this ability to walk away after massive punches, is what he did in every single film before, too. Whether he loses the fight or not is equally irrelevant as it was in the first film – and the fact that the DVD includes both final votes by the ring judges, and that it does not really matter for the overall impression and quality, shows that the film is really more about the rather melacholic atmosphere, and not so much about whether or not Rocky is still able to beat a guy who needs to fight with a broken hand. What is spectacular (and maybe more so than in part 4, with Stallone at the height of his physical spectacularity) is that man’s body, like a dark mountain resting between layers of fog and clouds. And the the mountain starts punching the shit out of the young guy. Now I cannot get the title music out of my ears.
thomas4cinema 