Entries in the Category "rocky"
Movie Reviews: The Boxer as Everyman
See my previous entry on Hoop Dreams, about how sports narratives, despite their inherent strength, are virtually lost on me, and this entry will all make a lot more sense.
It fascinates me, honestly, that two extremely iconic American movies are centered around boxing, which seems to me to be such a marginalized sport. You don’t see it on TV that often. You don’t see celebrities made of boxers the way you see celebrities made of football players, baseball players and basketball players. (With some exceptions, i.e., boxers I have heard of: Mike Tyson, Muhammed Ali, and the guy Russell Crowe played in Cinderella Man. That is all.)
Watching two boxing movies because the AFI made me was an interesting experience, then. As I watched and mused on how gross boxing is, I questioned why people (men mostly, probably) find the story of the boxer so universal. Part of it is primal, I’m sure: the urge to blot out the competition of another male of the species by pummeling him, injuring him, shaming him. Rocky in particular positioned the sport as being uniquely blue collar, a sport for working class schlubs, which seems appropriate for the 70s, which I always imagine was a very scrappy decade. Scorsese, with Raging Bull, seemed to find something very poetic about De Niro destroying himself in the ring while he unraveled outside of it. Hit him with a metaphorical punch in the street and then drive it home with a literal punch in the ring, basically. Again, narratively effective.
But I won’t explore that too much. For my own part, I find it hard to remove my own feminine experience from movie watching. That’s why you’ll never hear me say that Rocky or Raging Bull (or Saving Private Ryan, or Platoon) is my favorite movie; I’m going to name a movie with some incredible actress like Katharine Hepburn in it, that has themes that I can relate to intimately. That’s what makes a movie a favorite, as opposed to great. All critics agree on this, incidentally; the best movie in the world is not necessarily one’s favorite.
Raging Bull had, to put it bluntly, nothing to offer a woman. The culture of this movie was patriarchal Italian life, where women were for making sons, or to be hit when they said something disagreeable. Where when something important had to be discussed, it was demanded that they left the room. I respect Martin Scorsese as a director—and not just because he made the incredibly woman-friendly The Age of Innocence, but also for Goodfellas and The Departed, both of which I loved—but the environment that was so vividly portrayed in Raging Bull was rather offensive to me. There’s really no other way to put it. I’m glad that people and critics have connected with the movie as much as they have, that they find something universal in its message. It was utterly lost on me, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I didn’t mind the experience of watching Rocky at all. The underdog story kind of got to me—the first time I saw him try to run up those steps, and he didn’t make it, I thought, “Oh, you’ll do it eventually! I’ve seen that.” Rocky’s fumbly little romance with plain Jane Adrian was really quite sweet.
The thing I did not like about the movie was that Stallone sold himself out to such an extent later. There’s a moment in Rocky, where Burgess Meredith the old trainer offers to coach Rocky since Rocky has been challenged by Apollo and suddenly has earning potential. Rocky shouts that the guy should have coached him when he was younger and could have made something of himself because now he’s all broken down. He’s approaching 30 and he’s not in top shape for the game anymore. It’s a poignant moment.
Until the sequels. Then he wins. He wins all the time. And by the fourth movie he’s pulling a damn bobsled and felling ancient trees. And then it’s thirty years later and he’s still fighting! Too bad Stallone didn’t have the guts to let the first Rocky speak for itself; he might’ve had a very different career if he’d made a different choice. But whatever, he didn’t consult me about it.
My favorite kind of boxer:
Notes for a Tuesday night
On Boxing Movies
I've had a super busy day, but even so, I'm forcing myself to watch Rocky right now so I can mark a movie off my list today. I don't have anything against the movie necessarily--I understand that the stupidness of the many sequels is not a reflection on the value of the first. But, I gotta say--I hate boxing movies in general. They are so sweaty and armpitty and...and what's with that goo they rub on the boxer's wounds? It's just the grossest sport in existence.
Raging Bull, which I did not much care for, is not at all exempt from this.
Epic Wednesday for July 29
Here is tomorrow's viewing schedule for Epic Wednesday: (Vietnam) War is Hell edition.
9:00am: Platoon
12:00pm: MASH
3:00pm: The Deer Hunter
Notable Quotables
I went to a money management seminar tonight on Case's campus (my parents will be extremely excited to hear this) and one of the people who ran the seminar said something very quotable. This is not a direct attribution, of course, but it was something along these lines:
"People want to say that the hit the economy took last year was just a speed bump. The truth is, it wasn't a speed bump, it was a pothole, and when we hit it, the tire came off."
Who knew a financial analyst would have such a flair for metaphor?