Rocky

The First Lady and I watch TV together all the time. For every night we watch House Hunters, we watch a soccer match. She likes to watch ball on TV, and HGTV has grown on me over time. So we’ve found a nice balance. We signed up for an awesome cable TV plan that includes 450 channels and a lot of premium movie channels, so there’s always something on.

That said, she has placed two standing orders on what I want to watch while she’s around (rules don’t apply when she’s at choir practice or whatever). The first? No pro wrestling. It’s simple enough to follow… I went through a phase as a teenager and I can find enough YouTube videos of The Rock to keep me amused. No biggie here. Especially since I’m not in their target demographic anymore.

Number two: no Rocky movies. That’s right—The Italian Stallion has been outlawed.

With all the pay TV, It’s easy to find a Rocky movie in the mornings after the wife has gone to work. I’ve seen parts of the first five installments, and most of III and IV, all within the last few weeks. These are the two I saw when I started coming of age, since I was still a wee lad when the first two movies came out. I saw IV at the Cielo Vista 3-Plex, the one inside the mall, and remember the audience cheering when Balboa started pounding on Drago. 

I realize after the second film, it basically became a cash grab, as most sequels do. It doesn't stop me from watching. My thought is that the first two, and maybe the most recent (I don’t know if we can say ‘last’ yet) installment, Rocky Balboa, were about the acting and what people feel. III, IV, and V (which I don’t even watch) were about who knows what.

My favorite characters are Duke Evers and Mickey. They both seem so genuine to me. Both trainers, sure, but I’m a fan of every scene Duke is in, even the sappy one in IV, right before Rocky starts training in Russia. And Mick, well, is Mick. He’s flawed in his own way, but still dispenses truth in a blunt force trauma sort of way. Appropriate for a boxing manager, I guess.

There are also unanswered questions from the series—for one, I want  to know why there was not a Balboa-Lang 3 match. I know I’m not the first to ask, but Rocky got a rematch, so shouldn’t Clubber have gotten his chance? Besides, what kind of gate (not to mention movie ticket sales) would the third fight have gotten? That’s reason enough, by itself. Maybe it’s because the movie ended. I don’t know.  But it would’ve made a decent storyline for at least part of Rocky IV.

Another question I have is why Rocky just stands there and takes beating after beating from Creed, Lang, Drago, and Gunn. They all turn his face into tenderized meat, and Balboa just stands in and takes it.  It didn’t happen every time he fought (apparently), but it did happen every time there was a big title defense. It’s corny, but I can appreciate the symbolism— the stubborn determination of taking blow after blow and to still keep coming is something I try to emulate. Something like:

 But it ain't about how hard you're hit, it is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much can you take and keep moving forward.

In addition, I also think of Creed/Balboa I and Balboa/Lang I. The loser of those two bouts (I know Creed won, but he really lost) didn’t take their opponent seriously. Didn’t put in the maximum effort, and paid the price as a result.

The training montages are also pretty incredible—Vince DiCola and the video editing crew make me want to get out and go for a run. Great music, and hard work going on there. I even owned the IV soundtrack on cassette in the 90s. Might still be around here somewhere.

It’s not always well-acted, and the writing seems a little painful at times (no matter what), but I still watch, and that’s what they were after the whole time.