Eye of the Tiger!

I’m in the midst of a five film long Rocky marathon on Spike. My thoughts…

• The first film is an immortal classic, as long as one can accept melodrama. If you try to approach Rocky with any sense of irony, you’ve already given away the game; there’s nothing to like. But if you’re open to it, there really are some outstanding scenes. My favorite is when Balboa meets Apollo Creed’s promoter, with the expectation that he’ll be asked to be a sparring partner. Stallone demonstrates with his response to the invitation to fight Creed that he can really act; it’s unfortunate that he’s so rarely displayed that acumen since the first film.
• I have little use for the second movie, as it seems not much more than a recapitulation of the first. There are some interesting things going on, I suppose, and in some sense the second film may be better than the third and fourth, but it simply fails to capture my interest.
• The third film is perhaps the single best “white guy fears for his manhood when threatened by aggressive black guy” document on record.
• SPOILER!!! Ivan Drago killed Apollo. Therefore, he deserves to die. There’s so much interesting going on in the fourth film that it deserves an entire post. Ivan Drago is a magnificent creation, and I find it endlessly fascinating that the Klitschko brothers essentially became Drago in the late 1990s and 2000s. By this point Rocky is nothing more than caricature, but since he wasn’t much more than that in the first film it’s not as if anything has been lost. I love the Gorbachev caricature at the end, and I also love the vision of industrial Soviet athletics. Frequent commenter MJD once said to me that the Olympics have lost interest since the end of the Cold War because they no longer represent the confrontation of Eastern methods against Western, and I think that the Western interpretation of that conflict is nowhere on better display than in this film.
• … I have to add that the James Brown sequence in the fourth movie is such a magnificent distillation of the right-wing conception of foreign policy. All of America’s cultural achievement are significant, except when we have to fight the Russians. Drago simply ignores the pageant and proceeds to kill the unprepared Creed, just as the Russians will mess us up if we devote too much attention to trivial pursuits such as art and music instead of preparing ourselves for the inevitable confrontation…