Rocky II Review

So here’s the thing: the Rocky franchise sequels have a truly poor reputation, but revisiting the first sequel, Rocky II, reveals a film that is not so bad as might be remembered. If it were a standalone film, it would be a moderately successful little boxing movie, probably largely forgotten by now, but decent. As the sequel to the wildly popular and Best Picture Oscar-winning first film, it had a lot to live up to.

Essentially, Rocky II follows the formula of the first film almost to the letter. It exists purely to have a rematch between Rocky and Apollo, a recreation of the sports drama of the previous film. Like the first film, this one was written by Sylvester Stallone. However, this time he took on directing duties in addition and of course starred in the film. Carl Weathers returned as Apollo, as did all the other principals: Talia Shire as Rocky’s love interest, Adrian; Burgess Meredith as Mickey the trainer; and Burt Young as Adrian’s brother, Paulie.

Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rocky

It’s easy to forget after the deluge of increasingly absurd sequels through the 80s that Rocky – the original – as not only a great film, but is raw and gritty. I guess because I grew up on the sequels, the whole of the series sits in my memory as polished Hollywood filmmaking. And I even watched Rocky ten or fifteen years ago!

The movie truly feels like something out of another era. It’s low-budget, it’s seedy and dirty. Interestingly, I watched John Huston’s Fat City for the first time last year. That’s another 70s boxing flock that predates Rocky by a few years. I remember thinking how gritty it looked and felt and was shocked to find how similar the pacing and look of Rocky (at least in the first three quarters or so is to Huston’s film. I wonder if it was viewed by director John Avildsen and cinematographer James Crabe to achieve a real brown street look.

Creed Movie Review

In an age of reboots and sequels galore coming to theaters and television, it’s easy to become jaded by the lack of originality and craven capitalist instinct to cash in on a known product. Most of the time these projects wind up utter failures because the success of a piece of pop culture entertainment, be it movie, TV show, music, or book is as much the product of the culture in which it was produced and released as the actual quality of the work. You can get the band back together, but you can’t recreate the external climate that contributed to their greatness or the public perception thereof.

Southpaw Movie Review

Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw is a little chaotically scripted by Kurt Sutter with plot points that are occasionally unbelievable, nonsensical, or irrelevant, but it is Fuqua’s most restrained directing effort I can recall and contains enough moral uplift that it just crosses the line of what’s worth watching as a minor diversion.

Jake Gyllenhaal is impressive as Billy Hope, the light heavyweight champion of the world. Hope (and Gyllenhaal by extension) is physically imposing with a ripped torso and biceps. He has an anger control problem that remains mostly confined to the ring. So that he garners our sympathies, he’s got a beautiful wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), and daughter, both of whom he adores and dotes on. Maureen doesn’t want him to keep fighting because his style allows him to endure punch after punch until he’s angry enough to pummel his opponent. His manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) wants him to sign a three fight deal.

Fat City Movie Review

From the annals of long since forgotten films comes Fat City from 1972. Every calendar year is overloaded with movie releases that, even if modestly successful at the time, are destined to recede into memory as the years pass. The status of classic or cult classic is reserved fro only a handful of films each year. You need only go back eighteen years to find a Best Picture nominee called The Full Monty, for example. It was a small British film that found great success in the United States. But how many people think of it now? How highly regarded is it by those who do recall it? Now consider that film’s status with another twenty-five years of age. So The Full Monty is no Fat City, of course, if for no other reason than the latter was directed by John Huston, a Hollywood legend. But even his fame never elevated the film above the level of New Wave Hollywood footnote.

2018 World Cup Qualifying: Day 2

Today were the second legs of several home-and-away playoffs between the very lowest ranked teams in the Asian Confederation. The big news is that Bhutan, ranked lowest at 209th according to FIFA, defeated Sri Lanka to advance to Round 2.

India, Timor-Leste, Chinese Taipei, and Cambodia also advanced thus making Mongolia, Nepal, Macau, Brunei, and Sri Lanka the first teams officially eliminated from Russia 2018.

The second leg of the Yemen-Pakistan matchup has been postponed, to be played in a neutral location, following violence in Lahore where the match was to be played today. The first leg was also played in neutral territory due to security concerns in Yemen, who currently lead 3-1.

The six winners will be drawn into 8 groups of 5 teams each for home-and-away group play starting on 11 June.

Next up: CONCACAF begins first round play on 22 March with Barbados at home against U.S. Virgin Islands.

Foxcatcher Movie Review

One of the lesser known footnotes to modern Olympic history is the relationship of John Du Pont to the Olympic wrestling gold medalist brothers Mark and Dave Schultz. It’s a funny thing that no one pays much attention to the sport of wrestling outside of the quadrennial Olympic cycle, but there’s something so quintessentially American about the sport Of course it’s been around since the ancient games of Greece and eastern Europeans often excel at it, but the American ideal is intrinsically bound to it. It’s a sport based on physical confrontation one-on-one. You succeed based on your own abilities. It is a total make-it-or-break-it scenario. It’s about a fiercely intense combination of brute strength and cunning strategic skills. You have to be tough and strong, but also to outwit your opponent.

Senna Movie Review

If you go into the documentary Senna, about the late Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, directed by Asif Kapadia and written by Manish Pandey, with a blank slate as I did, you are likely to come away knowing more about this energetic and emotional young man than you could ever have learned from a book or series of articles about him.

The only thing I knew about Senna before was that he was from Brazil and that he died in the race car. I had no idea how old he was, how long he’d been racing before the accident, how many championships he’d won, or who his rivals were. Kapadia apparently did mountains of work combing through news and stock footage to be able to complete a total portrait of Senna’s Formula One career. He fills an hour and forty-five minutes of screen time without ever cutting away to a talking head. Every interviewed friend, family member, or colleague is presented in voiceover while we are treated to racing or practice footage, or those telltale ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments that reveal Senna’s emotions pre- or  post-race.

Short Cut Movie Review: The Armstrong Lie

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Documentarian Alex Gibney set out in 2009 to make a film chronicling Lance Armstrong’s improbable comeback after a four year hiatus following his astonishing record-breaking feat of winning the Tour de France seven consecutive times. What Gibney slowly discovered was that he was beginning to be viewed in some circles as making a kind of sycophantic fan film for a man many believed to be a liar, a cheat, and ruthless in the use of his power an celebrity to maintain a code of silence surrounding the rampant doping that we now know the U.S. team was engaged in.

When it later became clear that charges of doping were going to be inescapable for Armstrong and that he would be likely be stripped of his Tour titles, Gibney shifted the focus of the story and ended up producing The Armstrong Lie. He opens the film with Armstrong talking mere hours after his Oprah interview during which he admitted to the American public that he’d been doping nearly his entire professional career, specifically during all of his incredible Tour de France wins. This certainly wasn’t breaking news to anyone who’d ridden with or against him and not even to anyone who pays any kind of attention to professional cycling. What was shocking was that he actually, after years and years of vehement denials and standing behind Livestrong, the cancer awareness foundation for which he’d raised millions of dollars, owned up to it, putting his professional life even outside of cycling in jeopardy.

The film never really amounts to a great deal, mainly because most of us know the story. There’s no big revelation to be discovered, no unlikely turn of events that hadn’t already saturated the sports media for years. If nothing else, there’s a certain fascination in seeing how Armstrong handles himself now that he’s owned his culpability. There’s no tearful remorse and little to evoke sympathy for any plight. His biggest regret appears to be attempting the 2009 comeback, without which most people tend to agree he would have remained “clean” in the eyes of International Cycling. It’s also pretty difficult t condemn yourself when you know that every one of your rivals was using similar methods of illicit performance enhancement. For all the guys interviewed who have since received lifetime bans for doping, it was always just matter of fact that to compete at that level, doping is a must. It seems to me that’s where the interesting story is. What would it take to actually make the sport truly clean? And what happens t the guys who abandon their pursuit early on in the face of refusal to cheat.

25 Years Ago This Month: Field of Dreams Movie Review

It’s amazing how, not even being a fan of baseball, I can still be moved by the nostalgia that drips off Field of Dreams. I hadn’t watched it since I was a kid, and I remembered it as being sort of overly sentimental and hackneyed, but as an adult, as a grown man who has learned to appreciate America and history and our collective cultural consciousness, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s fantasy novel stands out as a modern cinema classic.

Short Cut Movie Review: Rush

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

It’s a result of severely reduced expectations that Ron Howard’s Rush managed to earn more than a little critical praise last year. As an example of its kind – the race car movie – it’s better than you might expect, but as an example of its kind more broadly – the sports movie – it’s sorely lacking in inspiration and spiritual uplift. The greatest sports movies draw their spectators in and make them stand squarely behind the hero so firmly and with such emotional investment that you can’t help but be overcome with emotion. I think of examples like Rocky or Breaking Away. Alternatively, they set up a tragic figure and become more a study of character and loss like in Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby. Of the two protagonists in Rush – James hunt, the lothario playboy played by Chris Hemsworth, and Niki Lauda, the cautious and meticulous champion played by Daniel Brühl – neither one achieves either of those apotheoses necessary for greatness of character.

25 Years Ago This Month: Eight Men Out Movie Review

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, is, on the one hand, an odd outlier compared to the rest of his work, and on the other, somewhat right in line with his plight of the working man sensibility. I’ve always been a great admirer of Sayles’ films. I especially enjoy the fact that he can make films illustrating the challenges of capitalism for laborers without being preachy or overtly socialist. He’s the more toned down American version of Ken Loach. In that respect, Eight Men Out fits right in because his version of the story, which is based on the book by Eliot Asinof, focuses more on the accused players as put-upon contracted laborers in thrall to a greedy owner who exploits their talents for financial gain. But amid his full body of work as writer and director it stands out as one of only two films he adapted from source material. So while he’s chosen to focus on the aspects that do appeal to him as a storyteller, the crux of the film is that it’s a historical sports movie, standing very much apart from his other work.

Japan Qualifies

I missed it the other day, but Japan became the first team apart from host nation Brazil to qualify for next year's World Cup. That leaves 113 nations vying for 30 spots.

Both Uzbekistan and South Korea (playing each other) can qualify with a win on the 11th.

Trouble with the Curve Movie Review

I have to give Clint Eastwood a lot of credit for his acting choices as he gets older. He has never shied away from playing his age, a rarity in a business that rewards youth and vigor. Roughly since Unforgiven he has continued to play characters whose age has some profound impact on the story. As Gus in Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood plays a baseball scout who faces irrelevancy by the new technologies and theories that have a way of creeping into the workplace.

My Collection: He Got Game Movie Review

Spike Lee’s He Got Game is a movie about America made by a man who loves basketball and the opportunity represented by this country. Stories of race relations have often driven Lee to make provocative films. Even when he’s not sharp, we see he has something interesting to say.

Lee is usually at his best when he keeps his focus on small communities in Brooklyn. He Got Game is set mostly in Coney Island, but the story has connections to the broader American community. The two main characters are diametrically opposed black men. Denzel Washington is Jake Shuttlesworth, a man with undying love for his children, but also a pent up rage that led to the death of his wife, for which he is now serving time in state prison. Ray Allen is his son, Jesus (pronounced like Jesus of the Bible), who is the number one high school basketball prospect in the country.

Undefeated Movie Review

Undefeated is a documentary of such surprising power and emotion I was left stunned in my tracks. I didn’t know anything about it before I walked in except that the poster indicated it was about football. If you want a similar experience to my own, then consider this a spoiler warning and stop reading now.

It tells the story of the Manassas High School football team in West Memphis, Tennessee, under the direction of volunteer coach Bill Courtney. I stress volunteer because the film is always careful to point out when the coaching staff involved donates their time to this horribly underfunded program in a city all but forgotten by the rest of the state. Not that any government has an obligation to fun sports programs in public schools. I understand completely the decisions that are made to cut programs for lack of funding even when those programs can be proven to give kids reasons to stay in school and make something of their lives.

Real Steel Movie Review

Real Steel takes a rather unbelievable premise and turns it into some kind of Over the Top retread. Okay, that’s a flippant comparison because after taking a guy who drives a truck around the country to participate in a competition that must appeal to a niche market and throwing in that guy’s estranged son into the mix until they forge the bonds of a relationship there’s not much to compare really. It also must be said that Real Steel is a far better film than that dreadful Sylvester Stallone vehicle from the 80s.

Miracle Movie Review: A Defining Sports Moment on the Big Screen

You may ask yourself what inspired me to revisit a not entirely memorable, though worth seeing at the time, sports movie about a great sports moment from 31 years ago. It was actually seeing Warrior several weeks ago. Both films are directed by Gavin O’Connor and I was curious to see how his nearly excellent sports film from this year compares to one from 7 years ago.

It is perhaps the greatest moment in the history of sports. It at least makes the top five. The United States Olympic Men’s Hockey team did the unfathomable by defeating the Soviet Union in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. There is hardly a more galvanizing moment in American sports history than that one, as 20 college-age amateur hockey players took to the ice and brought down the behemoths, those mythical beasts of the USSR who were regarded as the best hockey team in the world by far and had won the gold in the previous four Olympic games. What most people forget or treat as an afterthought just as Gavin O’Connor’s 2004 film Miracle does is that the US had to play and win a game against Finland to take the gold medal. Beating the Soviets was a great moment, but it would have fallen into the recesses of bittersweet memories of almost-made-its had our boys not won that next game.

Moneyball Movie Review

I’ve never really had any great love for the game of baseball. But the one time I remember really getting into it was the post 9/11 playoff season when it seemed like a Yankees victory in the World Series would magically heal the emotional wounds left over from that tragic day; when, in spite of the still-smoldering Ground Zero, we were able to focus on something that is otherwise meaningless in the grand scheme of things, whose very meaninglessness was all the more reason to assign more significance than it would otherwise merit.

We watched together at work as the Yankees took the ALDS against the Oakland A’s after dropping the first two games at home. Then they went on to defeat Seattle in the ALCS, but lost the Series to Arizona in 7 games. Nothing has brought back memories of that season more than Moneyball, Bennett Miller’s first feature since 2005’s Capote. Moneyball forced my perspective on the Division series to change, positioning the audience into empathizing with Oakland, three times on the brink of knocking down the mighty Yankees, but unable to make their $40M payroll compete with the Yanks’ eleventy billion. Who on the east coast knew that 3000 miles away, there were legions of fans immensely disappointed by the result of that Game 5? In the wake of disaster, New Yorkers certainly didn’t care. Watching the opening scenes, instead of reliving the joy of seeing the Yankees win, I felt the frustration and defeat of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the A’s, as he sits alone contemplating how he can possibly manage a team with less than one third the payroll of the biggest behemoth in professional sports.

Warrior Movie Review

I might describe Warrior as equal parts Rocky and Miracle. In fact, during the final contest we even hear the sports commentator shout something akin to the famous, “Do you believe in miracles?” spoken by Al Michaels at the close of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” when the USA defeated the Soviet Union in ice hockey in the Lake Placid Olympics. Miracle, based on that event, was also directed by Gavin O’Connor, the helmsman of Warrior.