SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

In an era when a boxing movie is more exciting than the real life heavyweight division, Rocky Balboa comes through in a thoughtful, entertaining and poignant way.  We love the Stallion because he was a loser picked by the champ for a showboat bout back in 1976.  Everyone expected him to get slaughtered, but his heart and guts prevailed and he went the distance with Apollo Creed.  The film was a smash success and mirrored Sylvester Stallone’s unlikely rise to Oscar winning writer and star of his own brain child, a project everyone wanted to take away from him on the way up.  The bum from Phillie streets connected with audiences in a broad and impactful fashion to achieve almost instant mythic cultural status.  Rocky is one of the great American characters in cinema, a simple man with a big heart going for  his dream in an often ugly world.  He made believers out of all of us the way champions do, listening only to himself when people laughed and spat on him.  Rocky’s easy charm and good will humanized the desperately fighting beast within which made him such a lovable creature, one you wanted to root for when everyone was there to watch.   The audience missed this man’s quiet moments in Rocky sequels that Stallone returns to his character in the succesful Rocky Balboa.

We all have a piece of Rocky in us.  I was six when he came out and I’ve used the word Rocky a million times in thousands of ways, not least of them jokes.  I make art for a living, my business is a blood sport, so inspirational characters like Rocky pepper my existence, remind me I’m really not alone, and push me to excel.  Rocky sequels became fodder for masses over time as his wealth came and went and his challenges got outlandish.  But Mr. Stallone reminds us in this last installment he wrote and directed why American cinema ought to appreciate him and why we’ll always love his alter ego Rocky.  I will say that I think Invincible still might be my favorite sports movie of 2006, a film about another unlikely Phillie hometown hero Vince Papalo, who walks on and tries out for Dick Vermeil’s Eagles in the Seventies.  Here’s a good Phillie double feature for all sports fans, even if you’re a New Yorker.  Bitter rivalries why?  Always so close, same divisions, tough teams… and respect in the end.