Rocky Balboa (VI)
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.