ROCKY 2 IS AN AWESOME FILM. HERE'S WHY.

It's been way too long since I posted on this blog, but I am going to make a commitment to update it regularly. 

I have been watching Rocky 2, and thought I would take a moment to post about something I noticed about Sylvester Stallone.  I noticed during the scene where Rocky is working at Shamrock Meats lifting the sides of beef and doing all that physical labor that Stallone looks genuinely tired from doing the work.  It's not like an ego thing where he wants to show everyone how strong he is, but rather he is acting in a way that is incredibly realistic and makes you feel for Rocky. 

In Rocky 2, Rocky retires and tries to make a living doing commercials and using his star power as a boxing contender.  When he is unable  to successfully do this, he tries in vain to get an office job.  Finally, he resorts to working at his brother in law Paulie's old job, since he gave Paulie his old job collecting debts for Mr. Gazzo the local mobster.  Throughout the job defeats, you can see the hope drain from Rocky's face and demeanor.  Stallone really gets a bad rap for his acting, but if you really watch him in his movies, he can really act well.  You can tell that he didn't phone in his performance, even in the scenes that one could easily take for granted, such as the meat warehouse scene. 

This post is going to be a bit short, since it is pretty late and I seem to have the flu, and also because I want to finish watching Rocky 2.  In truth the movie is one of my favorites not only because of the story, but it also has quite a personal meaning to me as I watched it with someone quite close to me one new years eve and I have an incredibly fond memory of this to say the least.  I was also given the dvd as a gift some years back, and it remains one of my favorites for both critical and sentimental reasons.  But enough of the waxing sentimentally, and back to the critical response to this amazing film. 

Rocky 2 stands out as an amazing sequel because it literally picks off where part one ended and does so seamlessly, and it is also an incredible coup for Sylvester Stallone, who wrote and directed the film, further solidifying him as one of the Hollywood elite. 

In my next blog post, I plan on comparing Stallone to his contemporaries in the action genre, and as you may well imagine, Mr. Stallone fares well ahead of these other leading men.