Rocky II
By Peter John Gardner
An paraphrased excerpt from a conversation I had last week with Kim:
"I'm thinking about abandoning Project Stallone."
"Why?!"
"I don't know. It's starting to bore me, nobody's really giving me any feedback, and I feel like I'm just repeating myself with a lot of these entries."
"You can't do that! I, for one, love reading them!"
"Yeah, but..."
"Stallone would keep pushing forward"
"Yeah, but..."
"What would Stallone do?"
Stallone would keep doing what he does best and with Rocky II, he does just that. In the first sequal to Rocky, Stallone returned to the character that he plays best after the dismal failure of his two post-Rocky forays into projects that were intended to sell him as a legitimate actor. Audiences didn't buy it. So here we see a pivotal moment in the career of Stallone in which Sly starts to play "safe" roles.
This installment picks up where the last one left off. Actually, it begins with the last ten minutes of the first one. We see the final fight between Rocky and Apollo Creed again (just in case you forgot the outcome), and the story picks up with Rocky's post-fight interviews and his trip to the hospital afterwards.
It turns out Rock-o might have suffered brain damage from being punched in the head one too many times. Kudos to Stallone (he wrote and directed this one) for actually providing an explanation as to why the character seems slightly retarded.
With that news in mind, Senor Balboa decides to retire from boxing and live the good life with Adrian. He buys a new car, that which he can't drive, some fancy-shmancy jewelry for Adrian, and a new house. As fate, or the plot, would have it, our hero does not know how to budget, and is forced to go to work in order to pay the bills. He works briefly at the meat processing plant where he used to beat the shit out of dead cows, and finally settles for a job as a grunt at Mick's boxing club.
Meanwhile, we find out that Adrian is pregnant. Not one to break tradition, Rocky still seems to be wooing her even after they've gotten hitched and gotten their groove on. "Yo, you like zoos? Yo, you know, I love the zoo. It smells so nice here when it snows. Yo. You know? You wanna hear a funny joke? I got tons of them. Yo."
Do lines like that work on women? Speak up, ladies.
Summing things up, Creed wants a rematch because even though the judges declared him the winner in the first fight, everyone else in the world felt the Rocky had won the fight. Creed is pissed. Meanwhile, at the boxing club, the young upstarts are harrassing Rock and calling him a coward and "The Italian Chicken" for staying out of the game and ignoring Creed's calls for a rematch.
It's not until Adrian has a near death experience while giving birth to Rocky Jr. that Rocky regains the urge to fight, and win, against Apollo Creed.
Like Rocky, I too felt disillusioned with not only Project Stallone, but other aspects of my life as well. I recently got rejected for journalist job with NLA, and it devastated me. I felt worthless. I felt like I had no marketable qualities, and I was destined to live the starving artist lifestyle for the rest of my life.
Then I watched this film last night.
Returning to what one does best may be repeating yourself in some aspects, but it's also playing to your strengths and selling yourself for what you do best. I'm sticking with Project Stallone even if it kills me, and it's definitely starting to hurt.
And so I got turned down for a higher paying job...so fucking what? It's not like that's the only one out there that fits my qualifications. Sure, I was bummed out for about a day, but Stallone has taught me to not give up. I'm not a scientist, preacher, dog whisperer, economist, doctor, or astronaut. I'm a writer, for better or worse, no matter how good or bad it may be. And just like how Rocky is a fighter and he "needs to be around it", I can't abandon things just because I get bored or uninterested.
I don't really have a satisfactory conclusion to this piece other than I am fucking ready to journey into what is now the downward spiral part of Stallone's career. From here on out, it's going to be the cheeseball action flicks, unnecessary sequels, and ill-advised comedies that have come to define our perception of Stallone. At the end of this odyssey, I will probably be just as beat up as Rocky is at the end of the climactic fight with Apollo Creed, but I will be calling out to you all, "YOOOO!! I DID IT!"
And then I will wrestle Hulk Hogan.
