What are the greatest films of all time?
Archive for February, 2010
What other great boxing movies are there?
Feb 26th
Rocky is a 1976 American film written by and starring Sylvester Stallone and directed by John G. Avildsen. It tells the rags to riches American Dream story of Rocky Balboa, an uneducated but good-hearted debt collector for a loan shark in Philadelphia. Balboa is also a club fighter who gets a shot at the world heavyweight championship when the scheduled contender breaks his hand. Also starring in Rocky are Talia Shire as Adrian, Thayer David as George Jergens the fight promoter, Burt Young as Adrian’s brother Paulie, Burgess Meredith as Rocky’s trainer Mickey Goldmill, and Carl Weathers as the champion, Apollo Creed.
The film, made for only $1.1 million and shot relatively quickly (28 days), was a sleeper hit; it made over US$117.2 million and $225 million worldwide, the highest grossing film of 1976, and won three Oscars, including Best Picture. The film received many positive reviews and turned Stallone into a major star. It spawned five sequels: Rocky II, III, IV, V and Rocky Balboa.
In November 1975, Rocky Balboa is introduced as a small-time boxer and collector for Anthony Gazzo (Joe Spinell), a loan shark, living in Philadelphia. The World Heavyweight Championship bout is scheduled for New Year’s Day 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial. When the opponent of undefeated heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is injured, Creed comes up with the idea of fighting a local underdog and, because he likes Rocky’s nickname, “The Italian Stallion”, he selects the unknown fighter. He puts it in light by proclaiming “Apollo Creed meets ‘The Italian Stallion’”.
To prepare for the fight, Rocky trains with a 1920s-era ex-bantamweight fighter and gym owner, Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), while Rocky’s good friend, Paulie (Burt Young), a meat-packing plant worker, lets him practice his punches on the carcasses hanging in the freezers. During training, Rocky dates Paulie’s shy, quiet sister, Adrian (Talia Shire) who works as a clerk in a local pet store. The night before the fight, Rocky confides in Adrian that he does not expect to beat Creed, and that all he wants is to go the distance with Creed (which no fighter has ever done), meaning that lasting 15 rounds (the typical scheduled length of championship fights at the time) against him would mean he “… wasn’t just another bum from the neighborhood”.
On New Years Day, the climatic boxing match begins. Creed does not initially take the fight seriously, but Rocky unexpectedly knocks him down in the first round and the match turns intense. The fight indeed lasts 15 rounds with each fighter suffering many injuries; as the final round bell sounds with both fighters locked in each other’s arms, an exhausted Creed vows “Ain’t gonna be no re-match”, to which an equally spent Rocky replies “Don’t want one”. After the fight, Rocky calls out for Adrian, who runs down to the ring. As the ring announcer declares the fight for Apollo Creed by virtue of a split decision (8:7, 7:8, 9:6), Adrian and Rocky embrace while they profess their love to one another, not caring about the results of the fight.
The information above has been sourced from wikipedia and was submitted by one of our blog followers Plasterer London
Film resurrects champ but takes punch at journalism.
Feb 20th
I saw “Resurrecting the Champ” last week, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Part of its allure is that it combines two of my favorite subjects — boxing and the newspaper business.
The main reason, though, is that the movie sprung from a Los Angeles Times Magazine story written by J.R. Moehringer, a colleague in the Orange County office while he worked on the story 10 years ago.
Pretty cool to have your story become a movie. That’s probably what Moehringer once told himself.
On second thought. . . .
The screen version features Hartnett as a Denver sportswriter who meets a homeless man claiming to be a former ranked heavyweight contender. That’s a story in anybody’s newspaper, and it’s the one Moehringer pursued with gusto when he met his down-and-out subject in a Santa Ana park.
In the movie version, Hartnett’s story dazzles everyone until, oops, it’s discovered not long after that the guy isn’t really who he said he is.
And so we get a movie that beats up the newspaper business for being so hot for a story that it doesn’t bother to check things out.
The reporter is reduced to a bum in his own right who, even after learning the truth, is reluctant to publicly acknowledge it. He’s not only lazy; he’s unethical.
I kept thinking, Moehringer must have been perfectly thrilled at the filmmakers’ telling the world that the movie was inspired by his story.
It might make me wince, but I could handle a story about a wayward reporter. “Shattered Glass” did it very well. The Jayson Blair story is still out there to be told about the New York Times reporter with a propensity to invent things.
That’s why “Champ” is so irksome — in real life, the reality was exactly the opposite of what the movie depicts.
Rather than running with the story, as would be the temptation, Moehringer put so much time into it that he eventually learned — to his great distress — that the guy posing as former contender Bob Satterfield really wasn’t him.
I remember us talking in the office when he learned the truth. He acted as though the world had come to an end. All that time spent on the story, he lamented, for naught. He assumed the story was dead; I suggested he write a saga for a national magazine and describe how he’d been duped.
Relaunch as a new blog!
Feb 20th
Resurrecting the Champ is a 2007 drama film directed by Rod Lurie and written by Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett, based on the L.A. Times Magazine article by J.R. Moehringer. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Hartnett, and Alan Alda, among others. It was filmed in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.The film is set in Denver, Colorado.
Reception
The film received mixed reviews, with a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One reviewer praised the newsroom scenes as “authentic” and noted that the film was above all “about fathers and sons, a male weepie” rather than being primarily focused on journalistic ethics or sport.
In an article about the film Los Angeles Times reporter Dana Parsons has said that the film largely distorts the actual events. In the film the reporter, Kernan Jr. (who works for a major Denver paper), does not learn that Satterfield is an impersonator until after the article is published and then seriously considers ignoring this fact for the sake of his burgeoning career. In reality the actual reporter, J.R. Moehringer, did extensive research and discovered the boxer’s true identity long before any article was ever published. Moehringer then changed the focus of the article to “describe how he’d been duped.” Parsons goes on to express irritation that the film depicted journalism in such a disparaging light.
The film earned $3,172,573 in the United States and Canada.
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