'Creed'

Rocky In Retirement

Maybe the most apt description is Nietzsche's "eternal return". At points in the past a Rocky sequel only elicited groans as Sylvester Stallone trotted out one of his trademark roles. Over in the USA of course, Rocky movies are a cult thing so it's not surprising that while Stallone lives, there's always another bite at the same cherry. It's a mixed blessing that this film is being cast as a 'spin off' from the Rocky movies.

The big difference this time is the Rocky isn't going in the ring to fight any more; he's handed that part of the mantle to the next generation where the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed goes in to fight. It's pretty much the same story arc as the original Rocky, much like 'The Force Awakens' is a beat-by-beat retread of the original 1977 Star Wars. I guess the world needed another Rocky movie just like it needed more Star Wars. It's just hard to believe that there is so much mileage in this franchise.

If you need a spoiler alert, you haven't been paying attention to Rocky movies or this blog.


What's Good About It

For once, it's not all on Rocky, and so it's not all on Sylvester Stallone to carry the film. The film has cast him as the elderly trainer, and so Rocky Balboa is there to pass on Mick's expertise. The slurred speech and the tired diction suits Rocky-as-old-geezer and lends credence to the notion that he probably took a hundred too many punches to the head.

Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed is the real revelation. He carries the film and does it with great ease. There's something cheesy about the whole movie, but then that whiff cheese goes all the way back to the original 'Rocky' movie so you just go along with it. The film is relatively short on fighting scenes that go on interminably. Instead we spend time exploring the life of Adonis outside the ring quite a bit.

What's Bad About It

'Rocky' movies aren't exactly works of penetrating realism. This film blithely follows in the tradition of a formulaic and relatively haphazard rationale for a big fight to happen in the third act.

Also, I did some maths. The events of 'Rocky IV' where Apollo Creed dies take place 1985. Which means, at youngest Adonis is 30. I know Rocky Balboa kept winning but 30 is a bit old for this story. The film glosses over it but if this Adonis character is indeed 30, he's behaving more like a 22year old than a 30 year old. As good as Michael B. Jordan is in the role, he's not exactly Mr. Believable thanks to the tenuous set up whereby he is Apollo Creed's illegitimate son, conceived just before Creed's death.

The film might have been better had the main character not been related to Apollo Creed at all, but is a fraud claiming to be the son of Apollo Creed just to get Rocky to help him.  It would have had better gags and a decent (pardon the pun) punchline when Rocky finds out and Adonis says "man, can't you do the maths?"

What's Interesting About It

This is tough. More than any other franchise other than 'Rambo', these Rocky movies might be the least surprising, biggest crowd-pleasing movies going. As Stallone famously said "they call it show business, not show art". Naturally it follows that one really ought not to expect any surprises but that abandoning of hope also promises that these films are not terribly interesting or insightful.

There is nothing in this film that we didn't know already about the character of Rocky Balboa or the universe in which he inhabits, or for that matter boxing itself. The film offers nothing new or intriguing about character or obsession or repression or fixation or race relations or the joys of getting drunk when celebrating or crying when something bad happens. There is absolutely nothing of interest or note. One wonders just for whom exactly this film was made.

Instead of trying to find what's not there, I might offer this up: The Rocky movies as a whole, including this spin off, gives us a boxer character with remarkably bad instincts about people and things, and an intuition that is best described as blunt rather than sharp. Astoundingly, the character survives all these dramatic moments in the boxing ring, in spite of his tremendously bad instincts and blunt intuition. Then, in his old age, he runs into a youngish boxer with equally bad instincts and blunt intuition, who he then takes under his wing to take on a champion - and just as it happened with him, the youngish boxer doesn't win.

There is that soaring moment just as they go into the final round where we hear the theme from 'Rocky' soar, one last time. It wasn't exactly an interesting moment, but it was for a brief moment, an emotional moment.

It's A New World Of Cinema

Australian Film On The Comeback Trail

It's taken 10years since the pit of despair leading up to the GFC, but the Australian Film industry seems to have turned around this year. I remember that pit, and long time readers would remember just how bad things got. Since then, the direct investment into film by the government has been rolled back substantially, while the high dollar knocked out the service industry side of the Australian Film Industry, but just as some flowers bloom in the desert at some point, Australian films had a bumper crop this year.

This has been a record year for Australian movies, which have collectively taken $84 million at the local box office, or 7.7 per cent of the total. That's the biggest result ever in raw dollar terms, and the best share since 2001.

What makes it truly remarkable is that just a year ago the local industry looked to be in terminal decline. 

In 2014, Australian movies accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the total Australian box office. Only once since 1977, which is as far back as the Screen Australia database goes, has it been lower; the 1.3 per cent share in 2004 makes that Australian cinema's annus horribilis. 

What's more, last year's result ($26.2 million) came on the back of a poor 2013 as well ($38.5 million, 3.5 per cent share). Had it not been for The Great Gatsby ($27.4 million), 2013 would have been a complete disaster.

You have to give credit where it's due, though it's hard to say just where it goes exactly. 

One of the reasons some of last year's Australian movies failed at the cinema was that people were given scant opportunity to see them. A week or two on a dozen or so screens with scant marketing barely counts as a release strategy when you're up against Hollywood movies on 500 screens with saturation advertising. But that's the fate of many an Australian movie. 

Those that cut through this year, though, tended to benefit from a wide release and hefty promotional spend. The Water Diviner went out on 299 screens, Oddball 289, The Dressmaker 384 and Mad Max: Fury Road a Hollywood-sized 542 screens. 

A wide release means a distributor can target their campaign around a narrow window of time, maximising bang for buck. Shane Jacobson did such a sterling job talking up Oddball it's doubtful anyone in Australia didn't know at least a little about the film by the time it hit cinemas.

But it takes a certain kind of product for distributors to have the confidence to go wide: an appealing story, star talent, good production values. This year's batch ticked those boxes, "but you can't reverse engineer it", says Screen Australia chief Graeme Mason. "If the distributors are spending millions of dollars – literally – putting it out there, they're not going to do that unless they see something commercially appealing in it."

So maybe it wasn't necessarily the quality, it was the marketing spend that backed a more palatable crop of films. In any case, you take any sign you can grab. Maybe there is a case to be made that Australian Cinema is at long last on the comeback trail. 

Paul Byrnes Still Sucks (Sun Still Rises In The East)

I find Paul Byrnes a terribly condescending moralist, mostly because his film cries in the SMH are more moral analyses than actual film crits. And so, he made a moral judgment about Sylvester Stallone and his films years ago, but for some reason he was moved to admit he was wrong about Stallone.

Stallone turns 70 next year and maybe this is a good time for me to apologise to him. For a long time, I thought he was just a meathead, like some of the characters he invented.
When I started writing about movies in 1984, he had become a poster boy for the American right. Ronald Reagan himself declared that Rocky was a Republican. Stallone had already made Rockys II and III, and he had done the first Rambo film, First Blood – which was actually pretty good. In 1984 he was paired with Dolly Parton in a country musical, Rhinestone Cowboy. Some wit declared it the meeting of the two greatest racks in show business. He was becoming a joke, but a very successful one. 

I think now that I was wrong. It's not just the phenomenal box office of his combined films, although that is a lump (more than $4 billion in grosses, adjusted for inflation). Stallone has had a major impact on the way movies are made now – in the way action montages are put together, the speed of the editing, the use of music. He has had an impact on how Americans see themselves, reaffirming their sense of right and might; he has redrawn the Hollywood map in terms of longevity, although he has had plenty of helpers there – from Eastwood and Schwarzenegger and all the other action has-beens who won't die, most of whom turn up in Stallone's Expendables franchise, another phenomenally successful Stallone idea that defies all notions of good filmmaking.

Ugh. Did you see what he did there? He's apologising for being wrong but still puts the boot in. You sort of wonder on what grounds the film critic has been endowed or earned such moral disdain for the practitioner - any practitioner - let alone Sylvester Stallone. I'm not a big fan of Stallone, but I've never held him in contempt or this low in a moral judgment sense. More so, I just don't get the impetus to give this mea culpa just because 'Creed' shows Stallone is still a decent actor given the chance. We knew that long ago, all the way back when the the original 'Rocky' came out. It's not some new discovery or revelation. 

If he's been dissing Stallone all these years even though he knew Stallone was a perfectly fine leading actor all this time, it strikes me as the height of intellectual dishonesty to mount such an apology. Paul Byrnes finally saw a movie with Stallone in it that he actually liked - and felt embarrassed enough to write an apology. It's truly pathetic. 

One More Rambo Movie Says Sly

Last Blood?

It seems redundant, but I guess built in redundancy is the name of some sort of good design. Sylvester Stallone is talking about doing another Rambo movie.

Sylvester Stallone is to star in another Rambo movie.

The 63-year-old actor is set to reprise his role as Vietnam veteran John Rambo for the fifth time next year in a film which will see his character battling drug and people traffickers on the US-Mexico border.

Rambo, which was released in 2008, had initially been billed as the final instalment in the series.

A source said: “The character obviously fascinates Sylvester and he feels there's more life in him yet.

“This time Rambo will be taking on drug lords and human traffickers after the kidnap of a young girl. Like all the previous films it's bound to be very violent but the character always had big box-office appeal.”

Aiyah.  Maybe they should just re-boot the Rambo series/franchise with another actor and another director. I don't know what good it would do to have Sylvester Stallone whip his body into some semblance of shape to do this thing one more time. The last time he did it wasn't all that convincing.