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Update: Events in my personal life have made me question whether perhaps my original title for this review, “When Eights Don’t Hate” was a little naive about the Classic American Enneagram Eight, you know—like, it’s natural, maybe, to want to let the ‘man of the people’ have his day in the sun, but it can lead to naivety and un-realism/cheerleading for kinda un-naive, un-idealist people who don’t exactly lead in with their heart, you know. Some things more closely related to the movie itself—the acquaintance who loves the movies, the scene where Rocky tries to tame the ‘tough girl’ from his neighborhood, right, among other scenes—kinda support that idea. (Re-assessment.) I mean, it’s not the worst movie, or the most unambiguous red flag, by any imagination, right: it’s not like saying, ‘Oh yeah, I saw “Get the Gringo”, it was Excellent’, right. It’s just that, there is a sort of naivety in America about the essential smash-and-grab personality type, given our history: and even though at the very same time we can sometimes often be extremely uptight about people who aren’t proper and classic-rich and uptight, you know. But there’s the mythology of the colonial governor’s mansion and the mythology of the colonial fighter, (the latter being a fighter not only against the British, lol), and they’re just—you know, very naive, and in the case of the fighter, about someone who isn’t even classically naive, right.
Maybe the obscure 70s Poitier adventure really WAS better, you know. The white guy in that movie—I’m sorry, I don’t know all actors—arguably WAS still the most important character, but, it was more of a collaboration, rather than a cheerleading thing, you know.
But either way there’s no way to make a perfect movie, or a perfect anything. Actually very few movies do I find to be exceptional, regardless of whether or not they are ‘classics’, you know. (shrugs) But anyway.
………..
In the Enneagram, the Eight is the lusty, aggressive number.
So yeah, I liked this, pretty uncontroversially, I guess, as much as the 1975 Sidney Poitier adventure that I liked but has been largely forgotten, right, (The Wilby Conspiracy), and I actually think that you would make yourself smaller by only liking serious, edgy, whatever it is—I mean, I hear Rocky won an award but it does seem pretty popular and simple, and not, you know, serious or edgy or whatever it is; I actually feel like I’ve seen too many, proportionally, of the serious adventures, the adventures into grandness, as opposed to other kinds of movies. The movie apparently does impress people, but not by trying to impress people, and I think that’s a valid style.
And it is rough, but it has heart…. And he’s not, I don’t know, the perfect man, the ideal man for marrying, even though in a different time, a time that probably hasn’t come yet, it’s easy to imagine him being one sort of ideal man…. If I were Isis, or even Aphrodite, I wouldn’t select him as my first round draft pick, right…. But if he’s not the ideal man, IMO, he certainly is A man, and that’s a valid choice, you know.
…. It’s funny, these kinds of guys can be jerks, you know: but I know I want to experience this movie, because if you had asked me before, when I was meditating on the “dark/scary” tarot cards in my way meditating through the Mythic Tarot, like if you had said, Suppose you drop a jar of processed corn syrup, basically, because you’re still spinning subconsciously about your co-worker (I work at a grocery store) there, and his, you know: a more accurate thing would have been, “Don’t mind me, Theodore; I’m just leaking from my leaky negativity canister: it leaks in between January and December…. Love you bro! Or I dunno: whatever”—that’s almost the sense of it—and something about being attacked triggers my skittishness, which turns off the basic life strength needed to hold a jar of corn goo, you know…. (I was only supposed to be picking up my check and was waiting for the bookkeeper to come back, so I didn’t have a bag on me.)…. But yeah, I knew even as I was writing about my decision to not flinch at the sometimes hairy, ugly disgusting nature of life that I wasn’t rooted in that yet, although somehow I didn’t think like Life was going to show me up within the hour or whatever…. Although people seem to perceive me as a very calm person, and will occasionally give me unsolicited positive feedback along those lines, sometimes while I’m wondering why my mind is like…. Making monkey noises while trying to tame a wild horse, basically…. Although I suppose I must have a lot of foundational calmness, despite the surface of my mind getting skittish or riled up easily—or maybe I’m just the philosophical equivalent of the pretty girl who never knows when she’s having a good hair day, right. But skittish, yeah—that’s why I gave up my horror movie hobby I once had—it just seemed like…. “The professor must have been discovering science before he got interrupted by the—ah! Jump scare!—“ You know, it didn’t feel like training for anything; jump scares are too intermittent and trivial to be consequential, although they are irritating…. But yeah, Leaky Canister wouldn’t have noticed anything angry about what I said, because I wasn’t angry…. But yeah: I do want to experience this movie. Carlos, son of the Jungfrau and Amadeus Mozart, once (apparently) said something like, “The best way to handle the other person’s negativity is to know your own”—or something like that, right….
So yeah: hairy, ugly, disgusting: that’s what you gotta get into sometimes, if you wanna live, right…. “Gawana kite?” Huh? (takes out mouth guard) “You wanna fight? C’mon; I’m Rocky—I’m a contender; (punch punch) (miscellaneous bar brawl fighter slang, lol)
You gotta get in the ring.
…. But yeah: even in boxing movies, there’s plot points and build-up, right…. Although, more so than in a horror movie or political drama, there’s a sense of, I don’t know, the brutally quotidian underbelly of the city, right. To you, it’s Thanksgiving. “But to me, it’s Thursday.”
As for the love interest, certainly whether you write a men-centric or woman-centric story, it’s a patriarchal society, and one of about half a century ago now, right. And part of basically any society is that some stories are men-centric, so what’re gonna do, right. In a story like that…. And I mean, you could even argue that they’re not setting up beauty standards for Everywoman, right: although I think you have to ask if it’s beneficial that the main girl be essentially mousy and inconsequential, right. She’s not a fighter; she’s not a contender. People push her around; she goes along with it…. And that scene with Rocky and the tough girl who wasn’t the love interest, right, that he lays down the Law of Reputation to, you know: there’s no fucking doubt in my mind that that scene is way too fucking long and way too fucking stupid…. If he’s a fighter, he should Want a girl with a little life in her; who tells fighters to obey the rules that church mice set up, right? Or do they do the punching that the church mice are afraid to do?
But yeah, it’s bordering on kinda an older movie in that sense, but because I wanted to appreciate a snow-white or whatever Creed called the idea, a snow-white fighter, alongside and to the same extent as the obscure Sidney Poitier/South Africa political adventure, I’ll say that this is not just a basic-good four stars movie, but I’ll give it that extra point and call it 9/10 for being the first movie in a successful franchise: because I liked the basic emotive idea and theme of it being about life in the hairy, ugly, disgusting underbelly of the city, day in day out, and how you gotta be a contender, you know.
…. But yeah: I was with my family, and especially when I was trying to follow my dad’s ineffective driving, I wanted to go back to the 70s so I could pull up besides a couple I didn’t know and say, Take her to the zoo~ you know. I understand the appeal of popular culture.
I wanted to have spies tell me petty details of my relatives’ lives, so I could say, I hear things. Don’t you think I hear things? ~They’d probs be duly impressed, right.
(cartoon old lady voice) I hear goosecap’s doing real good now—I think he runs the mafia.
My family is just like Gen Z—they slay…. Although more in the sense of, “You’re killing me, Smalls.” (face palm emoji)
…. But yeah, he’s not a bad guy. I don’t know that I admire him, but he’s not a bad guy. Certainly not as an individual. Maybe he is a little bad; we all partake in things that aren’t ours. But people told him education wasn’t for him, and, anyway, he needed to learn things that “our” schools don’t really teach, right.
But yeah it’s funny: they said “dago” in the 70s and they still half-meant it, right; although America always wants the guy on-the-bottom-but-not-quite-on-the-bottom to feel taken care of, right…. Although, what did they ever ~really~ do for him, right? Did they form in him an admirable character?
And, yeah: it’s a library DVD I was watching bit by bit, and Mercury is slowly easing into retrograde, right, but: the DVD got bad on me for a minute or two of the movie—and it took longer than a minute or two to figure out where the bad patch ended, probably five or six minutes—right as the classic-rich-guy asked Rocky if he “believed America was the land of opportunity”. I don’t know how you read that, assuming you believe in meaningful coincidence. Like in the real movie of life, does moment not happen, or does it maybe happen, but in the movie God makes about life, does a different music play, or something….
I mean, he’s not a “bad man” in himself: and it’s curious to see him represented as a good one, you know.
…. The depths of the man who thinks he’s no good who’s friends are telling him he can make it and he says that they’re no good and that he doesn’t think that they think that he can make it.
…. And yeah: it’s funny or whatever, right—Rocky wants to make out~ It’s A Good Idea; Rocky doesn’t want to make out~ It’s Not A Good Idea. Ok.
That said, I don’t know if I’d say “most”, but many, I suppose, men who are probably old enough to remember this movie (way back at the back end of the ethnic miracle in the 70s, right) are, in the context of this sorta thing, doing a somewhat good job—not punching people in the face, too often, etc. Some of the time, obviously.
Although I don’t mean “punching” literally exactly—boxing isn’t really my thing to watch, basically because the score/outcome is usually so arbitrary, you know; American football is probably at least as “violent” and to some extent it’s a perfectly amusing sport to watch, you know…. But yeah, boxing lends itself to storytelling, right….
…. We all have negative thoughts, but I do wonder if the message of the movie isn’t basically, You can think like a loser, feel like a schmuck—and you can still be the title character!…. All you need to do is learn this little trick by your fellow didn’t-used-to-be-white ethnic American…. Some of the lines are really crazy: you can’t make this crap up, right (crying laughing emoji) …. Although they almost let the girl be like, a real supporting character: it gets very close, right—so close…. And her brother is like the difficult-to-believe stereotype of the guy like that, so that he can take the fall and we like the title character better…. It’s all about the title character….
But it’s better than having your car get worked on, lol. “Hey Rocky tell that guy his car is ready!” (Rocky) Uh hello Mr. Nobody; my name is Nobody; I mean—Rocky. Your car is ready for pickup, will you be paying cash or card?….
~But yeah: it’s interesting perspective-for-life, you know. Sometimes you meet guys, masculine men, especially but certainly not exclusively older and/or white, and it’s like…. Yeah, that guy’s not doing so bad. Think of how he was educated by society, right? First he was told he wasn’t worth no education, and then he was educated in a bunch of bullshit ideas nobody who respected him ever told him to question, right….
The training scene was certainly entertaining.
…. And the other thing is, it’s not really paced properly, you know. My guess is that the fight should have ended about 80% of the way through a story of this length, and I’m over 80% of the way through, and it’s just, about, to begin, right. Really, it’s going to end, and there’s going to be just enough time for him to raise his hands up into the air and shout some vague, stupid thing, before the credits roll. There is a difference between fighting some kind of sports-fight to win at life and prove you’re a real champ or whatever, and being like an escape artist who literally just punches people sometimes, you know. Very indifferent storytelling; mediocre, really.
…. But yeah: no matter how American you are, epithet, the Irish-Italians will always be more American just by advertising their supposed countries of origin, right.
(draws self up) And that’s because this is the United States of America. (beat) (chuckles)
…. And yeah, it would be funny to make a list of the things Apollo/Apollo’s people promote so that we can have a laugh at their expense, right. (Money/fashion/Canada, etc.)
But don’t do that. You’ll get a headache. lol.
…. Life lessons: if you punch people enough, eventually, I don’t know, their whole face, right. It looks different….
But yeah, now we know what Rocky has to go through before he can feel the slightest emotion, lol….
…. …. “Do you hate anybody, Rocky?” No man, I don’t hate nobody. I don’t hate nobody, nothing like that. I don’t feel…. I don’t feel…. I mean…. Say, boss: what was the question?”
