Sly

Quentin Tarantino dedicated two chapters of his book, Cinema Speculation to Stallone movies. Rocky, the phenomenon that turned Sly into a superstar. And Paradise Alley, his wrestling follow up that bombed. 

It’s probably not surprising that an authorized Stallone documentary spends a serious amount of time on Rocky and like 30 seconds on Paradise Alley. 

Tarantino is big presence here as he explains how audiences reacted to Rocky. Spoiler, you could hear them cheering in the street. He also walks us through how the Rocky movies, written by Stallone, often reflected what he had to say about his life at the time. 

There are some things here that were new to me as a longtime Stallone fan. I didn’t know just how rough his childhood was and the documentary focuses on the abuse and trauma he suffered from his father.

It gives Stallone a lot of credit but I still think he will never be given his due as a great writer. Yes, he was a great writer in service to making himself look great as an actor but Rocky and First Blood are incredible. They are flicks that reach the pinnacle of what movies can be. 

After spending a significant amount of time on the rise the movie pretty much ignores all the dreck Stallone made. I guess Sly didn’t want to talk
about them. 

Copland gets a little shout out. And man, Copland is one of the great crime movies of the 1990s. It gets dismissed as a bomb and it was, but it’s also up among the Stallone performances that you simply must see. 

The documentary is content to let Stallone walk you through his career and he explains some of the thinking behind his choices. 

“Sure it’s ridiculous, but it’s … theatrical,” is going to be my answer for every bad decision I make from here on out. 

Stallone is dealing with aging. How could it all have gone by so fast? How can we already be here? 

Anyway, this is a fun bit of movie star history but it’s not terribly inciteful. It does confront the abuse Stallone faced and you can sense he’s still working out those issues. He’s also confronting the choices he made along the way. 

I know a man who told me he once apologized to his wife and child because he was never home. The apology was nice, I’m sure, but you can never get that time back. 

The doc makes much of the fact that Stallone is moving. He acts like he needs a fresh start. But his kids are grown and that old house, full of statues and memorabilia, must have seemed like a tomb. 

A journalist went to visit Muhammad Ali in his old age. The writer discovered that Ali was keeping all of his belts and other items from his legendary career in a barn. 

“I had the world,” he said. “And it was nothing.”