Rocky has been one of my most notable blind spots for a long time – one of the few Best Picture winners I hadn’t seen, and also the last holdout in the Flickchart Global Top 100. I’m not a big fan of boxing movies (even ones that people tell me are not really about boxing), so I avoided it for a long time. I knew someone would assign it to me in this challenge, and sure enough!
Unlike Gordon’s other film Animal House, which confirmed my unenthusiastic preconceptions, I actually ended up enjoying Rocky much more than I anticipated. I still didn’t really care for the boxing scenes very much, but there are really only two of them, one at the very beginning and one at the very end. And I can appreciate sports movies in general if they’re more about the indomitable human spirit than if they’re about the sport itself, or about ego.
