Creed (2015) (1 Viewer)

[Todd H]

Just a wonderful film. Great performances all around. Think I got a little something in my eye an number of times. Here's hoping it gets some love during the awards season.

 

[Elizabeth S]

I thought the movie was terrific!


It's certainly very poignant seeing an aged Rocky bearing the weight of all his losses. But it felt personally poignant, because I can recall seeing the first one in the theater and you find yourself thinking back to your own life back then and your own journey to this point watching this film. I've never really had that feeling with any franchise before.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I finally got a chance to see this tonight, and I enjoyed it very much. The original Rocky is still the best, but this is definitely in the series' top-tier along with Rocky Balboa. Part of what holds it back is that boxing just doesn't occupy the same place in the cultural consciousness that it did in the late seventies when the first film came out. Part of it is that Michael B. Jordan's body type keeps him out of heavyweight contention, so the title bout isn't the top prize that the Rocky title bouts were.

On the other hand, it's got the best acting of the entire series. The characters in the earlier films were strong personalities. There were some incredible human moments that came out of those personalities, but the characters themselves were larger than life. You see Rocky Balboa, you know exactly what type of person he is. You see Mickey Goldmill, you know exactly what type of person he is. Same really with Adrian, Paulie, Apollo and even Duke.

The characters here feel like real people that don't as easily fit into archetypal boxes. Adonis Johnson reveals a lot of different notes. Bianca reveals a lot of different notes.

The interesting thing is how the film handles Rocky himself. It understands that he's an archetype, with certain expectations attached, and it embraces that rather than runs from it. His unique way of expressing himself is as well-rendered as any of the films that Stallone wrote. But then these discordant notes come in that deepen him in interesting ways. When he gets the cancer diagnosis, you feel from Stallone's performance just what a hell it was for him to watch Adrian's dignity be stripped away piece by piece by the ineffectual treatments, in a way you didn't in Rocky Balboa when she was already gone. Intermixed among the boxing, you see Rocky attending to the mundane details of running a restaurant and keeping a small business afloat. The graveyard scene was a direct reference to the similar scenes in Rocky Balboa, down to the way Maryse Alberti shot it, but it was a scene that got the character of Rocky so exactly right than it made my heart hurt, and made me smile, all at the same time: his warmth, his gentleness, his loyality, his idiosyncratic quirks, the complete ease between himself and the world around him.

Talia Shire was brilliant as Adrian in the first five films, but it was frustrated me that her character arc was essentially to go from being Paulie's doormat to being Rocky's cheerleader. Her story was always defined by the men in her life. I love that Bianca is someone with her own hopes and her own dreams, and that when Donnie puts his ego and insecurities ahead of consideration for her professional ambitions, it's a pretty serious dealbreaker. When Donnie tells her why it happened, she takes the time to really hear him out and listen to what he's telling her, and she does care about it, but it still doesn't make up for what he did and she doesn't let him off the hook for it. It's Rocky that brings her back into Donnie's life. Some of my favorite moments in the film are the three of them in Rocky's worn out old house. Rocky loves both of them, sees the value in both of them, and makes sure to tell them. There are a lot of dehumanizing forces at work in the world, especially at this particular moment in history, and Rocky is a humanizing force.

So is Phylicia Rashad as Mary Anne Creed. When the film opens, Adonis is another written-off degenerate, biding his time until he can make the jump from the foster care system to the prison system. Mary Anne enters his cell and speaks with him like a human being. She is honest with him, doesn't condescend to him, treats him like he is someone worthy of having a conversation with. Why then, 12 years after he was born? Who knows. Maybe it took her that long to discover his existence and track him down. Maybe by that point, the last of her own children had moved on with their lives, and she wanted a piece of her husband home with her. Either way, she treated him like a person, so he started to see himself as a person, and achieved the kind of success that the first twelve years of his life told him was impossible. But having done that, having been plucked from extreme poverty to significant privilege, having made a respectable career utilizing his intellectual talents, the part of him that picked fights in juvenile detention still wasn't quieted.


Rashad navigates all of it brilliantly. I completely believed Mary Anne's journey in this film, especially since she was mere feet away when her husband died in the overly bombastic Rocky IV. And then, at the end, when she's watching the fight on television, you believe she's a boxer's wife. She isn't watching it passively, she's watching it actively. She knows exactly what dynamics are at play every step of that fight, and exactly what the implications are. And even though she did everything in her power to keep the boy she raised as her son from the ring, you also get a glimpse of what animated her about Apollo in the first place. I have no complaints about Sylvia Meals's performance in the role for II and IV, but Rashad was just great here.

 

[Malcolm R]

"Creed" crossed the $100M mark in domestic gross this weekend.

 

[Tino]

Sure hope Jordan and Stallone get Oscar noms.

 

[Tim Glover]

Really loved this film and look forward to owning it on Blu-ray or 4K BD

 

[Nigel P]

Really good film. I had one of my all time favourite cinema experiences watching part 4 at my long since disappeared home town fleapit as an 11 year old. The whole crowd was chanting Rocky, Rocky and we just don't do that sort of thing being all English and reserved and what have you. 30 years later and that character still means so much, that seeing him have to deal with having cancer after already losing so much is hard. Still coming to terms with Han and Leia not living happily ever after and now this, my childhood has taken a pounding in the last month.

 

[Sam Posten]

Cuff and Link live!