The Face Knife

Sometimes, cinema conspires to send you the right signal at the right time. Turner Classic Movies is running a “31 Days of Oscar” promotion, and I’ve been recording a lot of films I’ve never seen that I think I should probably watch. Rocky was one of those, and yesterday, on my 30th Birthday, I picked it out from the queue to watch, quite randomly.

With Sylvester Stallone being such a joke now, it might be hard for some people to recognize that this film is in fact very good. But the oddest thing about the film is how much I identified with Rocky. Here’s a lug, 30 years old, going nowhere, who is attracted to this:

for Christ’s sake, Adrian looks like a hipster. And she’s kind of a spazz. That’s pretty fucking close to my own “type.”

As the film went on, I became convinced that this year someone would give me MY title shot. Rocky is a very inspiring film in that way. And as luck would have it, today I saw an ad in the paper for Carl Weathers’s Stage Fighting Workshop….