Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...moment the bad guys are dead, and just as the old man faced them down in True Grit, so did the actor face down the last of his doubters, at once affectionately parodying and paying tribute to the American heroes he had played in more than 200 films. The film brought John Wayne an Academy Award and a sort of universal indulgence to do, say or be anything he wanted in his sunset years...
Rocky II is the most solemn example of self-deification by a movie star since Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born. Though ostensibly the story of Rocky's marriage to mousy Adrian (Talia Shire) and his rematch with World Heavyweight Champ Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), the film is not overly concerned with matters of romance or pugilism. The pivotal scenes all illustrate, in picture-book fashion, the hero's saintliness. We learn that Rocky loves animals: "I love animals," he announces early on, and then proceeds to devote a sizable amount of screen time...
There might have been fun in Rocky II, but not with Stallone serving as writer and director. During its first half, the film offers tedious exposition that exists solely to keep the big fight at bay. The script's stalling techniques are random and far fetched. Stallone tries to create drama out of Rocky's inexplicable inability to gain steady employment, his domestic foibles and, finally, out of his wife's simultaneous bouts with childbirth and coma. These developments are so poorly conceived that Adrian's brother (a newly slim Burt Young) must dart...
Stallone uses montages more than any other director since Eisenstein; he does not seem to understand that movie cameras are now mobile. All the performances are italicized and phony, a sad descent from the original Rocky. At one point in the new film, Rocky balks when a hustler suggests the marketing of a "Rocky doll"; yet, that is exactly how Stallone has merchandised himself here. The Rocky we see in Rocky II is best suited for mounting on a dashboard...
...reputation. Instead, Director Richard Lester, a master of off-the-wall historical japery (The Three Musketeers), has chosen to make Butch and Sundance an exercise in style; he tries to find the cinematic equivalent of oral tradition and legend making, or, less fancily, yarn spinning. This means that the film's pace is leisurely and digressive; dramatic incidents that might be told melodramatically are rather flat. The result may be disappointing to people expecting the brisk cheekiness of the first Butch-Sundance adventure...