When You're Not Sure If It's Real or Not

You know, the saying about how the hero lives long enough to become the villain is pretty accurate in its own way, but I wonder about a corollary that if you live long enough you see movies about the creation of the original movie.

Or in this case, about Sylvester Stallone getting the original Rocky movie made.

It feels somewhat surreal seeing this trailer, because I've seen "remakes" and "resets" that were basically comedies masquerading as a movie or television show reboot but were there to poke fun at the original piece. 21 Jump Street comes to mind, where the original television show was on FOX back in the 80s as one of the few shows that actually survived a few seasons and was anything but a buddy cop comedy, which the 2012 "remake" was. Starsky and Hutch is another, where the 2004 film made fun of the (admittedly not that great) 1970s television cop show. 

So when I saw the trailer for "I Play Rocky" in my YouTube feed in between amateur radio and gamer videos, I figured someone was going to spend the entire movie mocking Sylvester Stallone. After all, he is the guy whose acting prowess was once described by Dennis Miller as "having the range of a Daisy Air Rifle". 

I was quite shocked that this was a serious take on the story behind the original Rocky movie.

I'm not here to throw shade on the attempt, but I'd bet money that Sly was behind this film, and I have to wonder whether anything --ANYTHING-- was mentioned about his acting career prior to Rocky coming out. There's Death Race 2000 and Capone, for two examples, as well as bit parts in other films. Yes, that includes at least one adult film. You can even check Snopes, which confirmed the accuracy of the oft-repeated story about Stallone acting in a film they can't show clips of on regular television.

Still, who knows? There's a lot of other celebrities who got the biopic treatment, so I guess it was Sly's time. And it's not like Stallone will have been the first celebrity to have their biopic conveniently ignore certain parts of their lives.

Hmm... I wonder if they got Bill Conti to write the soundtrack for this movie too, or whether they'd only refer to the iconic bars of Gonna Fly Now in the same way that John Williams' themes are used in later movies (such as Superman).