Author: Craig

An Evening with Sly Stallone

Craig / / 2011

Would you like to spend time with Sly and fellow Stallone fans in an extended question and answer session?   Well you can, if you score a ticket to the Fallsview Casino Resort’s “An Evening with Sylvester Stallone” which is set for Feb. 24 and Feb. 25.  At each hour and a half to two hour session  Sly will be on stage with a moderator as he discusses his career and takes questions from fans.


Krayola Kidd Treats Us to a Sly Pun

Craig / / 2011, Craig's Sly Art

Mike Torrance aka The Krayola Kidd is back and he brought Sly dressed as The Punisher.

You can see more of Mike’s art at The Daily Sketch with The Krayola Kidd and his Deviant Art site. Mike is available for commissions and his prices are very reasonable. You’re also going to be happy to know that once a month Mike has a contest for someone to win a free sketchcard! That is how I came to own this cool piece. I won the contest [Halloween Edition] and told Mike to pick a Sly character. He chose Sly as the Punisher and I salute him!

Top 10 Reasons We Can’t Get Enough Sly Stallone

Craig / / 2011


AMC Blog recently posted the Top Ten Reasons We Can’t Get Enough Sylvester Stallone.

10. He Directs Well
Stallone brought a smoothly professional hand to four Rocky movies (including the surprisingly character-driven Rocky Balboa), the last Rambo movie, and The Expendables. And with only two duds (Paradise Alley and Staying Alive) out of eight features, his track record is the envy of most Hollywood directors.

9. He Lets Others Have the Last Laugh
Unlike onetime rival Arnold “Hasta la Vista” Schwarzenegger, Stallone doesn’t have to steal the show. His lets his co-stars have the memorable lines. For example, who can forget Burgess Meredith in Rocky: “You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thunder”? Or Teasle’s advice to Rambo: “Get a haircut and take a bath. You wouldn’t get hassled so much”?

8. He’s Not Afraid to Take a Punch
True action stars get knocked around a little. But no one would have thought less of 63-year-old Stallone if he’d deferred to a stunt double for The Expendables‘ knock-down, drag-out fight with former wrestler Steve Austin (nearly 20 years his junior). But Stallone didn’t and ended up with a fractured neck. That’s what you call walking the walk.

7. He’s Willing to Look His Age
Stallone doesn’t pretend he’s ageless. In Rocky Balboa and Rambo, his signature characters are old guys — old guys in great shape, granted — but they still have no business getting back into the ring or rescuing missionaries from Burmese warlords. They do it anyway, but Stallone makes sure you know they’re going to ache for a long, long time.

6. He Went From Bad Guy to Good Guy
Before Stallone was a hero, he was a hood. As egotistical auto racer “Machine Gun” Joe Viterbo in Death Race 2000, Stallone tommy-guns spectators who don’t show enough love. In The Lord’s of Flatbush, Sly plays a self-centered gang member who knocks up his girlfriend. Now he tends to be the hero, but back in the day he didn’t.

5. He’s Not Perfect
That’s quite a body — no two ways about it. But Stallone’s asymmetrical face and much-imitated speech impediment make him seem approachable, even vulnerable. That’s part of the reason that seeing Rocky beat the bejesus out of flawless Soviet superman Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in Rocky IV is so satisfying.

4. He Has Depth
Having said he regrets not doing more independent pics, Stallone took time out between Daylight and Driven ($17.5 and $20 million, respectively) to play a fat, lonely hearing-impaired policeman in the low-budget Cop Land. It paid off with the best reviews of his career. Beneath that swagger lies an actor who can hold his own against Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.

3. He Knows His Limitations
Stallone isn’t a monosyllabic mountain of muscle — he just plays one on the screen. He may like comedies, but after disasters like Oscar, Rhinestone, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot he opted to face facts and play to his strengths: great abs, buns of steel, and those wounded-puppy eyes that make women melt.

2. He’s a Fighter in Real Life
At 25, Stallone reached the point where most aspiring actors bail: broke with little work to show — a soft-core porn, a couple of exploitation movies, some uncredited bits — and a pregnant wife paying the bills. But he wrote a screenplay that made an old story — hard-luck guy, shy girl longing for love — new again. A year later, Rocky had ten Oscar nominations, and Stallone was a star.

1. He’s Rocky. And Rambo
Two iconic movie characters who can still pack theaters — and Stallone embodies them both.

Top 25 Threequels

Craig / / 2011, Rambo 3, Rocky 3

On November 3, 2011, Crave Online posted their choices for the Top 25 Movie Threequels. Coming in at 23 was Rambo 3 and here’s why…

By the third film in the franchise, John Rambo had gone from a tragic figure – a man so scarred by the Vietnam War that living amongst quote-unquote “peaceful” folks was now an impossibility – to a musclebound all-American hero for the Reagan era. But even so, Rambo III is still a kick-ass action movie. Once again, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is called out of retirement, this time to aid Afghan rebels in fighting off Communist invaders from the Soviet Union and save his kidnapped former colonel, Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) in the bargain. If you can overlook the unfortunate-in-hindsight political subtext, director Peter MacDonald made a killer, over the top action extravaganza, which once owned the Guinness World Record for “Most Violent Movie Ever Made.”

Sylvester Stallone makes his second (and final) appearance on our list with Rocky III, the last good film in the Rocky franchise until Stallone concluded it (we assume) with Rocky Balboa in 2006. The third time out, Rocky Balboa doesn’t start the film as the underdog. In fact, the new champion has gone so soft that he’s easily beaten by young, upstart boxer Clubber Lang, played by 1980s icon Mr. T in his film debut. After the death of his former mentor he’s forced to turn to his old nemesis Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) for guidance, creating an iconic “bromance” for the ages, and culminating once again a grand fight sequence that once again proves Rocky to be the greatest boxer of the age. The Rocky movies started to get a little hokey here, but if Rocky III had been the last film in the series it would have been a fine send-off to a classic franchise.

You can see the list here.

James Mangold, Sly & Cop Land

Craig / / 2011, Cop Land

On November 2, 2011, IndieWire posted a nice interview with director, James Mangold, with the focus being working with Sylvester Stallone on Copland.  Here are a few tidbits…

  • Mangold didn’t want Sly:  “I didn’t want him,” Mangold explained. “When he was first brought up to me, I was like, ‘Please God no!’ My whole perception of Sly at that point was, and he’s a friend and he would understand, but it was like he’d made this series of slightly-less than his best tentpole movies that weren’t very taxing for him, and he was just kind of an indestructible force in one picture after another. And I was looking to cast a vulnerable guy who was soft, who can’t quite pull the trigger – and I’m getting Judge Dredd?”
  • How Sly won over Mangold:  “All I laid out on the table was that I didn’t want to make this movie with him if he was going to take control of it, and I didn’t want to make this movie with him if he was going to change it, and I didn’t want to make this movie with him if he wouldn’t get fat,” Mangold explained. “And Sly in each case was like, look, it’s your movie, it’s your script, so we’ll do exactly what you wrote, and also, I’ll gain weight – I’d love to. And he was an angel about it in a way that a lot of other actors I’d approached before him were not angels about it. They were not happy about playing the unsexy or hesitant hero at the center of the movie, and here was this guy who was really into it. And I decided to take the leap with him, and for many reasons I’m glad I did.”

  • Miramax imposed a variety of changes upon the film because of test screening reactions and expectations that its high-profile cast would turn it into a box office champ. Describing how his cut differs, he said, “I think the biggest difference is that there’s a little less effort at the end to try and tie everything into a happy meal. I think there were several codas on the theatrically released version that were made to make audiences feel that their fanny was patted, their hair was combed and they were sent home with a warm and fuzzy feeling about everybody. I definitely never made the movie trying to make the feel-good movie of the year.”

Check out the interview for the full story!

And there’s more at…