Category: Entertainment

The winning idea behind screenwriter Peter Gamble and director Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky was to retrace the making of a classic 20th century triumph-of-the-underdog saga by fashioning the behind-the-scenes story into its own rousing shot of underdog triumph. Sure, Rocky was the quintessential boomer movie — the top-grossing film of 1976 and an Oscar winner for best picture the following year. But pretty much every generation since has ensured that it remains an influential pop-culture landmark half a century later, its message of self-belief, resilience and determination against stiff odds still a resonant evocation of the American Dream. Who cares if it’s pure fiction?

The strongest asset the new movie has in its corner is actor Anthony Ippolito, who had previously appeared as another member of the Hollywood star firmament, Al Pacino, in the miniseries The Offer, about the chaotic development and production of The Godfather. Having heard about the Rocky project before casting had even begun, Ippolito sent in a self-taped audition that convinced the filmmakers they had found their guy. That decision turns out to have been unquestionably right, potentially sparking debate as to whether he’s a better actor than Stallone. (Seriously, have you tried watching Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot?)

Gamble’s script starts out in New York, where frustrated young actor Sylvester, then going by Mike, works a series of dead-end jobs while auditioning for the same thankless bit parts as thugs and cops. One of those jobs is ticket taker at a movie theater, where pretty blonde box office cashier Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who would become his first wife, catches his eye. 

Stallone’s infamous early foray into softcore porn on a film quaintly titled The Party at Kitty and Stud’s — later re-released as Italian Stallion after Stallone had found fame — is given sanitized treatment as an economic necessity when he is kicked out of his grungy rooming house over unpaid rent and forced to sleep on the street.

The film jumps ahead 16 months, when Sylvester and Sasha have relocated to Los Angeles, still struggling to stay afloat. A friendly customer at the restaurant where Sylvester works as a valet parking attendant gives him an “in” with his producer buddies Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne). The meeting yields nothing concrete, but Sylvester slips his script for Paradise Alley into a slush pile on the way out. Chartoff and Winkler are impressed, though not quite enough to option it — the movie would resurface elsewhere two years later as Stallone’s directing debut, greenlit on the strength of his Rocky fame — but they invite him to come back and show them anything else he has written.

Inspired after watching the 15-round Muhammed Ali-Chuck Wepner fight in a bar, Sylvester goes home fired up and cranks out the Rocky script in three-and-a-half days. Chartoff and Winkler immediately go for it and start tossing around possible names to star as the southpaw boxer of the title — Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Ryan O’Neal. But Sylvester rejects the deal, stating his one condition: “I play Rocky.”

There are fun insights into the art of the moviemaking deal, first in Chartoff and Winkler’s negotiations with irascible Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), a composite studio exec, and next in a protracted back and forth with Stallone, as their offer to buy the script climbs to $360,000, an astronomical fee back then for a first-time screenwriter. But still Sylvester refuses to budge, insisting that he poured his heart and soul into the role and refusing to hand it off to another actor.

While Gamble’s script isn’t exactly subtle about it, the themes of perseverance and force of will that are so essential to Rocky are traced back to Stallone’s unwavering commitment to a part that’s in his bones. Refusing to let the commercially promising project wither and die, the producers opt to halve the already meager $2 million budget agreed to by Maddox, allowing them to cast anyone they want.

The extent to which Chartoff and Winkler are on board with Maddox’s contractual loophole is kept vague. But the budget and shooting schedule are so tight that any overage means Sylvester can be fired immediately and replaced by another actor. To help bring the film in on time, they hire director John G. Avildsen (Jay Duplass), known for his efficiency with fast, frugal shoots.

Since every underdog story needs an antagonist trying to beat them down, Sasha believes the filmmakers are conspiring to sabotage her husband’s involvement by breaking him physically, pushing him to the point of exhaustion. On top of six hours a day of intensive boxing training, they have him run some 20 miles all over the city on the first day of location shooting in Philadelphia (New York was prohibitively expensive). A doctor advises him to stay off his feet for two weeks due to a pulled tendon. But Sylvester knows that would get him kicked off the film.

The most iconic scenes from Rocky — notably the training montage; the sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rocky raising his arms in triumph at the top; the bare-knuckle pounding at frozen sides of beef in a meat storage room; the ice rink interlude with Talia Shire (Kiki Seto) — are recreated with reverential respect for the original, some more effectively than others. But even when all this plays like visual karaoke, anyone with a soft spot for Rocky will likely find themselves hit by a wave of warm nostalgia.

As he showed in his 2018 solo directing debut, Green Book, which won the best picture Oscar the following year, Farrelly is a populist director who feels no compulsion to challenge his audience. In that case, he offered a soft, conciliatory take on the racial divide, while in I Play Rocky, he doesn’t shy away from sentimental excess and even a slight shlockiness. The sainthood of Stallone here is shamelessly manipulative, but it works, restoring a likable everyman quality that’s been obscured by decades of celebrity baggage.

There are stirring breakthrough moments built into the movie, such as a confrontation between Rocky and Mickey, the old-timer who wants to manage him, played by Burgess Meredith (Robert Morgan). Avildsen says the scene as written is not delivering, prompting Stallone to step away for five minutes and return with a semi-improvised reworking of it that socks across the emotional stakes.

The action again jumps forward, to the premiere of Rocky, “ten months and one baby later.” The jittery artist too anxious to sit still and watch his work on opening night is a hoary trope of showbiz movies. But when the movie’s premiere audience stands and cheers in a moment of glory, clumps of the Toronto audience at I Play Rocky’s first screening did the same. Irrespective of Stallone’s political affiliations, this is a feel-good movie that should play equally well across red and blue states.

Farrelly coaxes solid performances from the ensemble, particularly Robb, who makes Sasha the opposite of a mousy wife, lovingly supportive but also tough-talking and opinionated. Kebbel and Byrne are an amusing double-act as Chartoff and Winkler, the latter now 95 and still producing, recently with the Creed movies and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Letts was born to play this kind of brutally blunt, ruthless-when-necessary businessman, and Duplass brings a kind of impish spark to Avildsen, making him seem a director who thrives under pressure.

There are strong moments also with Matt Dillon as Sylvester’s verbally abusive father Frank, who became a hairdresser when his acting career failed to take off; and Stephan James, who has a hilarious intro scene as Carl Weathers, strutting into his audition with the natural authority of Apollo Creed, his muscles packed into a superfly 1970s denim outfit, with his bare torso oiled and glistening.

The element that holds the movie together is Ippolito, who nails the garbled, rumbling diction, hangdog expression and hulking physicality of Stallone while never losing sight of his insecurities at this unproven point in his career. I Play Rocky repurposes most of its emotional uplift from the movie within the movie, but anyone with fond memories of the boxing drama — perhaps those who first saw it back in the day most of all — will feel a surge of elation from the moment Bill Conti’s theme music is folded in.

Musk documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney responded Sunday to a documentary legal threat from Elon Musk.

“I reached out immediately… But he clearly wasn’t interested in talking. We made so many formal outreaches to him, and with the exception of his remarks on Twitter, we received nothing back,” Gibney said during a keynote conversation in Toronto.

The veteran doc maker said Musk was heavily lawyered and fact-checked, so he’s confident about the veracity of his account of the tech billionaire. But he told the TIFF audience he has “great concern” that Bleecker Street will be able to theatrically release the near-four hour documentary in October and HBO Max will be able to stream the film, as planned, before Warner Bros. Discovery is taken over Paramount as part of an ongoing merger and acquisition process.

“I do worry about the storm clouds on the horizon and the fact that they (HBO) are in the midst of a takeover battle by Paramount. Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter… But so far, so good,” Gibney said. “It’s a great concern and the consolidation of the media and also the aggressive editorial takeover of the media by the tech barons is really deeply concerning,” he added.

Gibney’s comments follow the Musk film world premiering in Venice before shifting to TIFF for a North American bow on Monday. The world premiere was followed by attorney Alex Spiro, acting for Musk, sending Gibney and his production team a letter, alleging they had misrepresented facts about the tech mogul.

And Musk himself blasted the film as a “boring … hit piece” on X. The letter — confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter — focuses on what Spiro says is an insinuation in the film that Musk used his Starlink satellites to somehow influence the 2024 presidential election to boost Donald Trump.

Earlier, Jigsaw Productions issued a statement after receiving Spiro’s letter: “Alex Gibney’s films are consistently recognized for their in-depth, fact-driven explorations of influential figures and corporations, coupled with his bold and engaging directorial style. This approach has garnered him international praise, an Academy Award among other accolades, and a reputation that The Times of London recently lauded as the ‘gold standard for fearless journalistic integrity.’ The right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures is protected by the First Amendment — something that should be recognized and defended by all Americans, including the associates of Elon Musk, who has proclaimed himself to be a ‘free speech absolutist.’”

Musk is Gibney’s most recent film and follows a career making documentaries that investigate powerful institutions and individuals. In Musk, Gibney looks at the tech mogul behind electric cars, space travel, social media, AI, and more.

During his keynote, Gibney discussed Elon Musk’s infamous DOGE purge and its impact on the independence and financing of USAID, the foreign aid agency. “When you’re into hundreds of thousands of people who are killed by performative cruelty, it’s really a staggering moral stain on Elon Musk and the federal government,” he argued.

Gibney also discussed Musk’s use of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits, as part of his exploitation of financial markets. “You’ve got a con artist who has put in the White House another con artist, and they just keep running bigger and bigger cons, because there’s no Department of Justice or FBI to tell them to do otherwise,” he told the TIFF audience.

Gibney is also a producer of Edward Said: Between Worlds, a film about the Palestinian scholar, that is also screening at the Toronto Film Festival. “I just find him such a compelling public intellectual at a time when there’s a dearth of public intellectuals who engagement with such a sense of humanism, and obviously this is one of the great global scandals of this moment, the genocide in Gaza and the horrific things that are happening on the West Bank,” he said.

Gibney’s other films include the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, The Armstrong Lie and Citizen K.

In Jon Hamm’s new series, American Hostage, he stars as a local news broadcaster who finds himself in the middle of a hostage situation when a disgruntled borrower kidnaps a mortgage broker.

The 1977 true crime story, which was chronicled on a narrative podcast of the same name also starring Hamm, is decades old, but its political themes closely mirror today’s world, Hamm told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday.

“ I think that there’s some thematic devices that resonate in the culture politically now,” Hamm said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “I think the idea of a certain segment of the population being overlooked, or feeling overlooked or feeling under-addressed, in their wants and needs and desires. The show is called American Hostage. We fought very hard for that title because we thought it really spoke to the story on several occasions. This man obviously takes a person hostage, but is he in fact hostage to his American Dream?” 

“There’s a lot of resonance to the title,” the Emmy winner added. “I think that’s why the story, for whatever reason, feels — even though it’s a 50-year-old true story — it feels very relevant, given the current political climate.” 

Co-created by Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers, American Hostage is described by Sony as a “psychological thriller that tells the harrowing true story of Fred Heckman, a beloved Indianapolis radio reporter who is thrust into the middle of a life-or-death crisis when hostage-taker, Tony Kiritsis, demands to be interviewed on his popular radio news program.”

The news story on which the series is based made headlines at the time and reflected a changing media landscape, where live local stories made national news. For Hamm, the local news story he remembers as being the most significant is O.J. Simpson’s infamous police chase in June 1994.   

“ I think probably most people’s first experience of any of that was the O.J. situation because it happened in the middle of a huge sporting event,” Hamm said. “It was national. Most of us live in L.A., and L.A. had a car chase kind of every day, but it was very local. That became a very daily kind of thing in the ’90s. Some helicopter would chase some car going somewhere. The original one was most likely the O.J. situation.” 

“If you go back in time, this [1977 Tony Kiritsis case] is one of the first times we kind of see a local story explode nationally,” Hamm continued. “Another similar thing that happened was the Patty Hearst situation, where when they raided the house down in South Central Los Angeles. … It was the beginning of where we are now. I think the salacious part of this story — through no fault of its own — [it became] this life or death story. [It’s] kind of where we have landed now, where everything is maximized for the salaciousness of its content.” 

American Hostage also shows how audiences previously trusted the information delivered by their news organizations, in stark contrast to today where trust in the media remains at record lows, according to data from Gallup. Ryan emphasized that the “journalistic aspect to the show” is “very pertinent today.”   

“Right now, we live in a very fractured journalist world,” Ryan explained. “You can kind of choose your news more than the news really informing you these days. Back then, I’m old enough to remember what it was like for journalists to be trusted and for the news to be something that was sacred.”

Ryan added that Hamm’s character is “stuck in a very precarious position” in the series because he’s a journalist “who has invested decades into building his reputation as telling the truth … and now he’s also expected to be a hostage negotiator and to try to save two lives.”  

American Hostage is scheduled to premiere on MGM+ on Sept. 20. 

The title characer in Chris Rock’s sure-footed fourth feature as director, Misty Green, is having a rough week. An actress still best known for a TV series that ended years back, she’s about to be evicted, her bipolar brother is fresh out of a psych ward and in need of both emotional and financial support, a pimpy former colleague dangles a lucrative sex-work gig, and while her undeniable gifts might very well help her book an acting job, the many axes she has to grind in the entertainment industry keep getting in the way.

In a star-making performance, Rosalind Eleazar — best known as the tough MI5 operative grieving for her partner on Slow Horses — bites into this gift of a role with grit, tenacity and zero-fucks-given scrappiness. It’s a revelatory turn in a sensitively observed drama that depicts Los Angeles as both a shimmering beacon of fame and success and a soul-sucking grind of constant rejection, where disparities of race, class and gender are as much an obstacle as that casting director who seems to hate you. Following its premieres at the Toronto and New York film festivals, A24 will release the movie Oct. 9.

Coming 12 years after Rock’s last feature as writer-director, Top Five, a highly entertaining account of the quest to be taken seriously of a standup comic with a history of substance abuse issues, Misty Green is both an extension of certain themes explored in the 2014 film and a departure. While Andre Allen, Rock’s character in the earlier movie, had a fear of not being funny when sober, Eleazar’s Misty is more of a dabbler than an addict. But her problems with impulse control make it hard for her to say no to a night of hard partying, which tends to mess with her professional obligations.

The biggest difference, however, is that Misty Green is a significantly more mellow and thoughtful movie, the work of a mature director who knows what he wants to say and has full command of the tone of voice in which to say it. The film is frequently funny, but Rock and his actors never push for comedy. The wry humor is undergirded by melancholy, darkness, despair — by an awareness that even when you appear to have made it in Hollywood, maintaining that perch on the success ladder is not a given. Talent alone often is not enough.

Misty appears to have been floundering for years, bristling every time some young up-and-comer tells her how much their mom and dad loved her in her Emmy-winning role on a show called Red Eye. She’s handed a deadline to pull herself out of her rut when Celine (Amy Landecker, hilariously caustic) bursts in unannounced to kick Misty out of her late husband’s apartment. Dazed and hungover, Misty protests that Celine’s husband gave her the apartment, but the unmerry widow is not buying it, giving her a week to find new digs. The industry town’s monomania makes it seem almost normal when Celine starts running audition lines with her before begrudgingly agreeing to the seven-day grace period.

With no money and no friends or exes willing to help her out, Misty needs to book a role, pronto. But given her abrasive reputation — she was once fired off a film for punching the wardrobe woman in the face — that’s not easy. 

Things are further complicated by the reappearance of her loose-cannon brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), released from a psych ward but still only tenuously in control of his mental health. Her occasional hook-up, the slick and insincere Zach (Adam Driver), tempts her out on the town the night before an important audition, offering her a chance at big money if she’s willing to put aside her moral qualms and be part of the “entertainment” for a frisky emir at a lavish party in Dubai. Driver has often been fearless about playing unlikable characters, but Zach takes him to new lows of douchiness when he’s tossing Birkin bags, jewels and cash to a screaming crowd of paid models.

Her least complicated relationship is with straight-talking bestie Naomi (Anna Kendrick), with whom she works out at a gym near the Santa Monica Pier. Naomi serves as a sounding board and support system for Misty’s anxieties. That’s more than she gets from her agent Randy (Topher Grace), who throws up his hands in defeat after another abortive audition, telling her, “No one wants to work with you. You’re too difficult!”

While this is very much an ensemble piece, with a bright constellation around Eleazar’s blazing supernova, Rock gives himself a choice suporting role as the one person in the industry who might not have given up on Misty. Jordan is a director who was forced to fire Misty some years back for her anger issues. He’s now staying in her apartment building while holding auditions for a Dreamgirls remake, and while he’s wary about working with the volatile Misty again, he doesn’t rule it out.

That remains true even after she gets high with Zach while on an impromtpu date with Jordan, getting them both banged up in a car accident. She goes back to her apartment — where the eviction clock keeps ticking — and tips her stash of booze and pills down the drain, probably not for the first time, but maybe the last? 

Jordan often gets to channel classic Rock humor (“All civil rights movies suck, you wanna know how I know? Because white people like them!”), but the character is also notable for his sensitivity, even soulfulness. Jordan is an industry veteran with genuine empathy for people like Misty, coughed up and spat out while trying to sustain a career in the face of endless closed doors. The chemistry of Eleazar’s scenes with Rock is sublime.

Eleazar’s layered, brittle but also vulnerable performance makes Misty’s depths as a performer apparent, notably in two songs. She sings with moving expressiveness on a torchy version of “One Night Only” in her Dreamgirls audition and a stunningly heartfelt take on Radiohead’s “Creep,” in a Hollywood Roosevelt lounge bar gig.

Naturally, her propensity for self-sabotage means her path is one step forward, two steps back, through no fault of her own when Jay loses his cool after being pulled over twice by the same Black cop (Anthony Anderson, one of a handful of cameos) in both cases with no cause beyond racial profiling. When Jay lands in prison, the fiercely protective Misty feels obligated to come up with his exorbitant bail, prompting desperate choices that nudge her career goals aside.

Throughout all this, Eleazar keeps us firmly in Misty’s corner in a bold performance that simultaneously pushes the audience away while pulling us in. The tenderness with which Rock has built this vehicle around character, actress and a milieu he clearly knows intimately imbue the material with an aching depth of feeling that stayed with me for days.

Misty Green is a poignant snapshot of one woman sweating on the showbiz treadmill, in a town where glittering dreams, crushing defeat and emergency compromise solutions often walk in tandem — the latter echoed in constant local crime news reports heard on car radios. Misty’s personality flaws are what make her so captivating in a smart, refreshingly understated movie that’s very much an insider’s view — jaded, but also clear-eyed — and a credit especially to Rock and Eleazar.

Sometimes, history repeats itself.

Exactly a half-century ago, in the year of the American bicentennial, a low-profile film — the story of a small-time boxer who, against all odds, went the distance against the champ — became a gigantic hit and ended up vanquishing the likes of All the President’s Men, Network and Taxi Driver to win the best picture Oscar. That film was John G. Avildsen’s Rocky, which was written by and starred Sylvester Stallone.

Eight years ago, another film with a low-profile premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it polarized critics but played through the roof with festivalgoers and ended up winning the TIFF audience award en route to several Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, which it ultimately won. That film was Peter Farrelly’s Green Book.

On Saturday night, Farrelly returned to TIFF for the world premiere of I Play Rocky, a film about the inspiration for and making of Rocky. Like Green Book, it polarized critics, but delighted festivalgoers — indeed, it generated numerous instances of mid-film applause, as well as a lengthy standing ovation at the end — and it will probably follow in the footsteps of Rocky and Green Book to a best picture Oscar nom, if not a win.

If nothing else, I Play Rocky will catapult its little-known star, Anthony Ippolito, who plays Stallone, into the thick of a crowded best actor Oscar race. The 27-year-old eerily channels Sly’s unconventional but iconic appearance and manner of speaking, and, as was the case with Stallone 50 years ago, the story of his path to his career-changing part will have many rooting for him as much as the character he plays.

The biggest hazard for I Play Rocky, which Amazon/MGM is set to begin rolling out in the U.S. on Nov. 6, is Stallone himself.

In THR’s TIFF lounge, Ippolito said he had spoken with Stallone before playing him and Farrelly said he had shown Stallone the finished film and Stallone was pleased with it. And during remarks from the TIFF stage just before the film unspooled, Farrelly gave a shout out to Stallone.

But Stallone was not directly involved with — nor does it seems he will financially benefit from — I Play Rocky. And if the recent past is any indication, he believes he deserves a cut of anything Rocky-related: indeed, in 2022, he publicly blasted Irwin Winkler, one of the two producers of the original Rocky, who helped to give him his big break, for not giving him an equity stake in the franchise.

Winkler and the other producer, Robert Chartoff, who died in 2015, are both portrayed in the film (by P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell, respectively) rather sympathetically. The real Winkler, now 95, also makes a cameo in it. And Chartoff’s widow was at the premiere. In other words, it seems that the Winklers and Chartoffs are happy with the film.

If Stallone, who turned 80 in July, were to publicly lash out against I Play Rocky, that could really harm its Oscar prospects. But if he were to publicly champion it, that could really help them. And to be honest, he has a lot of reason to be happy about the film: written by Peter Gamble, it is essentially a celebration of his smarts, tenacity and talent — plus, it basically prints the legend about the origin of Rocky that Stallone has been repeating for the past half-century, not all of which stands up to close scrutiny.

In addition to Gamble’s script and Ippolito’s star turn, other strong work in the film is done by supporting performers AnnaSophia Robb (as Stallone’s first wife), Tracy Letters (as the head of United Artists) and Jay Duplass (as Avildsen); cinematographer Sean Porter (who also shot Green Book); production designer Anthony Gasparro; makeup artist Jackie Risotto; and hairstylist Nakoya Yancey.