I Play Rocky: Old Underdog, New Tricks

I spotted a fun cinephile Easter egg in I Play Rocky, director Peter Farrelly’s predictable (duh) but breezy and disarming making-of about the 1976 Best Picture winner that transformed a 30-year-old Sylvester Stallone from an unknown to a superstar overnight. In I Play’s early moments, when Sly is a starving actor in New York City going by “Mike” instead of his mouthful of a government name, he gets a job at a movie theater. There he meets a nice girl named Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who, in the space of an 18-month fast-forward to when they’re living together in Los Angeles, will become his wife. He wins her over not with his burly frame, but with his nascent film-bro brio, offering a thoughtful critique of one of the movies playing at their workplace—Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid classic The Conversation, no less.

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