He showed up out of shape, unmotivated and disinterested, but James “The Grim Reaper” Roper was the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the world, and in 1996, no white man was going to take that away. That may touch on racial nerves, but let’s face it, that was the only logical assumption in 1996! Incidentally (spoiler alert) this turned out to be the right assumption.
Considering that Mike Myers loves the sport of Hockey so much and his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs so much, why did he make a movie that seemed to destroy it? We won’t go into detail about how bad the movie is, as a million blogs in cyberspace have already done it. However for us, the lone bright spot in this Golden Raspberry winner was Justin Timberlake showing why he is someone to look forward to when he hosts Saturday Night Live. Basically, our support of Timberlake here is that he didn’t kill his career, like Myers did in this movie. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for induction, but we really don’t have much else to work with here.
The film that launched the career of James Earl Jones, “The Great White Hope” was the very much based on the life of the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Jack Johnson. As Jack Jefferson, we watched Jefferson struggle with the race card in an era that thankfully none of us know firsthand. The film was more about that, than actual boxing, but the performance of Jones is a gem we should not forget.
“I must break you”. Decades later, and we still remember the roided up superfreak who was engineered in a Soviet laboratory to take down Rocky Balboa. We know that he did not succeed in that task, but this was the man who killed Apollo Creed in the ring and was married to a then hot Brigitte Nielsen, before she became the grotesque trainwreck that once pined over Flavor Flav. Sure, he was symbolic of “Communist evil” and the movie aged quickly with the spirit of Glasnost, but tell us you won’t watch it when it comes on cable!
