There’s a scene in Rocky Balboa where an old man stands on a Philadelphia sidewalk and tells his grown son that life is going to hit him harder than any boxer ever could. Rocky’s wife is gone. The restaurant is doing fine. Nobody needs him to fight anymore. And his kid is blaming the world, and the old man’s name, for everything that hasn’t gone right.
I’ve seen that movie more times than I’d admit to a stranger. It’s my favorite of the six. I’ve seen all six, including Rocky V, which I went to see in the theater in 1990 at twelve years old. The speech on the sidewalk didn’t do much to me at twenty-eight, two years before my son was born. It does something to me now.
That scene came back to me this week during an afternoon of being asked about movies I had and hadn’t seen, and the results were embarrassing in a very specific way.
The game was simple. Name a movie, I say whether I’ve seen it. Back to the Future, a hundred times. The Princess Bride, and I answered with a line from it before the question was finished. Groundhog Day, same thing. Remember the Titans, Field of Dreams, Good Will Hunting, Forrest Gump, Toy Story before kids and after. Die Hard. It’s a Wonderful Life, which I’d put on a short list of the best things ever filmed, mostly for a phone call Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed share with one receiver between them.
Then the misses started. The Shawshank Redemption. The Green Mile. Unforgiven. The Truman Show. The Godfather. Inception. Amadeus. I’d seen parts of Dead Poets Society, never the whole thing. Schindler’s List once, over thirty years ago, which I’m not sure counts.
Every movie I could quote by heart is about somebody becoming better than they were. The weatherman who stops being selfish. The father and son who finally play catch. The man on the bridge who finds out his small life mattered. I write about that. I sing about it. I’ve built most of what I make around the idea that a person can be redeemed. And I’ve never seen the movie with Redemption in the title.
It gets worse. Unforgiven is a man trying to leave his old self behind and finding out how much it costs. The Green Mile is grace walking into a prison. Truman is a man who discovers his whole world is a lie and walks through the door anyway. Every one of them is squarely in the lane I claim as mine, and I missed them.
The stories I say I love and the stories I actually sit down for are not the same list, and it took somebody else reading mine back to me to see the gap.
I have a collection on my Apple TV, a couple hundred movies deep. At least one of the misses is already in it, bought and never played. I should probably make some popcorn and get after it.
