Rocky

#210 at time of writing.

What a great film.

Rocky Balboa is a thoroughly likeable underdog character. Poor, uneducated and ungraceful, but a real good guy. When he gets a once-in-a-lifetime wildcard opportunity to fight for the World Heavyweight Champion title, he begins a life-changing battle with his own self-doubt. A battle I - and possibly everyone - can identify with.

The small-time domestic scenes that build the story up are contrasted by the tense and unflinchingly brutal climactic fight. Sly Stallone admirably puts his all into the character. You would believe he used to be a boxer, rather than a beauty school dropout. (True!) Stallone deserves extra credit for having written the screenplay himself as a remarkably successful attempt to kick-start his acting career.

The story was inspired by a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner in 1975. Chuck was thought to be a no-hoper, but he defied all expectations by lasting 15 rounds against Ali - even succeeding at knocking him down at one point. Stallone saw the match, and turned it into a piece of cinema legend.

The scene with Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first uses of a Steadicam. It's probably the second most famous steps scene in movie history after the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin. The steps are now known as the Rocky Steps, and feature a permanent statue of Rocky at their base.

Films for Free at a Monitor Near You

There are 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte. There are 1000 gigabytes in a terabyte. And there are 1000 terabytes in a petabyte. The Internet Archive has been archiving the entire Internet since 1996, and now contains nearly two petabytes of information – more than even the world’s largest library.

Among that ocean of information is a huge archive of copyright-free and copyright-expired movies. Last week, I browsed the Moving Image Archive and treated myself to a string of films from the dawn of cinema.

I started with Le voyage dans la lune, a short film created in 1902 by Georges Méliès. Méliès created a number of special effects that are still used today, and is credited as the first person to use celluloid to tell self-contained stories.

With my appetite whetted, I spent the next few hours downloading and absorbing Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, The Man With a Movie Camera, Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu – and a few Merrie Melodies along the way.

These golden oldies are a pleasure to experience on two levels. First, because they are oddly familiar. The styles and stories, the idioms and issues that characterize the range of cinematic possibility as we perceive it today, were nearly all present from the very beginning. And secondly, never mind the historical interest, they are just wonderful films on their own terms – a great joy to watch.