Top ten sequels to best picture winners

It's been a minute on this blog since I've sat down to do some sort of top ten list. What was once the bread and butter of this blog has taken the back seat (to mix metaphors) as I have taken a more "catch as catch can" approach to blogging over the past, I don't know, decade. (My second son was born a little more than a decade ago. This could explain it.)

But the release of Gladiator II prompted me to decide to get back in the driver's seat, to return to the second part of my mixed metaphor. (Or to start slathering butter on the bread, to return to the first.)

So I decided to go through and look at all the sequels to best picture winners that I've seen, and decide which were the worthiest and least worthy. Or more correctly, to isolate the worthiest, meaning the least worthy will get shut out of discussion altogether.

Sorry Gladiator II. No spot on this list for you. 

(So if you want substantive discussion of Gladiator II, you can check out my review.) 

I ran into a tricky issue right away. While it would probably not surprise you to know that the vast majority of best picture winners have no sequel, there's one that has -- count 'em -- eight sequels, all of which I've seen. 

How to handle all the offspring of the 1976 best picture winner, Rocky?

Ultimately, I did include them all separately for consideration. If I only included one, I might not get to a top ten at all. 

First, though, just to give you a bit of an idea what we're up against.

I wouldn't say that I am familiar with all the possible sequels that may exist for the more obscure best picture winners. But as far as I can tell, no best picture winner had gotten a sequel until 1944's Going My Way had The Bells of St. Mary's come out the following year. I haven't seen The Bells of St. Mary's, so it won't be up for consideration on this list, and I didn't even know about it until I started research for this post.

It then takes all the way until 1967's In the Heat of the Night for there to be another BP winner to get a sequel, which is They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! -- making it the first BP sequel, chronologically, that I've seen, since I watched it only this year for my Blaxploitaudient series. The phenomenon becomes a little more common after this, but still not especially so. The French Connection in 1971 gets a 1975 sequel, which I also have not seen, and then of course The Godfather follows the next year, and we know what happened there.

One thing to clarify before we get started. I don't consider Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to function as a sequel to the 2003 best picture winner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a separate franchise and in any case, it wasn't solely the success of the best picture winner that prompted its existence.

So I have to say I started writing this post before I knew how many options there actually were to choose from. As I have now done that tally, I have seen 15 sequels to best picture winners, more than half of which are Rocky movies. 

So let's just make it a top 15.

15) Rocky V (1990) - The worst Rocky movie is easily the worst best picture sequel (that I've seen). No two ways about it.

14) The Godfather Part III (1990) - Nineteen ninety was a bad year for best picture sequels. It's likely Godfather III is not as bad as I remember, but I'm not eager for a second viewing to find out.

13) Gladiator II (2024) - I have to admit I came in a little biased against this film, because my former colleague at ReelGood told me beforehand that he hated it and would give it a 0/10. Having watched the film, I don't understand where that sort of vitriol comes from except this guy is given to extreme dislike (not so much to extreme like) and that he's younger than I am, so the original Gladiator was a foundational movie for him. But I don't think it's great. 

12) Hannibal (2001) - I remember the first sequel to Silence of the Lambs (I've only seen the two Hannibal Lecter sequels that feature Anthony Hopkins) having some unforgettable material -- like, the appearance of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger is permanently burned into my brain -- but that overall it's a bit all over all the place.

11) Creed II (2018). I'm not sure if the first sequel to Creed (which of course is itself a sequel to Rocky) truly belongs outside my top ten, but I am putting it here in deference to two other films that have just one sequel and therefore likely would have made my top ten, for the sake of variety only, if I had been going for only ten movies. Given my affection for the first Creed, I really wanted to love this movie, but it just pales in comparison.

10) The Evening Star (1996) - One of only two sequels on this list that we would not consider to be part of a franchise. The sequel to Terms of Endearment was fine, as I recall. I think I may have seen it before I saw Terms of Endearment. 

9) They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1971) - The other non-franchise sequel. This really has nothing to do with In the Heat of the Night, as it only features the main character, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), spun out into a blaxploitation progenitor that takes place in San Francisco. It's pretty good, not great.

8) Red Dragon (2002) - I do not have significant memories of the second Silence of the Lambs sequel except that I remember I thought it was better than the first.

7) Creed III (2023) - Creed III may not be four slots better on this list than Creed II in terms of real-world quality, but there's an indistinct middle section here where the difference is negligible between the movies. A slight improvement on Creed II, it still convinced me that we don't need any more Creed movies.

6) Rocky IV (1985) - That this movie ranks as high as it does is an indication of a) how few good best picture sequels there actually are, and b) how this movie has gained in cultural cache over the years. I still think I've only seen it once, and I think about it more for its gloriously absurd extremes than for actually being a good movie.

5) Rocky II (1979) - I only saw this for the first time in the past few years, and in fact, it was the final Rocky movie I saw -- or close to it anyway. (I can't remember if I saw it just before or just after Creed III.) I think this movie gets sort of retrospective respect applied to it because it was the movie that likely allowed this series to continue as long as it has. If the first sequel had not worked, that might have been the end of it. And so it paved the way for three Rocky movies still ahead on this list.

4) Rocky Balboa (2006) - It seems unlikely that the sixth Rocky movie is quite as good as I remember it. After the disaster that was Rocky V, I didn't prioritize seeing this in the theater and eventually caught it on a plane. But I really enjoyed it on that plane, and it might be the Rocky movie I am most interested in revisiting just to interrogate that reaction.

3) The Godfather Part II (1974) - Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy that this would not be #1, you are probably thinking. But here we take a big jump upward to a truly beloved top three. Then again, maybe I can't quite call the second Godfather movie -- itself a best picture winner -- "beloved," which is why it does not beat out the two movies ahead of it. Infamously, the first time my wife and I watched this movie -- neither of us had seen it as recently as the late 2000s -- we watched it out of sequence, putting in the second DVD before the first. I eventually saw it correctly sequenced, but I think by then I had already missed the boat on loving this movie. What can you do. I can only ever give you my true perspective on the movies I see.

2) Creed (2015) - My #2 movie of 2015. I eventually watched this four times, including twice in the theater. It did lose a little bit on each viewing -- not a lot, but a little bit -- so it failed to scale the heights to the top of this list. 

1) Rocky III (1982) - If you put Rocky III and Creed up against each other in a duel on Flickchart, I might pick Creed. In fact, Creed is currently ranked #243 on my Flickchart while Rocky III is at #268, though I suspect they have never actually had a face-to-face duel. Creed is definitely the "better" movie in all the traditional ways you define the craft of cinema. But Rocky III is the movie I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid-1980s, and it has so many beats that I love. Creed will continue to diminish by small amounts if I go much beyond my current four viewings. At 10+ viewings -- though granted, only about one this century -- Rocky III has not yet lost any of its luster. The one this century was enough to confirm that. 

So was it worth writing a post tagged to the release of Gladiator II that just effectively became a ranking of Rocky movies?

Perhaps not, but at least it's done now.

Tanna: This year's Creed

I'll explain that potentially confounding title in a moment, but first:

Fucking Tanna.

Excuse my language, but that's all I could say in December, after my second viewing of Australia's first best foreign language Oscar nominee: "Fucking Tanna." And if that needs explaining, I'm not mad at Tanna. Far from it. In fact, it had so reduced me, emotionally, that the only way I could think to describe its impact on me was to call out its pernicious effectiveness as an example of a medium designed to manipulate us -- in the best sense of that word -- via a slow shake of the head and a seemingly incongruous expletive.

You've heard of Tanna by now, if you follow the Oscars, but you certainly wouldn't have heard about it last August, when I first watched it, or last December, when I confirmed its lofty spot in my year-end rankings with a rewatch. So Friday night's viewing was the third one, as it took its rightful spot in the lineup of this year's Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), which I helped curate. A rightful spot we were determined to deny it because the movie is already available on DVD and digital rental, a reality that made us less likely to sell tickets to it.

Or so we thought in September. But as the months went along and it ultimately got an Oscar nomination, we thrust it back into contention, and there it was in the program. And it turns out our optimism was justified. Last night's showing was not a sellout, but it was damn near close, and the co-director, Bentley Dean, appeared afterward for a Q&A, coming across as thoughtful, gracious and funny. I shook his hand afterward, in part because my wife was talking to him -- she had helped approve some funding for Tanna in her job with the Victorian film body, and was in fact thanked in the credits. Which was the cherry on the top of her first viewing last night, the other cherry being that she loved it (almost) as much as I do.

So what does this movie have to do with Creed?

I'll tell you.

1) Both were my #2 ranked movie of their respective years, consecutive years as it happens.

2) Both were movies I gave five stars on Letterboxd.

3) Both were movies I saw three times before a year had passed since my first viewing.

4) In both cases, I saw them a third time before I saw the only movie that bested them, my #1 of the year, a second time. Last year I saw Inside Out for a second time only a few days after my third Creed viewing. I have yet to see Toni Erdmann a second time, though I'm not currently expecting to see it tomorrow, to complete the parallel.

5) The dates of the viewings even align in a sort of weird way. Although the first viewings were not aligned, date-wise (August vs. November), my second viewings of each movie came only a few weeks apart (Creed on November 30th, Tanna on December 15th), and the third viewings were only a month apart on the calendars of their respective years -- exactly a month apart, in fact (Creed on June 12th of last year, Tanna on May 12th of this year).

6) And I'm not going to even talk about the shared skin color of the stars of both films because that's really not relevant, and the cultures of the people in question are as different as they could be. The only reason I'm even not talking about it, as it were, is because I can't avoid the allure of even superficial similarities when making this type of side-by-side comparison.

There's even a funny way the films are inversely related, in terms of my own experience watching them. In the case of Creed, I saw it the first two times in the theater before seeing it a third on video (for my wife's first time). It was the opposite with Tanna, as I did not see it in the theater until the third viewing -- which was also my wife's first time.

And I don't know if it was because of that theatrical setting for my third viewing, but here's the part where my experience with the two films diverges. While I was conscious of my appreciation of Creed dropping just a tick on the third viewing, it was the opposite with Tanna. I feel like each viewing of this beautiful, touching, magnificent film is giving me a little more than the one before it, which is crazy, because I gave it five stars after the first viewing. Simply put, I spent most of my Friday Tanna viewing tingling with the same goosebumps I lamented not getting in this post.

Funnily enough, there's also a Tanna connection to that post I just linked to, discussing the thrills I'm not getting from movies that rely too heavily on CG (Goosebumps being the example in that post). You wouldn't expect CG to be a word that would come anywhere near a movie set on the island of Vanuatu and enacted by the natives in a recreation of a story from their own history. But in the Q&A afterward, it somehow came up that a very small amount of computer graphics was indeed necessary. There's a scene in the film where two tribes exchange kava and pigs to symbolize a peace treaty between them, but apparently, they did not finish filming before someone thought they were done and roasted one of the pigs. So, yes indeed, a pig was inserted digitally.

Could have fooled me.

So here's hoping this little additional dose of Tanna-related PR will bring more eyeballs to this phenomenal achievement.

See it. Love it.

If you do the former, you won't be able to help doing the latter.

Rocky Balboa, Rocky Horror

Note: I had already written most of this piece when I (belatedly) heard about the unspeakably tragic shooting at the club in Orlando. It stopped my fingers dead in their tracks, and it's been a day of miserable contemplation. But I finished, and decided that the subject matter of this post is kind of a fitting tribute to the victims of last night's terrorist hatred, most of whom were homosexual. So I'll post this piece as is without any further comment, and continue to mourn for those we lost. 

This image -- shared to my Flickcharters Facebook group a couple weeks ago, with the witty caption "Did you know?" -- seemed like the perfect thing to share with you the day after I watched a Rocky double feature.

As often happens, the fates aligned (more or less) unintentionally, and I ended up watching Creed and The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the same evening. Only one of which features Sylvester Stallone.

This was my third time seeing Creed, which I ranked as my #2 movie of 2015. But my wife had yet to see it, and it made a perfect viewing for a long weekend (we're celebrating the queen's birthday today in Australia, even though her actual birthday is in April). On such long weekends we try extra hard to come up with something good to watch. I was so excited for her to see it that I even splurged the extra dollar for an HD rental.

Then Rocky Horror had been borrowed from the library for more than a month, already surviving one renewal. It needed to get watched as soon as possible, and again, the long weekend seemed like a good excuse.

Since I've already talked plenty about Creed (see here, here and here), I want to spend the lion's share of my post today talking about a movie I hadn't seen in something like 25 years -- and only ever in the theater.

I want to say that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the movie I've seen most in the theater, and it's definitely the movie I'd seen most in the theater without ever seeing it on video. Its only competition for theatrical viewings is Pulp Fiction, which I saw four times in the theater in 1994 and 1995. I can't tell you exactly how many times I went to a midnight screening of Rocky Horror in Boston's Harvard Square in the early 1990s, but it was somewhere between three and five. I guess if it was only three, it would also be competing with The Goonies, the only other film I'm certain I've seen more than twice in the theater (I saw it three times in one week when it first came out). But just for the sake of it, let's say I saw Rocky Horror five times and just crown it the king.

But as much as I loved the experience of going to see the movie -- and of course the movie itself, though they were a bit inseparable -- I had never seen it again since then. I felt something crucial would be lost by watching it at home, without anyone shouting lovingly vulgar supplemental dialogue at the screen, without dodging handfuls of rice and sprays of water, most of it coming from squirt guns. I didn't know if my affection for it could survive the loss of the rowdiness and ecstatic joy of the crowd that was part and parcel to the viewing experience.

So it took a long time to watch it on video. A reallllly long time.

A long time that eventually seemed to be counterproductive. I had to admit to myself that I wasn't likely to attend another midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show anytime soon. So to continue to wait for a day that might never come would just be to deny myself the pleasure -- guilty though it may be -- of immersing myself in this glorious camp once more.

What really amazed me was how many of the audience retorts I remembered, which I hadn't heard in something like 25 years. It wasn't just "Asshole!" when Brad Majors' name was mentioned or "Slut!" when anyone invokes Janet Weiss. It was the alternate lyrics to the songs, and even the additional dialogue that was meant to heighten the double entendres in this screenplay and fill some of its sizeable dead spots in the delivery. Seeing the images and hearing the songs stimulated parts of my brain that I thought no longer retained this information, as though it had been just yesterday.

The thing I noticed straightaway was that the experience of Rocky Horror in Harvard Square was not necessarily universal. My wife watched most of the movie with me, having had something of a similar experience with seeing it at midnight screenings. But even the above epithets for Brad and Janet were too much for her, as if I were insulting dear and sweet members of her family. So I repeated very few of the alternate lyrics that were popping into my head. I did repeat some, as though it were some kind of proof/validation of my legitimate claim to Rocky fandom.

Another thing that occurred to me, as I involuntarily produced some of these rejoinders, was that some of them are more than vulgar -- they're actually politically incorrect. "Dammit, Janet, let's go screw" is not so inflammatory, but how about "Brad, you fag, fuck you too"? I was struck by the strangeness of the fact that an obviously gay-friendly crowd (you can't devote yourself to this movie unless you're gay-friendly) willingly produced one of the more hurtful ways to insult homosexuals, with an unself-conscious glee. I suppose part of that was the era in which I attended those shows, not long after the years when regular people used the word "gay" as a generic adjective meaning "bad" or "dumb." But I'm thinking it was more a form of empowerment. You can only call someone a fag if you are one, just how only black people are allowed to call each other the n-word.

And though I did find that there was a dimension missing from the experience, just being in the presence of these over-the-top characters -- especially Tim Curry's Frank N Furter -- was a grand delight. The shouting of audience members might have also helped keep me awake better, as we did start the movie after 11 and I just don't have the stamina I once did. But I never dozed for more than 30 seconds, and finished the thing before 1, feeling like I'd just sat and chatted with an old friend.

An old friend who wears a garter and lingerie under his mad scientist doctor scrubs, kills and serves fresh biker for dinner, and creates life in a laboratory just so he can fuck it, but an old friend nonetheless.

The disservice I did to Creed

I gave Creed a perfect 10/10 score when I reviewed it for ReelGood, and I've just named it my second favorite film of 2015, behind only Inside Out. That's out of 143 total movies I ranked. I also wrote this glowing post about it on the blog. In other words, I've done everything within one man's power to raise awareness of a terrific film that deserves the maximum number of viewers and the most possible recognition during awards season.

So how could I possibly have done it a disservice, you ask?

Well, in the wake of the Oscar nominations and the near total snubbing of African Americans, it's become sadly clear how I've unwittingly furthered the trend of overlooking the contributions of minorities to the films we love.

See, I wrote a nearly 1,100-word review of Creed -- and spent nearly half those words talking about Sylvester Stallone. Who just so happens to have become the only Oscar nomination from a film made by a black director with a black star and black female romantic lead. All of whom are absolutely terrific in this film -- to the extent that the director is "in" it.

I sensed the imbalance even while I was writing the review, but I was in such a feverish state of rapture that I didn't go back to even things out. I was happy with what I wrote, and knew that I'd have to make sacrifices on what I could cover in the interest of length. The thing about movies you love is that you want to devote double your allotted word count to them. Even as it was, it's the longest review I've written for ReelGood.

But looking back now I feel especially guilty about inadvertently embodying a viewpoint that is sadly common both in Hollywood and in the entertainment media. I wrote a review of a film by a black director and I made it all about its white star. Actually, its white co-star. Actually, really, its white supporting player. Stallone was nominated as a supporting actor, not a lead one.

Of course, Stallone's case is a bit unusual. He was the lead actor in every other Rocky movie, and he is the single person most associated with the nearly 40-year-old franchise. But he clearly isn't the lead actor in this one, and my review did a poor job recognizing that. (As is this post doing. We've gotten this deep and I haven't even mentioned the name of the director, Ryan Coogler, or the name of the star, Michael B. Jordan, or the name of his awesome love interest, Tessa Thompson.)

What happened was, I got this great idea about how to open the piece, comparing the fortunes of Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both 80s action icons, in their attempts to restart their most popular franchises in 2015. That's one of those darlings I should have killed, to paraphrase the old writing aphorism, because it did not relate very directly to Creed as a movie. But once I'd done that, it was only logical that I continue to call back to Stallone whenever and wherever the review seemed to call for it. And given the performance he delivered, it was all too easy to do that.

But what seems clear is that I missed "the story" of Creed's success. What I thought was the story was that Stallone, through sheer willpower and what was revealed belatedly to be good sense, had delivered the most satisfying entry in the series possibly since the original. I didn't know the real story at that time because I didn't know two things:

1) Ryan Coogler came up with this idea and brought it to Stallone;

2) Ryan Coogler is black.

It's the second one that really shocked me when I learned it. Coogler's Fruitvale Station was just outside my top ten in 2013, but for some reason, in all the discussion of that film I never absorbed the narrative that the film's director was black. And I think that's probably because his skin color was just not pushed very hard in the discussion of that film -- I mean, as far as I knew, it was not pushed at all since I never even learned that key piece of information. (I was also in the midst of moving to Australia at the time, so maybe I just didn't read as much about it as I thought I did.) Sure, the subject matter related to black characters, but for some reason I had always assumed that the film's writer and director was a white guy who was just unusually attuned to black subject matter. If asked to explore the reasons for that assumption, I'd probably tell you that I thought the name Coogler sounded Jewish. (And I'm not trying to get myself into further trouble here -- there's nothing wrong with Coogler possibly being a Jewish name, and it would be a pretty common thing in the movie industry.)

Anyway, I only finally learned that Coogler was black maybe ten days after I'd seen Creed.

It was actually at that same time that I learned that Coogler was the impetus behind this film. That's why I make reference in that review to the fact that this could have just been another director-for-hire assignment. I thought that Coogler was that director for hire, but without Coogler, the movie never would have existed.

If I'd known either of these things I certainly would have shifted the focus of my review. But I think it was also that I felt a little uncomfortable delving into the discussion of racial politics in that film, and part of that discomfort comes from the fact that the movie itself doesn't make an issue of race. Adonis Johnson's race is basically incidental, which is one of the things that makes Creed such a satisfying face of what we want the modern representations of race in the movies to be. If that movie doesn't want to make a big deal out of race, I'll respect that and follow suit in my review.

But then there's the more buried layers of meaning, where Johnson's race really does matter. There's an unspoken notion in this movie that Johnson actually is symbolic of many young black men in America, even though his circumstances ultimately end up being very different from many of theirs. Ultimately he lives his teenage years in a mansion as he is adopted by his father's wealthy widow. But before that, he's a kid going in and out of juvy because he grew up without a dad. Many black kids grow up without fathers, sometimes because they're dead, sometimes because they're in jail, or sometimes because they just left. On an unspoken level, this movie is about those kids finding their way in life and making something of themselves, rather than succumbing to crime, drugs or violence. (Johnson is involved in the violence part, but it's in his genes, and he does find a socially acceptable outlet for it.)

But to talk about all this in my review would have been to talk about things that are not present on a texual level in the movie, only on a subtextual level. And it could have become an instance of my seeing race or racism everywhere, when this movie overtly tries not to be about that. Then, you also walk the line of being a white film critic supposing to understand things about the lives of black kids, and you risk looking either condescending or just plain insensitive. Plus, I had all these other wonderful things I wanted to talk about. Too much good stuff in this movie.

But let's say an Academy member had only my review to go on in judging how to choose Oscar nominees from Creed. It's a pretty far-fetched scenario, as it's unlikely any Academy members actually read my review at all, and even if they had, they couldn't have voted on the awards in good conscience without actually seeing the movie and judging for themselves. But let's just say they did go only on my review. They would have read my opening paragraph, in which I call Stallone possibly the best part of the movie. They would have taken special note of the fifth paragraph, devoted entirely to Stallone, which actually ends with my prognostication that he'd get an Oscar nomination. But then they would have noticed that even in praising Thompson in the next paragraph, I talked about how her character speaks lines of dialogue that are a metaphor for Stallone's career.

Stallone Stallone Stallone. I couldn't get enough. And I don't think I'm wrong about him. He's great. He just isn't the whole movie.

Now, I need to let myself off the hook a little here in that the third paragraph is devoted mostly to Coogler, Coogler also gets a shout-out at the beginning of the second paragraph, and the sixth belongs mostly to Jordan. However, most of Jordan's paragraph is how his character is living down famous associations in the movie, something Jordan himself must do in real life since he shares the same name as perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. Another thing not really directly related to Creed. Another darling I should have killed.

I can't help but notice that even in the little blurb I wrote on Creed in my year-end rankings piece, I spent more time on Stallone than I did on either Coogler or Jordan. And that was just a couple days ago.

But it was before the Oscar nominations were announced.

Creed was never likely to get a nomination for best picture, even though the original Rocky actually won that award. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Mad Max: Fury Road has just become the latest sequel in any series to be nominated for best picture, it being the fourth Mad Max film. As the seventh Rocky film, Creed should scarcely exist, let alone qualify for the year's top award. But Jordan really could have gotten a nomination, especially in a year where a nomination was thrown to Matt Damon when he didn't seem to really warrant one. And Thompson, by going way outside what's expected of the main character's love interest, could have been considered as well in the supporting category. Getting Coogler in the best director race would have been a tall order, but he could have gotten recognized for his script. Maybe.

But what might or might not have happened vis-a-vis Creed's Oscar nominations is kind of secondary to the point I'm trying to examine here. I played a role, however small, in making the conversation about Creed all about Stallone. He's deserving of praise, but he's not the only one.

At least we can say that if Stallone weren't already the frontrunner, he certainly is now. Voters seem certain to throw votes Stallone's way just to assuage their guilt about not honoring other black performers, writers or directors this year. Sad to say, that may have been a factor in what happened last year with Selma's best original song win, though I'm exceptionally wary of diminishing someone's accomplishments by chalking them up to tokenism. A vote for Stallone will function as a vote for Coogler, Jordan or Thompson, at least in the minds of an Academy with a guilty conscience. When you honor an actor, you are honoring that actor's director in a very real and a very direct way.

And when/if that does happen, at least we'll be able to say that Creed was an Oscar winner.

Cinematic land mines

It's American Thanksgiving day as I write this, so I thought it was finally time to tell you about Creed.

"Finally" tell you about a movie I saw only four days ago, but which has been quivering around inside my body ever since then.

And this Thanksgiving -- which we celebrated last night with a modest plate of traditional Thanksgiving foods -- I want to give thanks for being reminded earlier in the week of cinematic land mines.

What, exactly, is a cinematic land mine? Well, like a real land mine, it's something you encounter without any foreknowledge that something is about to happen to you. And when it explodes, it may just blow your mind.

Creed was such a film. Until a week or two earlier, when I was invited to attend an advanced critic screening this past Monday night, I hadn't even been consciously aware that Rocky VII, as you could dismissively refer to it, was on this fall's release schedule. I've seen every Rocky movie except Rocky II, which can be explained by the fact that I started with Rocky III and only just saw the original two years ago, so this was likely something I was going to see eventually. But without the critic screening, I don't know that I even would have prioritized seeing it in the theater.

It wasn't until I actually got to the screening that I realized that Ryan Coogler, the director of Fruitvale Station, was reunited with his Fruitvale Station star (Michael B. Jordan) for this movie. I mean, I knew Jordan was the star, but I didn't know Coogler was the director. Fruitvale Station was my #11 movie of 2013, so my anticipation level went up a tick at that point.

But I couldn't have guessed how this movie would proceed to blow the roof off.

I'm not going to give you an itemized breakdown of what is so great about Creed, but I will direct you to my review, linked on the right, if you want to read my thoughts. I'll also say that even as the longest review I have yet written for ReelGood, it was only half of what I might want to say about this remarkable movie. It's so jam-packed with discussion-worthy topics that I felt like I needed to write a sequel to my review.

So today, I'll just be thankful of one of the things I love so much about watching movies: the element of surprise. Sometimes you literally have no idea what movie may just knock your socks off. Did I ever guess, in a million years, that Ruby Sparks would be my favorite movie of 2012? No I did not. Did that make me love it all the more? Yeah, I think it did.

No talk yet about whether Creed is my favorite this year, but I'll tell you that it's certainly in the discussion. And that's something I would have never been able to tell you when I walked innocently into that screening on Monday night.

When the movie was over, I applauded. That's right, I stood up and applauded, with tears glistening in my eyes.

So yes indeed, this Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks that Creed blew my legs clean off my body. And the reminder that any movie can do that, at any time. As film fans, we live one day to the next, never knowing the next thing that is going to rock our worlds.

Bring on Rocky VII

We haven't quite reached as many Rockys as are in this poster from the movie Airplane II: The Sequel, but we're starting to get to the point that Sylvester Stallone would actually look like this if he donned the gloves again.

Whether he'd be Asian or not, I can't say.

I'm seeing Creed -- the seventh Rocky movie -- at a critics screening tonight, and I won't be half surprised if Stallone does actually get in the ring.

After all, he did a boxing movie, as a fighter, as recently as 2013 with the movie Grudge Match. He's going to be 70 next July, but why not one more?

I'm guessing Stallone finally has enough sense not to go that route with this one, especially since 2006's Rocky Balboa -- which I quite liked -- was a return to a greater sense of realism in the series. Oh, the terrible Rocky V -- you know, the one where he fought that guy Tommy Morrison in a street fight -- was meant to be that return, but gritty did not necessarily translate to "realistic" in that case. In Rocky Balboa, it did, and Rocky Balboa is what gives me cautious optimism about tonight's film.

Another thing giving me optimism: Someone told me there's talk of Stallone garnering an Oscar nomination for his role as the coach of Apollo Creed's son, Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), who is following in his father's footsteps. (Let's hope he also doesn't get fatally pummelled by a massive Russian who says things like "I must break you.")

That seems a bit farfetched, but the source is one I trust, so we'll see.

Sylvester Stallone may never get to 38 Rockys, but at this point, it would be unwise to bet against him reaching double digits.