{"id":738,"date":"2006-12-21T16:03:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-21T16:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/idolchatter\/2006\/12\/rocky-reborn-stallone-pastors.html"},"modified":"2006-12-21T16:03:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-21T16:03:00","slug":"rocky-reborn-stallone-pastors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2006\/12\/rocky-reborn-stallone-pastors.html","title":{"rendered":"Rocky Reborn: Stallone &amp; the Pastors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.beliefnet.com\/imgs\/tout\/story\/StallonePhotoIC061221.jpg\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" \/>As my fellow Idol Chatterer Paul O&#8217;Donnell <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/idolchatter\/2006_12_01_idolchatter1_archive.html\" target=\"_new\">recently mentioned<\/a>, there has been a big marketing push by <a href=\"http:\/\/motiveentertainment.com\/\" target=\"_new\">Motive Entertainment<\/a> to get faith groups out to theaters to see Sylvester Stallone&#8217;s just-released &#8220;Rocky Balboa.&#8221; As a participant in a recent conference call with Stallone and a number of religious leaders, I listened in as he described his own strengthened faith and talked about Rocky being &#8220;reborn.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The more I go to church, the more I turn myself over to Jesus,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Church is the gym of the soul. Pastors are the trainers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, for his role in &#8220;Balboa,&#8221; Stallone needed to be in peak physical condition&#8211;I mean, the guy is 60&#8211;but he must have needed some spiritual strength training as well. Anyone would need a steady faith to create a follow up to &#8220;Rocky V,&#8221; one of the worst ever made. (The movie was dubbed one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestinkers.com\/100stinkers.html\" target=\"_new\">100 worst films of the 20th century<\/a> by The Bad Cinema Society.)<\/p>\n<p>During the call, Stallone admitted his failure with &#8220;Rocky V,&#8221; saying he was self-absorbed at that point in his life and didn&#8217;t put his heart and soul into it. &#8220;It really hurt me because it was totally my fault,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, though, he&#8217;s now in a better place in his life and isn&#8217;t as narcissistic. &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m any more important than the guy who lights the set because without him, [people] won&#8217;t see you,&#8221; he joked.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily, the initial reviews are positive, so I don&#8217;t think Stallone needs to worry much about making a movie worse than &#8220;Rocky V.&#8221; Let&#8217;s just hope a &#8220;Balboa&#8221; box office success doesn\u2019t lead him to create sequels to that movie (&#8220;Rocky X: A Nursing Home Smackdown&#8221;? &#8220;Balboa Beyond the Grave&#8221;?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As my fellow Idol Chatterer Paul O&#8217;Donnell recently mentioned, there has been a big marketing push by Motive Entertainment to get faith groups out to theaters to see Sylvester Stallone&#8217;s just-released &#8220;Rocky Balboa.&#8221; As a participant in a recent conference call with Stallone and a number of religious leaders, I listened in as he described&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Rocky Reborn: Stallone &amp; the Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2006\/12\/rocky-reborn-stallone-pastors.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rocky Reborn: Stallone &amp; 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