Philadelphia ready to go the distance with RockyFest week dedicated to 'Rocky' movies

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PHILADELPHIA -- Rocky Balboa fans are ready to go the distance — by bus, by ice skates, by 72 steps — to honor Philly’s favorite fictional fighter almost 50 years after the first movie launched the enduring series of an underdog boxer persevering despite the odds.

Yo, Adrian, Philly finally did it!

The city Rocky called home at last has a week dedicated to the box office heavyweight champion of the world a year after the inaugural Rocky Day was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps.

It’s Rocky, so of course there’s a sequel.

This year, it’s RockyFest.

The Rocky Bus Tour served as Round 1 over the weekend before the festival truly laced up its gloves for Tuesday’s kickoff event — on Dec. 3, the 1976 release date of “Rocky” — with area elementary school students running the Rocky steps.

From there, Rocky is feted with a mural unveiling, movie marathons, RockyU discussions on the enduring appeal of Sylvester Stallone’s most famous character, look-alike contests and even a bus tour. The tour weaves Rocky fanatics through the city and includes stops at Adrian and Paulie’s fictional graves (not far from the real one for former Phillies announcer Harry Kalas), the Italian Market where Rocky trained, and the exterior site of Mighty Mick’s Gym.

“If no one has seen the movie,” tour guide Adam Clements said before a recent trip, “there will be spoilers.”

Rocky fans can even recreate Rocky and Adrian’s first date at a local ice rink.

It seems almost as improbable as Rocky Balboa lasting 15 rounds with champion Apollo Creed that it took so long for Philadelphia to properly honor “Rocky” and the other eight movies in the series (including three “Creed” films).

Whether natives like it or not, Rocky is as much a part of the fabric of the city as the Founding Fathers and the Liberty Bell.

Before most fans chug their first raw eggs of the day, the Rocky statue at the base of the museum steps already boasts a line that often snakes around the corner for most of the day. Movie clips are played ad nauseam — usually Adrian imploring Rocky to win — on the big screen at sporting events. The strains of “Gonna Fly Now” stir ahead of kickoff for all Eagles games. Rocky’s faithful followers run a 50-kilometer race each year that follows his trumped-up training route in a grueling tribute to their mythical champ.

There’s even a merchandise stand at the steps that sells “Italian Stallion” robes and plush Clubber Lang dolls a short run from where Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet’s works hang in the museum.

Choose your favorite canvas, there’s a little something for everyone.

While Stallone and “Creed” star Michael B. Jordan have made previous promotional stops at the Rocky steps, no actors were expected to attend this year's events.

The 78-year-old Stallone did appear last year at a rain-soaked Rocky Day and credited the city for the character's success as much as anything the weathered fighter achieved on the big screen.

“I've been around the world,” Stallone said. “But for some reason, these 72 steps inspire me, excite me. It's like you get to the top, you feel inspired, you feel special, hopeful, happy. Most of all, proud of yourself. To all of you, who, believe it or not are real-life Rockys, because you live your life on your own terms, you try and do the best you can and you just keep punching.”

The 1976 film won a best picture Oscar and in 2020 finished tied for No. 2 in The AP Top 25 favorite sports movies poll.

The Philadelphia Visitors Center hatched RockyFest — which runs through Dec. 8 — in part for an overdue appreciation of the series as well as connecting locals and tourists to movie sites beyond the bronze statue.

“For years, there were tourists coming every single day to get their photo at the Rocky statue and there was nothing here officially to greet them," said Maita Soukup, of the Philadelphia Visitor's Center. ”There were no maps, no signage, no sort of visitor services infrastructure here at the Rocky statue and steps, even though it was such a big tourist attraction. That's why we wanted to open a visitor's center here. In the process of the city pursing that, Sly Stallone reached out to us and was like, let's do this in partnership.”

Just like Rocky, if the first festival is successful, expect II and III and IV and more.

____

AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports

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December 03, 2024 at 12:47PM

Demure, sanewashing, standalone 'staches, sourdough: Let's move on in 2025!

Repost Ent dalamlima.blogspot.com

NEW YORK -- We've demure-d our way through 2024. We've played passenger princess. We've baked enough sourdough to cover the world with our bubbly starters. We've rawdogged it and we've hyped it. All of it.

There's lots to leave behind as the new year rolls around. Here's a tiny tip of the iceberg of what we're over as we move on to 2025.

TikToker Jools Lebron's 38-second video describing her workday makeup routine as “Very demure. Very mindful” lit up the summer with memes. The video has been viewed more than 50 million times.

With her newfound fame, Lebron, a transgender woman, was able to earn toward her transition, help her family, rack up some brand deals and make a big statement about staying positive. In another video, she got the world going on “very cutesy.”

Love you, Jools! But here's the thing all you meme-makers: Summer's over. We're also looking at you, “brat” enthusiasts. The summer slime greenness of it all and the Charli XCX-Kamala Harris moment were great! We know you'll keep it demure as you move on to the next big thing.

As for all those dogs and cats eeeking out in videos over President Donald Trump's Haitian immigrant remark? Here's to a calmer 2025 for you, Springfield, Ohio.

Speaking of demure but no longer cutesy, in the name of all things Holy Feminism, passenger princesses must abdicate.

A passenger princess, according to Urban Dictionary, is “a pretty girl that has no other job but to look pretty in the passenger seat while her sneaky link/boyfriend/significant other drives.” What's a sneaky link, you might ask? It's a secret hookup. For sex.

Passenger princesses decorate their sides of front seats with little baubles in the air vent. They pack in snacks on little trays that fit on their Stanley cups. They bring cozy blankies, replace visor mirrors with fancy lit ones and generally reign while demanding their men place one hand on their nearest leg.

The term has been around since at least 2020, when a Twitter (now X) user called his dog a passenger princess on a photo of said dog in the front seat of his car. That, eventually, morphed into human princesses storming TikTok.

Take the wheel, dear princesses. We know you know how to drive. And congrats, TikToker @masonshea. Your passenger prince video has amassed more than 60 million views since you posted an equal treatment grab in early 2023.

Unless you're in a K-pop girl band and-or young, tall and stick-thin, this fashion thang looks good on exactly no one. And it's back. On runways. In streetwear. On shopping sites and store shelves.

Why reach for puff ball dresses, skirts, bloomers and tops with so many other options out there? Teen Vogue noted Gen Z's embrace in September, describing the silhouette as having a form-fitting waist and balloon-like hem. It's, wait for it, “feminine and romantic” and “draws attention to the body,” the magazine said.

Not, on the aforementioned, in a good way. And that means the majority of women.

“There is just something funny about bubble hems and the way they, well, bubble up around your thighs,” Harper Bazaar's Tara Gonzalez wrote in August. “They’re vaguely diaperlike in that sense, which is why they aren’t a crowd-pleaser. Instead, they’re something either you get or you don’t.”

Bubble dresses, in various iterations, are hardly fresh fashion. Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent got there first in the 1950s. They, yes, bubbled back up in the 1980s, and again in the 2000s.

Dare to be different!

What did we do during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic? We baked bread. Specifically, we went nuts for sourdough because we were home with time on our hands to feed our starters and tend to our rises and bake our loaves.

Well, some of y'all are still putting up sourdough videos, naming your starters, selling dehydrated bits of your starters, spending hours on rises and pull-and-folds and waxing wise on which tools and baskets are the best.

The world has re-started. Keep your bread videos to yourselves. Your starters bubble. They multiply. Your dough rises and rises again. Your little razor cuts are epic. Sourdough bread is lovely and it's healthy and, now, we all know how to make it.

Sourdough videos? No need. Thank you for your service.

Depending on who you are, rawdogging has different meanings. There's having sex without a condom. And there's the male-driven travel trend of eschewing all distractions and movement and sustenance while long-haul flying. The latter raw dogging spiked in 2024.

You've got your hyper-male enthusiasts looking to, well, be hyper-male. And you've got your travelers seeking to lock in some sort of mindfulness or uber-focus or, what? Who knows.

Listen: You paid for that ticket. Enjoy the food and music and movies. Also, not drinking is just dehydration silly. So is blood clot-worthy not moving around.

Finding your center by simply staring at the in-flight map seems, simply, pointless. Here's to a rawdog-free new year. The same goes for that plane seat belt thing where people find it somehow useful (not) to buckle up at the ankles, their knees hiked to their chins. C'mon. That can't be all that comfortable, let alone safe. Happy turbulence to you all.

Speaking of travel trends, shove off people curating the contents of your TSA trays. As for those among you who bought TSA trays to conveniently produce content at home. Not cutesy.

These potatoes. I mean, come ON! Are you kidding me? Wow, just wow. Don’t sleep on these! Potatoes!

Where there are content creators, there's hype talk. There's a superlative mountain. There's fake amazement, surprise, excitement over the mundanest of mundaney things as the race for likes, shares and comments carries on.

And there's a plague of weird verbalisms that make various tasks sound like battlegrounds: I'm “going in” with the ranch dressing. I'm “going in” with this concealer. I'm “frying off” the garlic. I'm gonna “hit it” with the salt!

Much has been made of social media speak for decades. This species is just so dumbly an attempt to make something truly boring sound viral worthy. It spread faster than a runaway money train.

Take a breath. We'll look at you making potatoes. We promise.

The chevron. The Dali. The pencil. The walrus.

Since virus lockdowns offered men the time and space to curate their faces, mustaches all by their lonesome have been on the rise. Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Pedro Pascal, The Weeknd and Jacob Elordi rocked their 'staches sans beards on red carpets and social media, upping the nowness of it all.

As of September 2022, Gillette estimated that 12.5 million men in the U.S. had mustaches. That's a 1.5% increase from March 2020. The shaving company launched a facial hair-grooming brand, King C. Gillette, to ride the wave.

Mustaches, with beards. Fine. Freestanding mustaches. Polarizing. Do we thank a contingent of ironical millennials looking to revisit the past for this, uh, trend? What about the unironical? Do we point to Miles Teller's character in the 2022 film, “Top Gun: Maverick?”

Teller's 'stache was a nod to Anthony Edwards’ similar one in the original 1986 “Top Gun.” This is not 1986.

Have a nice day.

Fancy headboards. Custom-made cabinetry. An interior designer. Dorm room decor for some is way, WAY off the rails, leaving students who can't afford to spend thousands in the dirt.

The cost of college — tuition, fees, room and board — nearly doubled between 1992 and 2022, rising from an inflation-adjusted average of $14,441 per year to $26,903 across all types of schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Dorm costs saw a similar increase in the same time span, $3,824 to $7,097.

Hello haves and have-nots. We see you. And thank you TikTok for fueling the frenzy.

Karens: Airplane Karens. In-store Karens. Neighbor Karens. Park Karens. Yes, we've mentioned you before and, lo, you're still here. You've had your day. You've had your years. Meds. Therapy. Whatever it takes.

Sanewashing: Advance the power of facts. End the false equivalence. In all things. That is all.

Anti-aging products for young girls: Damage has been done. Parents, get a grip.

Paging Dr. Beat: Emergency, emergency! All you walking-in-place video creators showing off your scrubs and your jammies and your entire wardrobes. Tired content. Cut it out. New year. New song. New memes.

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December 03, 2024 at 12:47AM

Former My Chemical Romance drummer Bob Bryar dies at age 44

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Bob Bryar, a former drummer for My Chemical Romance who played on the band’s career-defining rock opera, “The Black Parade,” has died

Bob Bryar, a former drummer with My Chemical Romance who played on the band’s career-defining rock opera, “The Black Parade,” has died, according to the band. He was 44.

“The band asks for your patience and understanding as they process the news of Bob’s passing," a spokesperson for My Chemcial Romance said in a statement Sunday

The statement did not include any additional details.

Bryar replaced drummer Matt Pelissier in 2004 and left the band in 2010. Bryar moved on from the music business and later auctioned off a drum kit to raise money for an animal adoption center in Williamson County, Tennessee.

Next year, the band will embark on a 10-date North American stadium tour, where they will perform “The Black Parade,” released in 2006, in full.

My Chemical Romance formed in 2001 and released four studio albums across their career, first breaking through with 2004’s “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.” They announced their breakup in 2013; a year later, they released a greatest hits collection titled “May Death Never Stop You.” In 2019, they announced a reunion, later revealing they’d privately reunited two years earlier.

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December 02, 2024 at 12:02PM

'Moana 2' sails to a record $221 million opening as Hollywood celebrates a moviegoing feast

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NEW YORK -- Christmas came early at the box office this year.

“Moana 2” brought in a tidal wave of moviegoers over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, setting records with $221 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. That, combined with “Wicked” and “Gladiator II,” made for an unprecedented weekend in cinemas and a confluence of blockbusters more like what’s often found in late December.

Expectations were high for Walt Disney Co.’s “Moana 2,” but the film blew predictions out of the water. Its five-day opening set a new record for Thanksgiving moviegoing. The previous best was $125 million for “Frozen 2” in its second week of release in 2019. “Moana 2” added $165.3 million internationally.

At the same time, the sensation of “Wicked” showed no signs of slowing down. The Universal Pictures musical brought in $117.5 million over the five-day weekend, pushing its two-week global total to $359.2 million. Not accounting for inflation, “Wicked” is now the highest grossing Broadway adaptation over “Grease.” (That 1978 film grossed $190 million, but factoring in inflation would put it past $900 million.)

“Gladiator II,” meanwhile, also held well, dipping 44% from its opening weekend. Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar-winning best picture original collected $44 million in its second weekend. While its steep price tag of $250 million will make profitability challenging, “Gladiator II” has swiftly gathered $320 million worldwide.

Those three films drove the overall box office to more than $400 million in Thanksgiving weekend ticket sales, a record. For an industry that has been battered in recent years by the pandemic, work stoppages and the upheaval caused by streaming, it was a triumphant weekend that showed the still-potent power of Hollywood’s blockbuster machine. Before “Wicked,” “Moana 2” and “Gladiator II” arrived in theaters, ticket sales were running about 25% behind pre-pandemic levels.

Michael O’Leary, president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, said the weekend showed what’s possible when “all the pieces of the puzzle come together” in compelling big-budget movies with marketing muscle.

“We’re very optimistic that this weekend is the start of what we believe is a full-on charge into the future,” he said. "The remaining quarter of this year looks very promising and then on into 2025 and 2026. We’re hoping next year is the first kind of normal year this industry has had in a long time.”

Like the last time such anticipated movies collided on the release calendar — as in 2023's much-ballyhooed “Barbenheimer" — the movie industry again could see evidence of a rising moviegoing tide lifting all blockbusters. In recent years, studios have typically tried to space out most of their biggest releases. Earlier this fall, “Venom: The Last Dance," for example, was the No. 1 film for three straight weeks, despite not being particularly successful.

“For a long, long time in Hollywood, there’s been a belief that you don’t put big blockbuster movies up against each other,” said O'Leary. “But the truth of the matter is that competition is good. It’s good for the movies. It’s good for the studios. It’s good for the theater owners. But it’s particularly good for the moviegoing public.”

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December 02, 2024 at 12:17AM

AP PHOTOS: A Japanese artist finds solace and global fans with intricate leaf-cutting

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TOKYO -- A frog holding a taro-leaf umbrella. A parade of frolicking animals. An Ukiyo-e style Mount Fuji. Giant waves. A Japanese artist who goes by the name Lito carves these delicate designs on fallen leaves, giving life back to them.

The world of Lito’s delicate art, which he began in 2020 and posts on social media almost daily, has won fans from around the world. The leaf art has also given him solace after earlier struggles with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and a purpose in life — the joy of making people happy with his art.

He enjoys working at night. From a pile of leaves treated with a wrinkle-free chemical, he picks one and places it on a cutting board.

First, he outlines the design on the leaf with a pen in his right hand. Then he takes a design knife in his left hand and starts cutting the leaf carefully. Slowly, the leaf begins to take the shape of a frog carrying an umbrella — a simple design he demonstrated in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

More complex, highly intensive work on a single leaf can take more than eight hours to complete.

His leaf-cutting works include titles such as “Scrolls of Frolicking Animals,” “Leaf Aquarium,” and “Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji: The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” Each piece includes his own twists, and often uses animals.

“I would rather finish it in one go when I am focused,” Lito, 38, said. He didn't want to disclose his real name for personal reasons.

Since his childhood, Lito says he has had high levels of concentration and patience. But he had trouble fitting into what was considered the norm at school or at work, despite all his efforts. He struggled to interpret others' feelings and to avoid confrontations.

After years of difficulty, he went to a hospital at age 30 and was told he has ADHD, a diagnosis that he felt explained why he has always done things differently.

He saw no point in forcing himself to do things the same way as other people, and began to adjust his life.

In early 2020, Lito came across the art of leaf cutting. He saw it as the perfect use of his patience and concentration.

Word of his skills has spread across social media, and he has published books on his leaf-cutting work. He holds a near monthly solo exhibition in various places in Japan.

“If I can make people happy by doing what I am doing, I want to do more. That’s my driving force for what's next,” Lito says.

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December 02, 2024 at 12:02AM