Two New Films About Making Films: Almodóvar and the Rocky Origin Story

Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas and Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky both open with the same premise: a filmmaker cannibalizing the world around him. NPR critic Bob Mondello reviewed both films this week and found more common ground between them than their wildly different styles suggest.

His framing is blunt. "Write what you know is probably the most time-honored advice you can give a storyteller," host Sacha Pfeiffer said. "Maybe these days, it should be film what you know."

What happens in Bitter Christmas?

Bitter Christmas begins with the sound of typing. The words "a film by Almodóvar" appear on screen. The clickety-click keeps returning, because the characters we're watching — a filmmaker named Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) and her firefighter boyfriend Bo — are fictional characters in a movie being written by Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a fictional filmmaker created by Almodóvar himself.

The plot turns on how moviemakers use what they see around them, and maybe shouldn't. Elsa models her new script on the failing marriage of a friend, who is, of course, furious. And since Elsa is modeled on Raúl's assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Mónica is just as ticked off at Raúl.

Mondello notes that all this introspection is "augmented by campy melodrama." Elsa's boyfriend isn't just a firefighter. He moonlights as a stripper. Mónica gets to critique not just the film-within-a-film but all of Raúl's career — and, by extension, Almodóvar's. Since Almodóvar is calling the shots, that means he's doing the critiquing himself.

The effect, Mondello says, would be dizzying even without the black sand beaches and the blazing scarlet and gold wardrobe that keep Bitter Christmas firmly in the Almodóvar canon.

What does I Play Rocky cover?

A few notes of Bill Conti's theme from Rocky is all it takes, Mondello observes, to remind whole generations of moviegoers how they felt about boxer Rocky Balboa back in 1976. And a few words is all it takes Anthony Ippolito to conjure the man who created him: Sylvester Stallone.

Ippolito is, in Mondello's words, the film's "knockout right hook" — a 20-something actor who so inhabits the wannabe 1970s movie star that you may forget he's not actually Stallone. "Acting's what I live and breathe for," Ippolito's Stallone says. His soon-to-be wife Sasha (Annasophia Robb) is, at that moment, pretty much his only fan. Her advice: "Write a script and give yourself the best part."

He does. The script about a boxer reaches producers Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), and director Peter Farrelly turns I Play Rocky into what Mondello calls "a punch-drunk tribute to a whole era of indie filmmaking."

How much of it really happened?

Quite a lot, Mondello reports. The film's dialogue tracks the known history. Chartoff and Winkler marvel that Stallone wrote it in three and a half days. Executive Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts) tries to buy the writer out of the lead role — first at 25 thousand dollars, then at 200. "I'm not giving this up — not for a million bucks, not for 10," Stallone replies.

Farrelly also slips insider details into scenes audiences thought they knew:

• The meat Rocky punched turned out to be frozen solid, breaking the actor's hand.
• Carl Weathers, played by Stephan James, admits he can't actually box: "I lied. I'm an actor."
• The freshly invented Steadicam made the famous run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art possible.

The real Stallone has told his tale for ages, and everyone knows how it ends. Yet as Farrelly "bobs and weaves," Mondello writes, it feels as if there's actual suspense.

His verdict: I Play Rocky, "a crowd-pleaser about the making of a crowd-pleaser, feels roughly as inspiring as the film that inspired it." Two very different directors, one shared subject — the suspicion that art always steals from somebody.