Rocky Balboa: The Best of Rocky
No matter whether or not you think Sylvester Stallone should have gone back to the Rocky trough one more time, this soundtrack is fun because it's basically a collection of music from all the past movies in the saga, ending with Three 6 Mafia’s rap contribution toRocky Balboa,"It's a Fight." The CD starts off with Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)," which remains so totally awesome that we can only bow to its 1970s brilliance; a 2006 remix tagged on at the end doesn't improve on it. Oddly, the sequencing isn't chronological, maybe so the two best-known tracks--the original theme and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," fromRocky III--could start off the CD with a one-two punch. But that also means that we zig-zag back and forth in the Rocky saga. James Brown's "Living in America" (fromRocky IV) has aged rather well, but the compilers realized Bill Conti's proto-disco score for the first installment still fares the best, and so five tracks are pulled from it (compared to just one fromRocky V). That old warhorse's still got some juice.--Elisabeth Vincentelli