Sylvester Stallone

OK, you keep thinking, where the hell is Shelley Winters?So standard a '70s disaster picture is "Daylight" that the absence of Winters indeed feels like a major disappointment. Her replacement by a far more austere Claire Bloom in the old-lady-who-dies-bravely role may appease the minimalists among you, but the rest of us, who want a real wallow, a shameless blast of cheesy nobility, false heroics, big explosions, action sequences like thrill rides and pious optimism about the morning after, will shrivel with grief.

Rocky is back. Yay. Strictly for nostalgia lovers, Rocky Balboa - the latest in a film franchise that stretches back three decades - resurrects everyone's favorite underdog heavyweight boxing champion for one last go at the title. Hero worshipers who cherish the Rocky character will doubtless enjoy what amounts to a stroll down fantasy lane, as the 60-year-old Balboa revisits his old haunts (even the skating rink where he and Adrian fell in love) and tries to recapture some of the old magic.

Now that we're at the end of the year -- and fed up with articles on how to stay trim and have that box of Christmas cookies -- it's a perfect time for the self-reflective pieces offered in the December issues of Vogue and Esquire. The reflecting is being done by movie stars Winona Ryder and Sylvester Stallone. Both actors talk about seeking liberation from the images that brought them stardom -- Ryder in an OK Vogue article that could have dug deeper, and Stallone in a long, fascinating Q & A with interviewer Susan Faludi, the feminist author of "Backlash."

Harry Hamlin as dad in a family sitcom is not a concept that makes me leap to my feet screaming, "Yes!"But that's the deal in "Movie Stars," a new sitcom that premieres tomorrow night on the WB, and Hamlin is not half bad in hitting the tricky notes of satire and self-parody that his role demands."

Rocky is back. Yay. Strictly for nostalgia lovers, Rocky Balboa - the latest in a film franchise that stretches back three decades - resurrects everyone's favorite underdog heavyweight boxing champion for one last go at the title. Hero worshipers who cherish the Rocky character will doubtless enjoy what amounts to a stroll down fantasy lane, as the 60-year-old Balboa revisits his old haunts (even the skating rink where he and Adrian fell in love) and tries to recapture some of the old magic.

Stop! Or my mom will throw up.Now, my mom likes movies, don't get me wrong, but I don't think she would like "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot." In this one, Sylvester Stallone's movie mom, Estelle Getty, who is already a TV mom (of Bea Arthur), gets to blow a scumbag away with a .44 Magnum, talk tough, drive a car real fast and supervise her movie-son's affair with a superior officer, who, I hasten to add, is a woman.I don't think mom would believe a bit of it. And, I don't think she'd laugh at all!

Stop! Or my mom will throw up.Now, my mom likes movies, don't get me wrong, but I don't think she would like "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot." In this one, Sylvester Stallone's movie mom, Estelle Getty, who is already a TV mom (of Bea Arthur), gets to blow a scumbag away with a .44 Magnum, talk tough, drive a car real fast, and supervise her movie-son's affair with a superior officer, who, I hasten to add, is a woman.I don't think mom would believe a bit of it. And, I don't think she'd laugh at all!

Internal memos say that Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. spent more than $950,000 in a span of four years to feature its cigarette brands in more than 20 movies -- including payments of at least $300,000 to action film star Sylvester Stallone.The payments took the form of checks, cash and merchandise -- including jewelry and automobiles for such stars as Paul Newman, Sean Connery and Mr. Stallone -- over the years 1979 to 1983, the documents say. Product placement, which involves payments for display of brand-name merchandise in films, is a legal and potentially large source of revenue for filmmakers.

SYLVESTER Stallone has done it again. You would think his ''Rocky'' films would succumb to the law of averages, but the newest in the series, written by Stallone, is better than some of the others.''Rocky V'' has originality, and that's surprising in a boxing film. Aren't the stories always the same?Well, yes, they are, but this one braves a few new trails. When the film begins, the credits give us a review of the last film, one in which the Philadelphia boy took on the Russian champ and put him away.

WE MAY have seen the best of ''Oscar'' in its trailers. The film becomes amusing a half hour or so before it is over, but the first hour is farce that never quite makes it. It is far more frantic than funny.It's a shame. Sylvester Stallone had probably hoped this film would allow him to break away from action films, but he'll have to try again.Based on a French play by Claude Magnier, ''Oscar'' presents Stallone as Snaps Provolone, a 1930s mobster who tries to go straight after promising his dying father that he would.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a skinny, balding guy in a red cape!When Nicolas Cage soars in "Superman Lives" next year, he will complete the stunning transformation of action heroes in the '90s. No longer are bulging biceps or a washboard stomach required to shoot guns, nor is the guttural utterance of such one-liners as "Hasta la vista, baby" or "Make my day" needed to make audiences scream.Instead, all you need is an Oscar-winning actor primed on independent films intoning: "Put the bunny back in the box!"

Now that we're at the end of the year -- and fed up with articles on how to stay trim and have that box of Christmas cookies -- it's a perfect time for the self-reflective pieces offered in the December issues of Vogue and Esquire. The reflecting is being done by movie stars Winona Ryder and Sylvester Stallone. Both actors talk about seeking liberation from the images that brought them stardom -- Ryder in an OK Vogue article that could have dug deeper, and Stallone in a long, fascinating Q & A with interviewer Susan Faludi, the feminist author of "Backlash."

OK, you keep thinking, where the hell is Shelley Winters?So standard a '70s disaster picture is "Daylight" that the absence of Winters indeed feels like a major disappointment. Her replacement by a far more austere Claire Bloom in the old-lady-who-dies-bravely role may appease the minimalists among you, but the rest of us, who want a real wallow, a shameless blast of cheesy nobility, false heroics, big explosions, action sequences like thrill rides and pious optimism about the morning after, will shrivel with grief.

What do you say about a man who hangs his wife by a rope 300 feet over the Caribbean on their honeymoon?Well, he's either very nasty or a movie director.Fortunately for Geena Davis, her husband is a movie director named Renny Harlin, and that's exactly what he did to her on "Cutthroat Island," the $80-million swashbuckler that's just opened."You have to put the stars in danger," says Harlin, the affable Finnish action mechanic who pulled the same stunts on people he wasn't sleeping with in "Cliffhanger" (Sylvester Stallone)

Jacquline Stallone, psychic astrologer and mama of Sylvester Stallone, won a court order recently against a Timonium outfit, forbidding the use of her name in its sales pitches for a psychic hot line.Mama Stallone of Santa Monica, Calif., had dissolved her relationship earlier this year with the defendants: JTK Technologies Inc., Jeffrey Augen, Joel Katz and L. J. Marketing Inc. of the 1900 block of Greenspring Drive, according to the Baltimore County Circuit Court file. In February, she agreed to see-all exclusively for the Starpower Club, run by Universal Psychic Network Inc. of Miami, which was preparing a 30-minute infomercial.

This is hard for me, folks. I don't know if I can do it.Sylvester Stallone has finally made a good mov --No. I can't do it. My fingers refuse to obey my mind. I am ordering them to type: "Sylvester Stallone has finally made a good movie" and they will not do it.Let's try: Sylvester Stallone's new film, "Judge Dredd," isn't that bad.See how easy that was?And it gets better: He's the worst thing in it.Derived from a legendary British comic book, the movie offers Stallone, blimpy with muscle (he appears to have muscles in his lips!

This is hard for me, folks. I don't know if I can do it.Sylvester Stallone has finally made a good mov --No. I can't do it. My fingers refuse to obey my mind. I am ordering them to type: "Sylvester Stallone has finally made a good movie" and they will not do it.Let's try: Sylvester Stallone's new film, "Judge Dredd," isn't that bad.See how easy that was?And it gets better: He's the worst thing in it.Derived from a legendary British comic book, the movie offers Stallone, blimpy with muscle (he appears to have muscles in his lips!

'Oscar'Starring Sylvester Stallone.Directed by John Landis.Released by Touchstone.Rated PG. Imagine a ballet danced by pigs in cleats with clowns on their backs and you have some idea what carnage is done to the form of farce by Sylvester Stallone and his cohorts in "Oscar."Stallone is awful. The other performers are awful. The movie is awful. The seat I was sitting in was even awful and when I got to my car in the lot afterward, it was awful.Stallone plays "Snaps" Provolone -- a more appropriate name might have been Snaps Prosciutto, by the way. He's a hammy, preciously cute New York gangster in the year 1931, who swears to grant his father's dying wish to go straight.

"The Specialist" does not require the services of a movie critic so much as a bomb-sniffing dog, who could crouch at the foot of the ticket booth and yap like a maniac, warning the unwary to take cover.Where to begin? The movie is, as they say, a target-rich environment.Let's begin, therefore, with the biggest of them all. That's Stallone, Sylvester Stallone. In this movie -- why should this movie be any different than any of his others? -- he has exactly two expressions. The first is a kind of hang-dog, sappy dolor, his facial muscles so limp that the flesh falls off his skull and turns his eyes to droopy eggs.

Woody Harrelson almost licked the label off an empty wine bottle in "The Cowboy Way," and a new era was born.Welcome to the Year of the Himbo, the male equivalent of abimbo. He walks, and he talks (though none too well), but mostly he looks like a million bucks. He is his pecs, his lats or his deep blue eyes. He is an object, ladies and gentlemen, meant only for decoration and sexual innuendoes.We have, perhaps, come full circle. For years -- decades, even -- the American bimbo has been a time-honored character in literature and cinematography.