A Knight's Tale
A classic sports plot elevated into greatness by being set in medieval Europe. Probably the only mainstream film that starts with a secondary character violently voiding his own bowels ‘till death (offscreen, of course, this is still Hollywood).
After said shiting leads to the Protagonist being forced to joust as his knight, he wants to be a self made man. After hiring the help of a gambling addict Chaucer, he fakes a royal bloodline and wins big all over mainland Europe.
The final game is the (Medieval) World Cup (of Jousting?), set in England, right on the same miserable hellhole where he had lived as a boy. His father saved him from a miserable life of Thatcherism (wink wink, nudge nudge) by making him a Lord’s servant, and decades later lives to see him knighted for real.
The king can do what he wants, but the protagonist is knighted for sticking a lance on the king’s face, even after seeing through his paper thin disguise. Not exactly Sir Isaac Newton, more Sir Pelé.
Rocky is a squeaky clean version of this. I don’t remember Apollo crapping himself on the arena, or Ronald Reagan showing up and take some jabs on the chin.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.