I knew that Stallone wrote Rocky. He was very brave to insist that he had to star in the film because he put the pending sale of the script at risk. However, I don’t feel he really built on the promise of Rocky. Films like ‘Cobra’ are kind of mailing it in(which Stallone also wrote). That’s the film I was referring to with the matchstick line. To be fair, all of them (Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and Stallone), were all highly intelligent and successful. It’s difficult to achieve the success that they did.

I haven’t read Ted Chiang, thanks for the recommendation and thanks for the comment!