WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The new Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa, is unabashedly sentimental.

"I have an overactive cornball gene that I can't repress," Rocky's creator and alter ego, Sylvester Stallone, admits when pressed on the topic by the Toronto Sun. He also loves to talk, even philosophize, and reflect on life.

"I know some people wouldn't think that," he offers, referring to public attitudes towards him, especially if fans are going by what they have seen in his Rambo and not his Rocky movies.

Rambo is an action brute who does not like to talk. "It's a performance!" Stallone says. "I'm more the other guy."

A reluctant Stallone is going to play Rambo one last time in Rambo IV: In The Serpent's Eye, which is now in pre-production for a probable 2008 release.

"Do you know what it's like to keep your mouth closed for six months, to be monosyllabic? It's hard!"

Yet it was easy for Stallone to go back to playing Rocky in Rocky Balboa, even if it was difficult to get the picture financed and produced.

Stallone inhabits the character he created 30 years ago. So the sentimentality in the new movie is natural, if challenging for the writer-director -- who is also Stallone.

"Being sentimental, it's a very tricky thing, you know, because you can get right into that precious area.

"But I like that, I really do. It just fascinates me when people can see a real tough guy and he's sitting there petting a poodle. I like that."

The rabbits and turtles and goldfish of Rocky's past are perfect for the character, Stallone says. In the original, his turtles were named Cuff and Link, funny for a guy who did not own a shirt that needed cuff links.

"Those kinds of things just get me and, if you can insert them in the script, it just gets you," Stallone says of how he crafted the details that made Rocky come alive.

"I'm a sentimentalist. I sit there and cry at a supermarket opening. I'm bad, I'm bad. I'm blowing it here!"

Stallone is also sentimental about the profound effect the original movie and the character of Rocky have had on American culture. Rocky won the Oscar as best picture of 1976. Stallone became only the third person to be nominated for both acting and screenplay in the same year, following in the august footsteps of Charlie Chaplin (The Great Dictator in 1940) and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane in 1941).

But the experience still left Stallone personally disappointed because Academy voters denied him a statuette. He has never been nominated since.

It is unlikely Rocky Balboa will deliver an Oscar, either. Not even a nomination. The sentimentality will probably sabotage that kind of honour. But, despite initial cynicism and laughter when the trailer started playing a few months ago, the movie now looks headed to critical acclaim and healthy box office.

And Stallone says his primary reason for making Rocky Balboa was to give the character a proper finale, not to gain any more personal glory. "Rocky's got to have some elevation at the end."