Concussion [DVD] [2016]

FIFA, the IOC and the NFL are huge, multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. As such, they’re as powerful as some governments or countries. They sit atop the food chain and have no natural enemies to challenge them, eat them. Thus the temptation to lord it over underlings is always there. Oscar Wilde once famously said he could resist everything except temptation. These conglomerates are the same, dissipated by greed, self-indulgence, corruption. The bottom line is everything to them, nothing allowed to get in the way of it, not even the health and lives of the players on which their sports (and money) depend. This might be labeled ironic, as well as self-defeating, though in sport, as in war, fresh players can always be recruited, regimented and sent into battle. It’s called collateral damage.The NFL in particular is guilty as charged, several of its former players now dead because of brain trauma caused by the sport they played — American football. This film journeys into that particular heart of darkness in America.The story has five major themes: (1) the American Dream and immigrant experience in the U.S.; (2) professional integrity and the need to defend it; (3) romantic love and the support it gives when one is suffering through difficult times; (4) scientific evidence that football is dangerous to human health; and (5) the mendacity of corporate power in destroying, or attempting to destroy, forces that challenge its power.The drama opens in Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. There are three major professional sports teams in that city: the Pirates (baseball), the Penguins (ice hockey) and the Steelers (football). The Penguins have been successful and are the reigning Stanley Cup champions. The Pirates have won some World Series, though not lately, their greatest triumph coming in the 1960 World Series when they knocked off the mighty New York Yankees in 7 games, winning the last game of the Series with a walk-off home run in Pittsburgh at old Forbes Field (now sadly demolished). New York has never forgiven Pittsburgh for that act of treachery and never will. But it’s the Steelers, their highly successful football team, that owns the hearts and minds of those who love sports in Pittsburgh. In the main lobby of the city’s airport two statues of cultural heroes can be found: one of Colonel George Washington (who fought a major battle in Pittsburgh during the Revolutionary War against the hated red coats, the British) and Franco Harris, local-boy running back for the Steelers who played in their heyday in the 1970s under the great head coach Chuck Noll. No team has won more Super Bowls than the Steelers (6) and only one other team (the Dallas Cowboys, despised in Pittsburgh and many other places) has appeared in the Big Game more times. So let us say that football is more important than any other sport in Pittsburgh. Maybe not quite a religion, but as important as George Washington and wars of liberation.Dr. Bennet Omalu was a pathologist from Nigeria who worked for the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office in Pittsburgh. He was highly educated with degrees from three universities and skilful in his diagnoses of patients when performing autopsies. He was also a religious man, highly spiritual, who treated the dead before him with utmost respect, praying for the souls of the departed and talking to them out loud as if in communion with them before cutting their poor bodies open. He was viewed, naturally enough, as an eccentric outsider by his colleagues. He was serious and studious, not the life of any party, so he had few or no friends, just colleagues. Plus, to make matters worse, he sinned. He didn’t know or care who the Steelers were and consequently knew none of the players who played for them. Imagine not knowing who Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann are in Pittsburgh. It has to be a joke, and yet it wasn’t with Bennet. He just didn’t know important things. His deal was dealing with the dead, practically all he did.He was a bachelor of course. What woman would have him? His flat was a mess, littered with books, papers, reports, a microscope and slides. He lived there but it was really just an extension of his workplace. His life, one might say, was one-dimensional.But Bennet was and is human, endowed with the desire to be with others, the human animal just as social as all other primates. This desire was mainly met and satisfied at church, which he religiously attended, pun perhaps intended, every Sunday. It was there that a slim, charming and beautiful young woman named Prema Mutiso manifested her presence one Sunday after church. Actually, she was shy, just like Bennet and new to the community. She was from Kenya and knew few people in Pittsburgh. She worked as a nurse and caregiver at an old folks home in the city. It seems she had just moved to Pittsburgh and hadn’t yet found a proper place to live. So the pastor or someone in the church recommended that she room with Bennet. His flat was big enough to accommodate another person, as he had a spare bedroom he never used. It’s not clear if matchmaking was the motive behind the suggestion. It may have been. Or it may have just been the thought that two lonely African people in a strange new country might be good for one another, even if the histories of Nigeria and Kenya are so different.Their relationship, as one might imagine, given their backgrounds, was polite, formal and respectful. If Bennet or Prema thought of romance, neither made any indications of their feelings. But of course it’s no surprise in the film to see them gradually bonding and relying on one another. Over time genuine devotion begins to develop and we watch, rather endearingly, as two shy, old-fashioned and tentative persons begin to fall in love.There’s no doubt Prema gave Bennet strength, confidence, self-belief. I don’t see what happens in the rest of the film happening without her. She becomes part of the well-known homily that behind every great man there’s a great woman. It was true in Bennet’s case. Prema was his rock of support. He loved her, she loved him, and out of their sweet and almost chaste romance marriage resulted.Mike Webster was a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970s and ‘80s. He was a center, the player who crouches down on the offensive line and hikes the ball through his legs to the quarterback, whose nickname in football parlance is the field general, as he’s the player who directs the offence toward its intended goal — scoring points by getting into the opposition’s end zone. Iron Mike was Mike Webster’s nickname. He was bad in the good sense of the word — tough, ornery, aggressive. Players didn’t fool with Iron Mike. He used his head like a battering ram, knocking helmets with opposing players for 60 minutes every Sunday on a playing field. He did that for 18 years and hardly ever missed a game. He anchored those Super Bowl-winning teams for the Steelers in the ‘70s. There were more glamorous players on the team that played the sexier positions — quarterback, running back, wide receiver, cornerback — but Pittsburgh is a no-nonsense blue-collar, working-class town. It’s been called many things, but sexy isn’t one of them. Pittsburgh loved Mike Webster. No, it worshipped him. He was the city, represented its style, mentality, attitude. Actually, people everywhere loved Iron Mike. You didn’t have to come from Pittsburgh to respect him. I’m from California and my team is the San Francisco 49ers. But I knew who Iron Mike was and why he was great. Everyone knew. Or, I should say, almost everyone.Bennet didn’t. Iron Mike died and was wheeled into his pathology lab. He lay there cold and immobile on the gurney. It was Bennet’s job to do the autopsy, to determine the cause of death. But this disturbed some people among him, colleagues who thought it undignified to cut Mike open and probe his body. But Bennet insisted on doing his job. So did his supervisor.Mike was 50 when he died but looked much older. His body was ravaged by football. Fractured bones, bad joints, swollen feet, broken teeth, and a brow ridge that made him look Neanderthal, calcium deposits building up on his forehead from all the violent contact over the years. But it was Mike’s brain that interested Bennet most. He thought it would be shrivelled in the way brains in Alzheimer’s patients are. He thought this because Mike suffered from dementia and depression for years before he died, conditions that altered his personality. He lost everything — his home, family, mind. He pawned his Super Bowl rings and was living in his car when he died, a homeless, suicidal junkie.Pitiful, heartbreaking.Bennet was stumped. The brain looked normal. He couldn’t understand the cause of death. True, Mike had officially died from a heart attack. But Bennet believed this was secondary. What had caused the dementia? There was no tumour and no signs of congenital deterioration.The pathology report seemed finished but Bennet wouldn’t sign it. Nagging doubts lingered. His work was incomplete. What had been happening in Mike’s brain? Where did the dementia come from? He needed an answer. He needed a detailed analysis of the brain.This was a problem because many people wanted Mike in the ground as soon as possible. He was an icon, not a cadaver, and these emotions got in the way of these people. But Bennet stood his ground. He even spent $20,000 of his own money to try to solve the riddle. He sent tissues of Mike’s brain to special labs where more detailed preparation of them could be made. When he got them back he discovered something new: a build-up of large quantities of tau protein in the brain. This shouldn’t have been there and could only be down to one cause: repeated blunt trauma. Mike Webster was concussed. His brain was in a continuous state of concussion. Bennet had the evidence and went to his supervisor. Another expert pathologist was called in to corroborate Bennet’s findings. He did. Nowhere in the medical literature could references to the condition be found. But the slides did not lie. The evidence was firm. He had to publish. Ethically, under his Hippocratic Oath, there was no question. The world had to know. But first he had to give the disease a name. He chose a tongue twister, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, otherwise now known as CTE.CTE entered the medical and science literature when Bennet and two colleagues of his from The University of Pittsburgh published their findings in the science journal Neurosurgery in 2005, three years after Mike Webster’s death in 2002. By 2006 the NFL was aware of the article and dismissed it as fantasy and charlatanry, using its own medical body, the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, to publicly denounce it as false and misleading. This was the beginning of the NFL’s campaign of dirty tricks and harassment. Bennet was an uneducated quack, a con man, a fantasist seeking personal glory. He wasn’t even American, just a black nobody from Africa trying to dishonour the glorious game of American football.The irony was immense. Bennet naïvely thought the NFL would thank him for revealing the truth. He had helped it, its players, their families, and the world by identifying CTE as the cause of intense suffering in players affected by concussions. Instead, a witch hunt.Bennet lost his job at at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. Prema also lost their first baby. It died in the womb. A link to the trauma in Bennet’s life? We can’t be sure, but certainly the stress and scrutiny both were under after the storm broke could not have helped her pregnancy. Bennet got a new job far away. He became the chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County in Lodi, California, a small town in the Central Valley, population 60,000. Later he would say that he wished he had never met Mike Webster. Why was it he who was destined to discover CTE?Some will say because only he could have done it. Why? Because he was honourable and by the book, a dedicated science man: neutral, objective, dispassionate. He had no agendas. He didn’t know who Mike Webster was and only cared about Mike’s past insofar as it could shed light on his death. This was Bennet’s work, how he operated, so he needed to know. When he understood what football was and how the players engaged with it on the field, the light went on inside his head. He suspected Webster’s brain had been damaged by the sport. He knew a human brain can absorb shocks of up to 60gs. After this threshold CTE can take hold. He also calculated that Mike Webster’s brain was receiving blows of over 100gs repeatedly over the 18 years he played the game. He says in the film (or Will Smith does, I mean) that Mike would have received over 70,000 blows to the head at 100gs or more during his career. The evidence said so.Bennet won, the NFL lost. Truth spoke to power and power was humbled, or at least it’s adopting that posture now. Over 5,000 former players have sued the league for compensation over head injuries received during the course of their playing careers.A note on the screen at the end of the film reads as follows:“The NFL settled on the condition that it would not have to disclose what it knew, and when, about the effects of concussions on football players.”Of course it did. It did a deal. It’s corrupt and above the law, so that must mean the law itself, designed to bring criminals to justice, is flawed too.So, what it is the future of the NFL? Hard to say. It’s massively wealthy now from TV deals and lucrative sponsorships. This isn’t likely to change soon. Also, even though the evidence is out now, many young men are known to be gamblers, which is to say risk takers. Even though the average career span for players is only 3.5 years in the NFL, the average salary is $1.9 million per annum. That’s a lot to think about, retirement after only four years with over 7 million dollars in the bank. Mind you, the average life expectancy of former NFL players is 55, compared to 77 for the non-playing male population of the U.S.Another thing with young people: distorted perspectives. An NFL athlete at 25 can feel indomitable, indestructible, on top of the world. This is an illusion he’ll discover much later if he has a later.But there’s no doubt the league has taken a hit. The word is out and many top athletes may opt to play other sports. In a generation or two it could be that the Super Bowl will no longer be very super and football will have to struggle to keep up with pro-wrestling and NASCAR for ratings. Parents throughout America are now thinking twice before allowing their children to strap on shoulder pads and put a helmet on. A child’s skull is thinner, less protected than the skulls of adults. The brain is smaller too, not having fully developed. Also, there’s slightly more space inside a child’s skull, which means the head has less internal shock-absorbing ability for the brain. A bad mix, then, football and children. Potentially lethal too.There was a time when the world got along just fine without FIFA, the IOC and the NFL. That’s heartening to think about. The Olympic charade in Rio just came and went. Next up, Japan and the Japanese who have kicked in bribes worth millions to the IOC to land the summer games in Tokyo in 2020. It’s a criminal operation, the whole thing, but nobody’s talking. In Japan, where I’m writing from, the topic is forbidden by unspoken and unwritten decree and therefore doesn’t exist. The difference between Japan and North Korea is a matter of image and degree, not principle. NHK, the state mouthpiece here, will never report anything controversial about Japan. Print media amounts to the same. Japan is a country where everyone pretends to be blind, so the elephant is always standing in the room.Anyway, bravo Bennet. It took you, an African, to tell America some dirty truths about itself.

This is a stunning film.The storyline is gripping, all the more so because it is taken from real-life.The cast is excellent with Will Smith’s Bennet Omalu thoroughly believable and some big names even in minor roles.The subject-matter is disturbing and thought-provoking for many sports: the boxing fraternity (not a sport I am happy with) has acknowledged the sad sight of the ‘punch-drunk’ ex-fighter for generations; American football clearly raises the brain-accelerating/decelerating forces to a new level with its high-speed helmet-to-helmet collisions graphically depicted in the film.My own sport, Rugby Union football (a player of no great ability but latterly as a medical officer at first-class and international squad level) is not exempt, with today’s players being bigger, fitter and faster and the tactical plays having raised it from a ‘contact sport’ to a ‘collision sport’. The recently-introduced requirement for ‘head-injury assessment’ time-out is to be applauded and the availability in sport of access to CT imaging is to be welcomed but the insidious effects of repeated concussional episodes and the absence of changes on currently available imaging do raise questions. It is hoped that new CT equipment will show detail allowing better information regarding Alzheimer’s and other dementias but whether this will extend to warning of the encephalopathy following repeated impact episodes remains to be seen.This is an exceptionally well-made film avoiding going over-the-top in its depiction of the size of the problem – huge food for thought.

At last an intelligent film about sports to rank with 'Moneyball'.Will Smith gives a very fine performance and his Nigerian accent is beautiful.The film tells the story of how a Nigerian pathologist in Pittsbugh discovered that American football players were suffering from a dementia-like condition due to the injuries to their brains. The high velocity impact of helmet-to-helmet generates tremendous force and the human brain has no shock absorber. Therefore the brain will experience violent movements and battering against the skull leading to constant bleeds which can cause catastrophic damage. (See images attached to this review - as an aside, in one charming scene, Will Smith shows pictures of birds that can resist tremendous g-forces and says 'The human brain does not have a tongue wrapped around it like the woodpecker'. I had always wondered how woodpeckers managed to knock their heads against trees!)The movie outlines the discovery process and then goes on to the struggle to get the governing body of the sport to acknowledge this. The film is a bit cagey, not quite coming out and saying 'the governing body knew of this but suppressed the evidence' however it clearly suggests that these inconvenient truths were blocked until the evidence and public opinion were overwhelming.The most interesting parts of the film offer visual evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy as well as the meticulous methods of brain sectioning required to gather it. The condition could only be diagnosed post-mortem at the time and, I presume, that is still the case.Along the way there is human interest in the form of a love affair and also the cranky boss ( a real scene stealer with some very memorable lines) who supports Will Smith only to be accused of mail fraud by the FBI. The film suggests that this is an attempt to bury the evidence, however this suggests the federal government would support the NFL (why would they having already prosecuted big tobacco which is a far stronger set of corporations with deeper pockets than the mighty NFL?) and also ignores the fact that, in reality, these indictments occurred three months after Will Smith left his job to go to California to take up another job as a pathologist.

It highlights a very important subject that needed to be discussed. Amazing film

je connais bien le football américain et ses dangers il faut tenir compte du danger ,comment le faire moins violentj'ai rencontré un accident grave lors d'un match ,mon gendre a arrété net il était pourtant un joueur passionné

Drama que presenta la realidad de muchos atletas en la práctica del futbol americano al presentar daños irreversibles a nivel cerebral Hechos de la vida real.

Haven't been a fan of Will Smith's. Perfectly lovely human being, I am sure! But his characters have been him playing the same specific guy all the time. Not in Concussion.Concussion is the important true story of a highly trained doctor investigating the bizarre death of a football star. Will Smith earns very high accolades for his portrayal of that doctor - he *can* act, and this film is worthy. More of this please.The bluray also features actual interviews with the principals from the film (the actual people in real life)... very well-done special features, candid, not "produced".

Excelente

Good