WILL SMITH'S CONCUSSION

"Concussion is a 2015 American biographical sports thriller/medical drama film directed and written by Peter Landesman, based on the 2009 GQ exposé Game Brain by Jeanne Marie Laskas, and starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who fought against efforts by National Football League to suppress his research on the brain damage suffered by professional football players. The film also stars Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Albert Brooks. Columbia Pictures released the film on December 25, 2015."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussion_(2015_film)


No, I haven't seen the movie "Concussion." 

No, this is not a movie review

Yes, I hope the movie is actually worth all they hype.

And yes, I truly hope Will Smith wins something for it


But I just wanted to make one or two little observations:

I think it's interesting that mothers all over the damn planet have been saying football is too rough and stupid since football was invented and the first mother of a football player ACTUALLY saw her son play.

And that first mother and every mother after her was "poo-poo-ed" by her husband, coaches, etc. and told she doesn't know what it is to be a boy becoming a man. And while that's true, she may not know x, y, and z about being a man or becoming one. But many, if not most, female human beings know idiotic when they see it...until they turn off their brains and let the men around her tell her that she doesn't see what she sees.

Now that a male scientist has come around to say all that hitting is dangerous (to head AND BODY) now there's been some sort of new discovery?

To me this sounds very much like Columbus discovered America -- the patriarchy/sexism version.

The thing that's unique about Dr. Bennet Omalu is that he's fighting uphill to get the National Football league to admit that players are being permanently damaged. It seems to me that Omalu has had about as much success as the general public at getting the NFL to sanction it's players for beating and raping women -- when nobody's looking. Maybe this movie will help change something other than padding and helmets required etc. 

The other thing I'm wondering about is the status/class aspect of this. I don't watch sports too much. But I've heard the inner-city rags to riches story over and over again. I'm wondering how many NFL hopefuls are wishing Dr. Omalu would just go away and let them take their chances with brain damage if they might earn millions of dollars. Black inner-city football hopefuls possible reaction to "Concussion" and Dr. Omalu put me in mind of that prison movie where the sadistic prison warden puts the inmates in a competition to the death. Only one out of 100 will win, live on, and make it out of the prison, but they're all desperate so the inmates volunteer for the competition. The prison warden always has a back up plan to kill all of them. Nobody ever wins. But football? A certain percentage might get to win for a good long while. If your only way out of the inner-city is through a life altering series of concussions, they might take the chance. Sort of sounds like the gladiator thing they had going in Europe so long ago too, doesn't it? So if people take "Concussion" seriously, I wonder if it'll only be rural desperate whites, immigrant desperate all-shades, and inner-city desperate black people that wind up playing football in a decade or so? Or maybe everybody's desperate when it comes to a chance at getting rich?