Thứ Sáu, 27 tháng 11, 2015
Thứ Năm, 26 tháng 11, 2015
Courtesy Of Columbia Pictures.
Forty minutes into Concussion, Dr. Bennet Omalu, played by Will Smith, turns to his future wife, Prema Mutiso, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and tells her: “God did not intend for us to play football.”
Sitting on the couch in their apartment, watching a clip reel of NFL hits and falls on a small television in front of them, Omalu shows Mutiso a peach in a mason jar full of water that is meant to represent the way human brains float unprotected in our skulls. He shakes the jar back and forth, punctuating each motion to indicate separate hits. The peach begins to break down, and the camera toggles back to NFL footage.
Concussion is Sony’s upcoming adaptation of the true story of Omalu, a Nigerian-born neurologist, who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy — or CTE, a degenerative brain disease — in beloved Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster.
The discovery led to the revelation that the NFL worked to conceal brain injuries caused by playing football, plunging the league into a public relations and legal crisis. The film is based on “Game Brain,” a 2009 GQ story by Jeanne Marie Laskas — credited as a screenwriter for Concussion — that told how the NFL tried to discredit Omalu’s research and intimidate him into retracting his findings.
Though not in the credits, the story clearly draws heavily from League of Denial, the 2013 book by ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. Omalu’s language in some Concussion scenes is drawn directly from the book, which was adapted into a PBS Frontline documentary in 2013.
When Sony’s emails were hacked and uploaded online in 2014, the NFL pushed back hard on Sony executives — who were meticulous in making the film airtight “in its representation of the “science and history.”
That revelation led to concerns that Concussion would water down the NFL’s treatment of Omalu — this was, after all, a story the NFL did not want to be made public. But, for the most part, that didn’t happen when it came to the final product: Concussion is unflinching in its portrayal of the CTE crisis. And attention on the disease will only pick up steam after Wednesday's revelation that NFL legend Frank Gifford suffered from it.
To borrow a line from the film — spoken by Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht, played by Albert Brooks, to Omalu — “The league has kept everyone in the dark, and you’ve turned on the lights and given its biggest boogeyman a name.”
Concussion, out Christmas Day, does just that.
Melinda Sue Gordon / photo credit Melinda Sue Gordon
The film begins with an adaptation of a speech Webster (played by David Morse) delivered during his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997. The role of the center on an offensive line is both cerebral and physical: He makes the decision on how his fellow linemen should be set, snaps the ball to the quarterback with precision, and then an instant later blocks defensive linemen from the most central route to the passer.
Webster is then shown — years later — ragged and living out of his truck in an industrial corner of Pittsburgh, homeless and away from his wife and family. To put himself to sleep, he sniffs ammonia and tasers himself repeatedly in the leg. He visits Dr. Julian Bailes (played by Alec Baldwin), a longtime trainer with the Steelers, and confronts him violently, telling him he can’t control the demons in his head and he needs a cure. Bailes tranquilizes Webster, looking at him with sympathy, but without a solution.
Webster died in 2002 at age 50, only five years after his Hall of Fame induction. Omalu was the pathologist on shift at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office the day Webster’s body came in. A throng of fans and reporters showed up at the office with Omalu, perhaps one of the few Pittsburghers who knew nothing of Webster’s 17-year NFL career.
Smith plays a convincing role, though his heavy accent has been criticized as a generic mix of sub-Saharan accents. Omalu’s Nigerian heritage is used in the film to tell the story of a man pursuing the American dream, but what mostly helped Omalu hold the NFL accountable, noted in Concussion, is his status as an outsider. Football is an inextricable part of modern American culture. But Omalu harbored no love for or knowledge of the game, allowing him to pursue the science without personal conflict.
Examining Webster’s body on a coroner’s table, Omalu looks at the former NFL star and says to him: “I need your help to tell the world what happened to you.”
When Omalu examines Webster’s brain, he sees no signs of abnormality, which strikes him as absurd. The man had been acting as if he had dementia in his forties, and Omalu knew there was no pre-existing literature on the condition that led to Webster’s death. Against the discouragement of his colleagues, and on his own dime, Omalu dissects Webster’s brain and takes slides of internal matter and examines it at his own kitchen table.
He focuses on what appears to be splotchy neural matter to the untrained eye — but in the slides he sees something the film does not name, but is now known as “tau proteins,” which should not be found in the segment of the brain Omalu observed. He paces, contemplating his discovery, as shots of Webster’s football career flash in his mind. The discovery, publishing, and naming of the disease are presented in a gripping 15-minute portion of the film, complete with dramatic music and aerial shots of Heinz Field. Omalu called it chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and he was excited to share his knowledge with the world.
This is how researchers at Boston University (where there is now a CTE Center led by top researchers in the field) define CTE:
“A progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes (and others) with a history of repetitive brain trauma, including symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head. CTE has been known to affect boxers since the 1920s. However, recent reports have been published of neuropathologically confirmed CTE in retired professional football players and other athletes who have a history of repetitive brain trauma. This trauma triggers progressive degeneration of the brain tissue, including the build-up of an abnormal protein called tau. These changes in the brain can begin months, years, or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement. The brain degeneration is associated with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia.”
A recent report by Frontline said that CTE has been found in the brains of 87 of the 91 former NFL players examined by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University. It’s a non-scientific sample size and the disease can only be diagnosed postmortem; it does not show on a CAT scan.
Concussion sticks closely to story reported in “Game Brain” and League of Denial, editorializing infrequently but effectively. The science of CTE is simplified, but portrayed accurately. Director Peter Landesman benefited from the compelling nature of the true story but struggled to capture the full context of the disease and subsequent crisis in a tidy two hours. Concussion is not the story of CTE in full, but it will be an impactful elevation of the science and silence behind the crisis in public consciousness.
Will Smith, the real Bennet Omalu, and director Peter Landesman.
Melinda Sue Gordon / photo credit Melinda Sue Gordon
When the NFL was made aware of Omalu’s science, they first tried to discredit it by presenting conflicting information from doctors who were not trained neurologists, and then attempted to intimidate Omalu into silence. The league denied any connection between their sport and the prevalence of CTE in its former players.
In a scene in the Coroner’s Office, Dr. Wecht is straight with Omalu, who still struggles to understand why the NFL would not prioritize the safety of its players:
“Bennet Omalu is going to war with a corporation that has 20 million people on a weekly basis craving their product. They own a day of the week: the one that the church used to own.”
Throughout the film, Omalu makes as many allies as enemies. Dr. Bailes, the former Steelers trainer who saw Webster before his death, enthusiastically joins Omalu. The two men try to recruit Dr. Joe Maroon (Arliss Howard), a neurosurgeon who has been a member of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee since 1994, to their cause after he tries personally to scare off Omalu. Maroon struggles with a foot in each camp — the NFL and science — but explains the NFL’s central fear of Omalu’s research: “If only 10% of mothers in America begin to conceive of football as dangerous, that is the end of football.”
The same quote was attributed to Maroon in League of Denial. The pipeline to the NFL will dry up without youth football, Maroon asserts.
One day at home, Omalu receives a phone call from a man who appears to be a football fanatic, but is not explicitly connected to the NFL: “You wanna puss-ify this country?” the irate fan asks, echoing the legions of fans who associate player safety with an apparently offensive feminization of sport culture. “You wanna vaginize it? Get the hell out, or it’ll be your autopsy.”
Intimidation tactics against Omalu and his family from the NFL and fans are used to show Omalu’s perseverance and confidence in his work. But by the end of the film, Omalu has received some recognition and the NFL has begun to realize the story of their players’ health is no longer in their control. The American dream narrative that follows Omalu through his research and battle with the NFL concludes neatly, but with a heavy hand.
When Concussion is released, the NFL will be in the prime of its season — just about to wrap the regular season and head into the playoffs, punctuated by Super Bowl 50 in the league’s shiniest new stadium in Santa Clara, California. For many avid football fans, the story of the CTE crisis as presented in Concussion is not new or revelatory. But for many fans, Concussion will be the light that shines on the NFL’s darkest spot.
Concussion will certainly change more than a few minds and hearts on the moral value of watching football on Sundays, and the NFL was right to be concerned about its release.
Brad Barket / Getty Images
NFL legend Frank Gifford has been diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) by a team of neurologists following his death at 84 years old in August 2015, his family said in a statement Wednesday.
CTE is a degenerative disease caused by repetitive sub-concussive hits to the head that can only be diagnosed post-mortem and has been found in the brains of many deceased football players.
His family explained they had an idea that he might be suffering from CTE before he died:
After losing our beloved husband and father, Frank Gifford, we as a family made the difficult decision to have his brain studied in hopes of contributing to the advancement of medical research concerning the link between football and traumatic brain injury.
While Frank passed away from natural causes this past August at the age of 84, our suspicions that he was suffering from the debilitating effects of head trauma were confirmed when a team of pathologists recently diagnosed his condition as that of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)–a progressive degenerative brain disease.
Symptoms of CTE, according to leading researchers at Boston University, include "memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia."
CTE, and its connection to football — and the NFL — are the subject of Concussion, a feature film starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian doctor who discovered the disease in the brain of Steelers legend Mike Webster in 2002.
For years, the NFL denied the connection between repetitive high-impact hits on the field with the neurodegenerative disease, but in recent years have begun to address the issue and have implemented new safety protocols for handling players' brain injuries.
Gifford played twelve seasons in the NFL, all for the New York Giants. He missed the 1961 season — in the middle of his career — after taking a hard hit and suffering a brain injury. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
Following his NFL career, Gifford became a broadcaster, and spent much of his career as an announcer for Monday Night Football. He married Kathie Lee (Gifford, neé Epstein) in 1986.
In Wednesday's statement, his family said they will continue to support the game Gifford loved:
We decided to disclose our loved one’s condition to honor Frank’s legacy of promoting player safety dating back to his involvement in the formation of the NFL Players Association in the 1950s. His entire adult life Frank was a champion for others, but especially for those without the means or platform to have their voices heard. He was a man who loved the National Football League until the day he passed, and one who recognized that it was–and will continue to be–the players who elevated this sport to its singular stature in American society.During the last years of his life Frank dedicated himself to understanding the recent revelations concerning the connection between repetitive head trauma and its associated cognitive and behavioral symptoms–which he experienced firsthand. We miss him every day, now more than ever, but find comfort in knowing that by disclosing his condition we might contribute positively to the ongoing conversation that needs to be had; that he might be an inspiration for others suffering with this disease that needs to be addressed in the present; and that we might be a small part of the solution to an urgent problem concerning anyone involved with football, at any level.
The Gifford family will continue to support the National Football League and its recent on-field rule changes and procedures to make the game Frank loved so dearly–and the players he advocated so tirelessly for–as safe as possible.
Chalo, let’s do this.
This is Dutee Chand, a 19-year-old sprinter from Odisha.
Via bitgiving.com
In July, 2015, she won a landmark case against rules that banned her from competing in women's events because she had a high level of testosterone.
Rafiq Maqbool / AP
She recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for a four-month visit to the Chula Vista Olympic Training centre in the U.S.
Via rockinmama.net
Several people have been tweeting out in support of Chand's dreams.
Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Johnson in Creed.
Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.
There’s a moment in Creed, the new Rocky spin-off of sorts, where Adonis Johnson knocks the living daylights out of a local rapper who mocks him by calling him Baby Creed.
The up-and-coming boxer is the son of legend Apollo Creed — who had an affair with Adonis's mother — but Adonis is pissed. He’s worked hard to get to where he is, to make a name for himself, and to keep the name of his father (who died in the ring fighting an unsympathetic Russian contender in Rocky IV) a secret. So when some guy — who, like the rest of the world at this point in the film, has learned of his heritage — tries to belittle Adonis’s accomplishments, as if he’d be comfortable riding on someone else’s coattails (or stars-and-stripes shorts), he decides to start the fight before the fight.
That scene, in many ways, parallels where the actor who portrays Adonis, Michael B. Jordan, is in his career right now: He is ready for his own battle.
By all accounts, Hollywood insiders consider 28-year-old Jordan the heir apparent to the thrones that Denzel Washington and Will Smith have built. For decades, those actors have established themselves as box office champions and they’re in a very small and exclusive fraternity — black men who can land leading roles in successful, high-profile feature films.
Creed is a continuation of the beloved, long-running Rocky franchise that made Sylvester Stallone famous in the title role, and now it’s about to do the same for Jordan.
But no matter how hungry we are for the next Washington or Smith, Jordan isn’t quite ready to raise his hand for that part.
He’s got other plans.
“I don’t think I have the pressure to be the next anybody,” he said, after tossing the idea around in his head for a few minutes. “I don’t put that on myself. I need to be the best version of myself. I put that pressure on myself to be the best version of Michael B. Jordan. And whoever that person is going to be, I’m still growing. I’m not even 30 yet.” He paused to slightly laugh at himself. “So I’m going to be a different person two years from now. I’m a different person now than I was a year ago: same core values, same person on the inside, but just growing to the next stage of my life of being a man. Will and Denzel have such phenomenal careers that anybody would be in awe of. [But] I think the time has changed. I think they came up in a different era, a different generation of film and cinema, which was molded and shaped by that as well. I think now, the timing, the platform is there for me to be able to be a version of what they had at their time.”
Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in Creed.
Courtesy Of Warner Bros.
Jordan’s heard plenty of times that Creed could catapult him into a superstar stratosphere. After Warner Bros. screened the film for journalists, the consensus was unanimous: the film — and most importantly, Jordan — was fantastic. Jordan offers “the best all-around performance of his young career,” reads a USA Today review.
Creed is Jordan’s first leading role in big feature film, a victory tantamount to Adonis nabbing his first taste of certifiable respect and getting dapped up by an opponent for being the real deal, not just a flash-in-the-pan wannabe boxer hoping to score off daddy’s name. Jordan has been working to get to this moment since making his debut in a 1999 episode of The Sopranos, before finally landing his big break on HBO’s The Wire in 2002 as teen drug dealer Wallace. Since then, he’s had roles in TV series like Parenthood and Friday Night Lights, been a part of ensembles in films like 2012’s Chronicle, and showed his dramatic chops in 2013’s Fruitvale Station, also directed by Creed’s Ryan Coogler.
Creed could also mean that Jordan has found a franchise that he can star in for years to come, an effort that didn’t exactly work out with the Fantastic Four reboot earlier this year. He won the part of the Human Torch — who has previously been portrayed as white, which sparked some controversy and a ton of conversation — but the movie was critically panned and a box office failure. But Creed? Critics already love it; if fans turn out, it could fall right in line with its predecessors, giving him a stability he’s yet to experience.
Coogler, Stallone, and Jordan at the L.A. premiere of Creed.
Todd Williamson / Getty Images
“This is something that I’m super proud of, and I feel like, as an origin story it could become a franchise and have success, and have multiple films. You have to be strategic,” Jordan said of Creed. “After Fruitvale Station, I started to be a little more selective. That was the first opportunity I had to think about my career moves, and really have real control over the projects that I was doing. Up until that point … with The Wire, it's not like I had a choice between six different roles. Those were the auditions that I went in for and I got.”
Coogler told BuzzFeed News earlier this summer that Jordan is “kind of like a LeBron James," saying, "Not only is this dude the perfect size, the perfect build, but he's come along at the perfect time and he has a crazy work ethic. He’s the perfect storm.”
And now, the actor is starting to work on his strategy, gearing himself to perhaps, like Adonis, defy the odds of a newly minted contender. Next up, he and Coogler will team up again for Wrong Answer, a film about the cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools. Jordan also wants to return to his television roots to develop and produce, and he said he wouldn’t mind giving the comic book world another go-round. “I'm interested in producing and developing a film, and a novel, a comic book, animation,” he said.
Perhaps most importantly, he’s finally at a point now where he can say “no” — a first in his career — and that means staying away from roles where his character dies, because it upsets his mother too much.
Jordan as Wallace and J.D Williams as Bodie in The Wire.
Courtesy of HBO
“She would be bawling, she used to be crying. Like, Mom, stop it! Nobody wants to see their mom cry; that’s not a good feeling, regardless of the performance. It was just traumatizing over a period of time. It’s something that people don’t think about, but a mom can’t be seeing her son die over and over and over again, in dramatic ways. I’m not going out on a hospital bed in a dramatic fashion,” he said, referencing the fact that nearly all of his onscreen deaths have been violent, starting with young Wallace on The Wire. “I need a break. And I want people to see me live, to evolve into a leading man that survives some accident. That’s very important. Audiences get the chance to see this character live and try and be victorious and have some type of closure without ending his life.”
He paused and then added: “I’m trying to break those stereotypes [of black men].”
Like he tried to do earlier this year when he played the Human Torch. Even though the film didn’t do what he’d hoped it would, he still challenged what audiences thought a superhero looked like. And now, he’s actively looking for similar opportunities to be cast in a role traditionally reserved for a white actor.
It’s a notion Jordan first mentioned in a GQ article this past September, in which he said he wanted “roles that were written for white characters.” His intention, he told BuzzFeed News, was to challenge Hollywood on its race issue and get decision-makers to think outside of the box with more color-blind castings. But readers’ negative reaction to the quote forced Jordan to clarify his words in an open letter in Essence. Jordan also felt the need to come out strong in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the same letter in an effort to debunk a bogus Snapchat about him supporting #AllLivesMatter.
He wants to be clear that he’s not shying away from his blackness or onscreen stories that feel black. If anything, he plans to go harder as his career continues and make sure that the stories he signs up for feel more universal, diverse, and, yes, black.
“There’s a lack of a black perspective in cinema. And I think it starts from perception, from the point of view of where the content is being created. You have more black writers and creators, and new developers in content that aren’t just the stereotypes that we’re used to being created or portrayed. The African-American experience is different. There are more genuine portrayals in characters that are diverse that somebody from any walk of life can play,” Jordan said. “I think that’s very important to the growth and progression of black cinema — matter of fact, people of color in film generally. The more opportunities, the more roles that are created, the more of those things you start to see, then you will start to see black actors in cinema, in movies, in television.”
Jordan running through North Philly as Adonis Johnson in Creed.
Courtesy Of Warner Bros. Picture
It’s a platform he’s taken on not just because his recent success affords him the opportunity to have that kind of power; it’s also an undeniable fact that as his star rises, more eyes are on Jordan’s every move.
And he’s well aware.
“It’s overwhelming at times,” Jordan said of his new level of fame. “Day by day you see it: Your privacy is stripped away. You start to move differently; you’re cautious. Oh man, I can’t go to the mall today. What day is it? Saturday? Ooh. Lot of people. No, I’m not going to go to the mall. No, I’m not going out. That's something that I'm getting used to, and it's happening pretty fast. I'm going to make mistakes; I’m going to learn some lessons — some things that I used to do that I can't do anymore. I have to learn how to separate Michael Jordan, the actor, and Michael Jordan, the person. There are no guidelines that exist how to navigate this journey that I’m on.”
His compass is the same circle he’s looked to for years. “I definitely rely and lean on people: my family, my friends, my mom, my parents. They are people that tell me straight; they’ll call bullshit when they see it,” he said before adding with a laugh, “I just got to meditate more.”
Of course, that gets harder when you’re on the verge of the world seeing a movie like Creed. But Jordan is ready to knuckle up and take this big step in his career — and just like Adonis, it’ll be on his own terms.
“A film this size, man … it changed the chessboard. The pieces got rearranged. I just got to sit back and look at the board and figure out what’s the best move,” he said. “I’m in a very fortunate situation. It doesn’t come around a lot.” He offers another pregnant pause, then speaks again after a few silent beats.
“I’m still working, you know? I feel like I still have so much to do. As successful as I’ve been so far, and the blessings that I know I’ve had — and I acknowledge my blessings — I’ve still got so much more that I want to do and accomplish. I just want to put myself in a position to be able to create and expand and grow and be progressive, period.”
