By Amanda Bachman, Staff Writer<\/p>\n
Recently, I went to go see the new movie Concussion<\/em>, starring Will Smith and directed by Landesman with a friend. Later, watching TV together, we saw a trailer for the same movie, advertised by critics as \u201cdelightfully entertaining.\u201d We both got a good laugh off of this and agreed, Concussion<\/em>, though an excellent movie, could never be described as a \u201cdelightful\u201d picture.<\/p>\n The content matter of Concussion <\/em>is a dark look into the NFL\u2019s ugliest elephant in the room; the fact that football, America\u2019s favorite sport, is dangerous and sometimes deadly game for its stars. The story follows forensic pathologist, Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian doctor whose unwavering dedication to both medicine and justice become the saving grace of many diseased football players, but also his own personal demons. His discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy brain damage, brought on by routine head injury experienced in professional-level football bring him head to head with the National Football League, who, in their own interests, attempt to suppress his revolutionary research. The part is played brilliantly by Will Smith, who once again shows his complexity as an actor. His portrayal of Omalu as a foreigner against the most American of organizations broadens the movie\u2019s medical and football theme into an overall disenchantment of the American ideal.<\/p>\n The pace of the film itself is kept exciting and dark, helped along by drab imagery and a neutral color palette, very nearly bordering on an action-drama. Scenes of Bennet Omalu in his simple, budding home life are juxtaposed by frightening story lines of football players succumbing to the disease which he will find. The awful truth to the extent to which the former players succumb to madness is not underplayed, the film can become downright disturbing in some accounts, as shows the recurring arc of beloved players losing everything and succumbing to isolation, desperation, pain, and insanity. To add to the drama is the violence insinuated against Omalu after the publication of his discovery, as he suffers threats that tear at the tentative foundation of his home life. This style is reflected in the director Peter Landesman\u2019s only other film, Parkland, which seeks to weave together the chaotic scenes following the assassination of JFK.<\/p>\n Overall, the movie is undoubtedly worth the watch. The topic does what such a movie should do, it makes us squirm a little, it criticizes a staple of American culture, and therefore, spares no sports fan from its damningly dark conclusions. These are not things we want <\/em>to think about, as quoted from the movie\u201cthe NFL owns <\/em>a day of the week.\u201d But as Bennet Omalu inarguably proves, human lives and sanity have been lost, and the time for squirming rejection of clear, fast facts, is past. Concussion <\/em>is an essential watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Amanda Bachman, Staff Writer Recently, I went to go see the new movie Concussion, starring Will Smith and directed by Landesman with a friend. Later, watching TV together, we saw a trailer for the same movie, advertised by critics as \u201cdelightfully entertaining.\u201d We both got a good laugh off of this and agreed, Concussion,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[241],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","tag-concussion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/concussion-trailer-will-smith-movie-2015.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}