‘A dangerous gift’: ‘Concussion’ and the NFL

January 3, 2016

“Concussion” – the new movie about football and head trauma – is a beautiful film beautifully rendered. That may be an odd choice of words for a story about two of the sometimes uglier games men play – power and violence – but then, football, like humanity, is a multifaceted subject, at once mindless and Shakespearean, as one character notes.

This football tale is told from the viewpoint of an outsider who longs to be an insider, a Nigerian immigrant who has grown up thinking of America as God’s country. Armed with a slew of degrees from Nigeria, New York and London, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a proud, accomplished but obscure forensics pathologist working for Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the chief medical examiner in Allegheny County, Pa., in 2002 when he is given what he describes as “a dangerous gift” – a gift for knowing. ...

Concussed

December 21, 2015

“Concussion” – starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who blew the whistle on NFL head injuries and their relationship to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia – opens on Christmas Day and is already stirring the pot.

Some say it’s too easy on the NFL.

Others that the movie plays fast and loose with the events and exaggerates the relationship between football and poor health.

“Are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes?” Daniel Engber writes for Slate. ...

‘The Danish Girl’ and the transit of gender

December 17, 2015

The acclaimed new movie “The Danish Girl” – about the artist Einar Wegener, who became the first person to have male-to-female sex reassignment surgery – raises intriguing questions about the nature of art.

Specifically, should a transgender role be played by a transgender actor? (The film stars Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar for his performance as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” and has been nominated once again for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for “Girl.”) More broadly, should creative and interpretive artists stick to their own experiences? The latter is a question that I have a vested interest in as the author of the debut novel “Water Music,” about four gay athletes and how their professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another, and the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, success, acceptance and love in the NFL. (They’re both part of my series “The Games Men Play.”)

What, I’m often asked, would a woman – and a straight one at that – know about gay sex? ...

His way

December 12, 2015

With virtually everyone weighing in on Ol’ Blue Eyes 100th birthday Saturday, Dec. 12, I thought I’d put in my two cents since I covered him live and from a distance for Gannett.

Any discussion of Frank Sinatra begins and ends with talent. His was deep, varied and wrapped in a complex personality. Begin with the Voice – distinctive, limpid and punctuated by the impeccable phrasing and superb breath control he learned from bandleader Tommy Dorsey’s trombone playing. Throw in his dancing – a talent people don’t generally associate with Sinatra. But his was fluid and fleet. (See “Anchors Aweigh” or “On the Town.”) ...

Standing up to fear itself: A timely ‘Trumbo’

December 9, 2015

I wasn’t planning to see the movie “Trumbo,” but I’m glad I did as it truly is a movie for our time.

It’s the story of Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) – a brilliant Oscar-winning screenwriter, born 110 years ago on Dec. 9 – who as one of the Hollywood Ten was blacklisted for refusing to testify in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communism in the motion picture industry. (Trumbo was a member of the Communist Party from 1943 to ’48.) The film’s real subject, however, is fear and how it divides us – from others and from our better natures. ...

Paris, the city of popular imagination

November 18, 2015

One of the themes to emerge from the Nov. 13 Paris bombings has been why the world – and particularly journalists – has paid more attention to the terrorist acts in Paris than it has to the double suicide bombing in Beirut a day earlier.

There are any number of reasons for this: Bombings in the Middle East, sadly, seem commonplace; the Paris attack is more of an anomaly; more people were killed in Paris (129 to Beirut’s 43), although you can’t really quantify death, of course, each death being a tragedy to someone; the West and particularly the United States have close ties to France, etc. ...