Alex Dezen: Album of the Month

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ALEX DEZEN

Alex Dezen

Rock Ridge Music

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The best album I heard in the month of January doesn't officially release until February 12–a self-titled solo affair from Alex Dezen, the lead singer of Brooklyn's The Damnwells. Among the many things I admire about Dezen's solo venture is that he made me like the kind of album that generally annoys me: a let-me-tell-you-about-me collection. An entire album of these usually makes me want to scream, "Dude! Get over yourself; you're not that interesting." It's to Dezen's credit that his self-disclosures feel bigger than that.

Call it the voice of experience; he has already gotten into the heads of others by penning songs for the likes of Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, The Dixie Chicks, Matt Hines, and the Pilobolus dance troupe. His news songs, though, are cut from non-pop cloth. You know you're in for personal stuff when a release kicks off with "Ode to Ex-Girlfriends." It's typical of the album's ten tracks in that Dezen writes in a long prose form that is heavy on narrative and short on poetry. (A lot of the lyrics don't even rhyme, let alone conform to meter or couplets.) It's also typical in that much of the material deals with relationships, usually of the doomed variety. A track titled "If You Can Say 'I Love You' on a Greeting Card, How Can it Be True?" is wordy, but poignant–the tale of a failed marriage. Boiled to its basics it's the classic cycle of abuse: violence/apology, promises/lies, guilt/betrayal, and children caught in the middle. Appropriately, Dezen puts down his acoustic guitar for an electric, as if symbolically allowing tragedy to spark and fritz. Speaking of guitars, "The Last Song I'll Ever Write (on this Guitar)" is a love song to an old D-35 Martin he was forced to sell. "Into the Hands of Hazelden" explores a different kind of regret: Dezen's musing over a college friendship and musical collaboration that fell apart in early adulthood. "I Don't Want to be Alone When I Die" suggests he's not had the best of luck in love.

The last of the above finds Dezen at the piano and in Seth-Glier-like sotto voice. He duplicates this effect on "Leonardo," in which he cleverly catalogs a doomed romance—himself presumably in the tragic male lead–by metaphorically casting his beloved as a 19^th century woman like Kate Winslet in Titanic waiting to be swept away by a suave Leonardo Di Caprio: "He was cool, so cool/Like a Dylan/So brave and confident/And I was a short Jewish kid/with long hair and green tint…" But again, Dezen adjusts his musical vibes to the mood of his songs, including an angry dance club throb to "A Little Less Like Hell," in which he refuses to fall in line with self-congratulatory victory parades like the one after Osama bin Laden's death. Instead he notes: "But what I'll never understand is why/Regardless of how hard we try/We need someone on the cross/Just to make up for the things we lost." He sings it with the kind of leave-nothing-behind abandonment of Ellis Paul. "Elephant" is filled with lots of Millennial references, and sung like it might be a Paul Simon song, though the tune was inspired by the mix of structure and looseness of The Beatles' "Blackbird."

I'd be the first to admit that there are lyrical and musical misfires on the album and hints of self-absorption. But there are enough gems on this recording to make it very worth your while. Check out www.alexdezen.com in mid-February and see what you think.

Rob Weir  

Video Review: Circumstance an Idea Only Partially Realized

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CIRCUMSTANCE (2011/12)

Directed by Maryam Keshavarz

Participant Media, 107 minutes, Unrated (sexuality), Farsi with subtitles

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This film from Iranian-American writer/director Maryam Keshavarz made a splash at Sundance back in 2011, but almost nowhere else. Lately it’s gotten a bit of new life courtesy of a DVD re-release. It's probably worth a rental, but it's at best a worthy idea only partially realized.

Circumstance could be called a film about song in a land that has abolished singing. Atafeh Hakimi (Nikohi Boosheri) dreams of becoming a belly dancing chanteuse, not exactly a sanctioned path in an Iran ruled by cheerless post-revolutionary mullahs. Atafeh has other issues as well. Her fate is inextricably linked with that of her orphaned BFF Shireen (Sarah Kazemy). They are typical teens filled with typical teen hormonal surges, desire to experiment, and urges to go wild. One person’s typical is another’s taboo, and virtually everything the two wish to try—listen to hip hop, smoke, dub porno films into Farsi, make out with boys, and make out with each other–is dangerously verboten.

Circumstance is ultimately a film about the gap between freedom and what a small cadre thinks the supernatural demands of them—right down to the point of foisting their values upon others. It’s also about how easy it is to be drawn to absolutism and intolerance and what it’s like to live in a society whose public norms are shrinking. Who can one trust under such conditions? We watch Atafeh’s brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) transform himself from a druggie loser to an increasingly pious young man, but is that a good thing or not? Can Atafeh and Shireen trust him? And what happens if one makes a teenaged mistake in an oppressive society? Even worse, what if one simply cannot tolerate life amidst repression? Can even a hero of the revolution like Hakimi paterfamilias Firouz (Sohei Parsa) protect family members?

We see two Irans on the screen—the one like exists officially and publicly, and the one that exists in the shadows—in private homes, subterranean clubs, and inside outlawed affinity groups. Keshavarz has dared hope that underground copies of her film will make their way into Iran and he aired in that shadow world. Perhaps they will, though I wished it had been a better film that would justify the risks involved in viewing such a film.

I found Circumstance to be too disjointed. Big ideas are waved and dropped more than probed, which makes it ultimately a character study about two teens trying to circumnavigate sharia law. That’s fine, but such a film demands a tighter narrative structure than Keshavarz’s episodic scattershot approach. It also entails tamping down sexual voyeurism that titillates without illuminating, and it requires believable evil, not cardboard cutout bad guys. For Keshavarz, Circumstance was a labor of love and politics, but one too obviously so. I came away fascinated, but convinced that what was needed was a more detached script treatment from a different writer. It’s not a bad film, but it’s not a patch on what it could/should have been.

Whatever it was that ignited interest at Sundance eludes me and seems to have eluded others as well, as the film hasn't caught fire on video either. I admire Ms. Keshavarz’s bravery and values, but good politics just isn’t the same as good filmmaking. Her film is a classic tweener—too good to be a bad film, but not good enough to be a great one. 

Rob Weir

Andrew Greig's Poetic Non-Fiction

AT THE LOCH OF THE GREEN CORRIE (2010)

Andrew Greig

Querus Non-fiction, 324 pages

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I'm about to start Andrew Greig's new novel, but one of his older books, The Green Corrie, inspired musings best phrased as "Whither Non-Fiction?"

As a historian I read lots of non-fiction books. Alas, too many must be labeled occupational hazards. I used to joke that many academics couldn't write "This End Up" on a box and make themselves understood, but now I think the joke is on me because it's more true than I ever imagined. The non-academic world is only marginally better. Non-fiction comes mostly in three forms these days: biography, memoir, and social problem exposés. Some biographies are quite good, but many writers suffer from Robert Caro Disease and can't sift relevant from mere detail, or tell a story in under a thousand pages. For every great memoir there seems to be a dozen penned by people who are legends only in their own mind–especially musicians! Books that probe sociological conundrums, political issues, and challenges economic, social, and cultural tend to have a very short shelf life, even when they are well written. Journalists are generally best at making this type of book readable, but we consume them more to be informed than for the sheer joy of reading. Where are the non-fiction books that make us marvel over the prose, provoke our imaginations, or contemplate our natures? Where, in short, are other books like At the Loch of the Green Corrie?

Green Corrie stands out because it's autobiographical, yet self-effacing; reflective in ways that invite us to probe rather than listen to homilies; and poetic both literally and figuratively. It's short, yet it's also a travelogue, a history and geology lesson, and a meditation upon friendship. It dips into everything from mountain climbing and fishing to questions of land ownership, a sense of self, lessons learned from the departed, and the meaning of life. All of this unfurls from the slimmest of premises: Greig set off with two friends to find, then fish, a remote mountain lake in Assynt, a region in the far north of Scotland. Why? Because Greig's departed mentor, poet Norman MacCaig, spoke fondly of it and Greig hoped to discover more of MacCaig's spirit and nature there. MacCaig's poetry appears throughout, as does some of Greig's own verse.  

No review can do justice to this book, so let me simply offer a few samples that give a sense of the glories of the book's prose and profundities.

On remembering the departed: Our days are numbered and we still don't know what that number is. So let us not sift through the dead who grow more numerous every year. Let the book of homage remain unwritten and unread. Yet there are places and times on this Earth when the ground as it were grows thin, and the dead rise of themselves. Gone days, dead parents, lost friends, old loves, rise round us as an escort, an entourage, to provoke, counsel and console. As we drive, or lie with a book at the day's end, we may glimpse them at the edge of vision. They must be spoken with, if we are to remain honest.

On over-learning about things intrinsically sublime: Sometimes the more you know, the less you see. What you encounter is your knowledge, not the thing itself.

On seeking to be mindful of the now and geologic Deep Time: I ambled back down to the car and drove off into the rest of the day, floating on Deep Time. I sometimes think only the unfolding present moment and Deep Time are good for us, and better not to mess with mister inbetween. As with the bifocal lenses I tried last year – the close-up and the long distance are true, while the middle distance is fuzzy and befuddled. Unfortunately that is where we live most of the time.

On the inevitability of change: World rolls on. This lochan is still here, maybe a degree warmer, though none of the water can be the same as last time we were here. A loch is essentially a bath with the tap running and the plug out. We are not so different. Let me not stand here and deplore. We are in danger of doing what we swore we never would when we were young, saying that the world is all changing for the worse. Dangerous, doomed and horrendous, or beautiful, mysterious and magnificent beyond reason– one's take on the world says more about oneself than the world. Let me not end up ringing my hands over all who have gone. They in their time were doubtless thought not a patch on their predecessors. The past is a bourach*. Let's pay homage, cut off the useful hooks and tie them to a fresh cast.

I could pull out dozens of poignant quotes like this–phrases that induce wonder, melancholy, and lucidity. The beauty with which Greig wields the English language is a hatchet to the argument that today's 140-character world can be called "communication." Not a chapter flew by without slowing my mind and forcing me to think upon the whys behind a world full of whats. Read any Andrew Greig book upon which you can put your hands.  

Rob Weir

* Bourach (boor-ack) is a Scots dialect word that means a muddled mess. It's also a hill, but an untidy one.

My Brilliant Friend a Poignant Portrait of Postwar Naples

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (2012/15)

Elena Ferrante

Europe Edition, 331 pages

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Even today Naples is a place where dreams die swift and hard. Is it a municipality of 3.1 million, or 3.1 million anarchists haphazardly thrown into the same 45 square miles? As Western European cities go, Naples–like Marseille, Palermo, or Liverpool–invites adjectives such as "tough" and "gritty." It simultaneously fascinates and horrifies; nothing quite works, yet everyone is cheerfully resigned to muddling through as best they can.

Let's just say that muddling through was considerably harder in the 1950s, a time in which Italy was struggling with its recent fascist past and cleaning up wartime devastation. The Camorra thrived in the vacuum left by effective government and was about the only thing that did thrive. Naples is the setting for Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, a novel that's like a Vittorio De Sica film set to type. The novel was originally published in 2012, but is now in a new edition as Ferrante has just published The Story of the Lost Child, the final book in a tetralogy known as "The Neapolitan Novels." Its glowing reviews have set Ferrante novices such as myself back to book one, My Brilliant Friend.

The book centers on the friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who grow up in a poor yet lively Naples neighborhood. The expectation for most girls is an elementary school education, then work, early marriage, and motherhood. To get beyond the sixth grade, as Elena manages, involves passing rigorous exams, scrapping together tuition money, borrowing grubby books, and working with tutors to master subjects such as Latin, Greek grammar, English, and philosophy. What are the chances that the daughter of a shoemaker can do this?

My Brilliant Friend is often hailed as a story of female friendship and so it is, but it's far more than this. In the hands of a lesser writer the story might be little more than a hardship versus perseverance tale; in Ferrante's hands the struggle to acquire knowledge is a mere foil for peeling back the layers of a Neapolitan onion for its textures, cadences, smells, and daily struggles for survival. It's also about the randomness of life's chances. As Lila prepares for marriage at age 16, she calls Elena "my brilliant friend," which we recognize as doubly ironic as it is she, not Elena, who should be the scholar. Elena is bright enough, but it's Lila who is her greatest tutor–the one who borrows Latin grammar books from the library to tutor Elena. Lila is stoic on the surface, but is she also vicariously living her first best destiny through Elena? Place our two characters in the insalde miste context of a neighborhood of ex-fascists, pastry chefs, low-level criminals, casual workers, poets, widows, housewives, tinkers, beggars, and ironclad patriarchy and you have a book that feels 'bigger' and more sprawling than its 331 pages. 

It's also as enigmatic as Ferrante, a beloved author whose identity is unknown and might not even be female, though the author claims (on the web) to be a mother.  Ferrante is a heck of a writer, whoever he or she might be. My Brilliant Friend skirts the edges of magical realism without actually going there, a deft bit of writing that bathes characters and circumstances in a glow that's also quite Neapolitan. Imagine growing up in Naples but never visiting the sea until you are well into your teens. Imagine living under skies that dazzle, but knowing more darkness than light. Imagine and dream, but don't trust the latter.

Don't believe any remarks that pigeonhole My Brilliant Friend in that sexist sinkhole labeled "chick lit." It's about humanity and I look forward to wending my way through the three remaining books. From where I now sit, Elena Ferrante feels like an Italian Marcel Pagnol. 

Rob Weir  

Ayes and Nays: Recent Releases

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Folk rock generally occupies the "warm" end of the sunny to gloomy spectrum. Think artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Arlo Guthrie, The Youngbloods, The Byrds, The Decemberists, or Great Big Sea. Perhaps, most of all, think James Taylor. And think Pat McGee. He's been around since 1995 and has followed the usual folk rock path: get signed by a major label, get dumped by it, leave the fast lane, and find peace as an indie artist.

            I invoked Taylor because McGee's repertoire and voice are strongly reminiscent of Taylor's. His is a soothing voice especially strong in the high register and with the same reedy assonance as Taylor. He even builds a song the same way—a nice smooth groove building to up-the-scale drama, cut to some harmonies, and let the music wash over like a soothing bath. Heck, on "Take the Long WayHome" (not the Supertramp song!), he even invokes Massachusetts. His song "Kite String" is a soft rock/PG-13 blues number akin to Taylor's "Steamroller Blues." I don't mean to suggest that McGee is derivative—his band is cooler, to note one difference—but the resemblance to Taylor is uncanny. McGee is on the road again these days and has a new 5-song EP, Pat McGee (Noble Steed Music), to go with the tour. He's well worth catching. Check out "Overboard," which features old friend Pat Monahan from Train on vocals and guitar. Aye.

Tow'rs is also (sort of) in the folk rock vein. Its new album The Great Minimum (Tow'rs Music) is a polished affair finds an introspective seam between arty and traditional. This five-piece group from Flagstaff, Arizona, is anchored by the husband/wife duo of Kyle and Gretta Miller. They, along with three friends, are often reviewed as a "Christian" band, though they are not preachy, and their repertoire is more of a secular-meets-mystical blend. I suppose the Christian music crowd likes them because the songs are rated PG and many of them drop the message that home may not be on this mortal coil. Their best songs, such "The Swan and the East" and "The Boy and His Shadow" have the country/folk-rock feel of early Neil Young, though Kyle Miller's voice would be the silk to Young's gravel. Mostly the songs deal with love or the transitory nature of life,and are populated by lines such as "Is there an answer in the silence/Are we asking the wrong questions?" and "…man is but a breath hanging by his skin." The album's major downside is that, like many inward-looking projects, it's heavier on musing than music. It's all skillfully done but since much of it is cut from the same cloth, you might not recall a single melody a half hour after listening. In the end, some listeners may find it better contemplated than consumed.  Aye/nay (It depends on whether you enjoy the entire introspective folk rock genre.)

Bridge 19 hails form Louisville, Kentucky, and is a band on the rise that has shared the stage with the likes of Richard Thompson, Brandi Carlile, and Sarah McLachlan. Their new CD, Riding on a Wire (Bridge 19), is full of verve that comes at you with country/folk/pop chops. Amanda Lucas and Audrey Cecil, who write most of the material, and handle lead and harmony vocals, anchor Bridge 19. Both have voices best suited to quick tempo selections such as "Chain" and "Nothing Else." The interplay of vocals, guitar, and percussion is especially crisp on the latter. Call this music without a lot of empty spaces, pull up your socks, and get down. Aye 

I'm a Juliana Hatfield fan—of her mature work. Once upon a time (1986-91), though, she was a member of the Blake Babies, which attracted brief notice. My attention span was briefer; I thought the Blake Babies (Hatfield, Freda Love, John Strohan, and sometimes Evan Dando) one of the worst bands I'd ever heard. Noisetrade offers a free download of the Blake Babies Live, 1989, so I thought I'd reconsider. Now I think they might actually be the worst band I've ever heard! Hatfield became a good artist, but back then her voice was thin and her ear was tin. The Blake Babies emerged at the dying tail end of the grunge heyday, back when audiences were growing impatient with sloppy DIY music and a lot of bands were cleaning up their acts in (the mostly vain) hope of commercial success. Call it a lost period and never dial that number again. Nay. Cick here for a track

Old Man Canyon is mostly Vancouver's Jeff Pace, a changing ensemble, and lots of technology. OMC is trying to whip up enthusiasm for a new project called Delirium and has been sending out its 2013 EP Phantoms and Friends in support of it. My take is that OMC, which integrates sonic loops, synthesizers, visuals, and projections on stage, would be more interesting to watch live than to listen to on its own. At his best, Jett's work evokes a band such as Darlingside, but without the latter's ability not to take itself too seriously. The music sets mood and ambiance and there are pleasant vocals, though they are immersed in such a thick sonic soup it's often hard to know what they're about. The music seeks to be alt.folk, but it often comes off as a hipster with too many toys. Nay.

Make Me: A Middlebrow Page Turner

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MAKE ME (2015)

Lee Child

Delacorte Press, 416 pages, 978-08041478778

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Make Me is book number twenty in Lee Child's Jack Reacher mystery series. For Jack Reacher novices–or those who know the character only from Tom Cruise's limp movie portrayal– Reacher is what you might get if you crossed Robert Parker's Spenser with Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan sans the rah-rah flag-waving propensities. He doesn't play games and he doesn't care for convention, external judgment, or social niceties; when he unjustly fell under a cloud of suspicion, he resigned his Army commission and never looked back. Since 1997 Reacher has been drifting with no permanent address and only the clothes on his back. (When they become dirty, he buys new.) Like Spenser, his handle is his last name–no one has ever called him Jack. If you like tough-guy mysteries, Reacher fits the bill and the build–he's a large man with lethal-quick reflexes and always on the alert—as anyone would be who drinks as much coffee as he.  

You don't really need to know any of this to enjoy Make Me, a stand-alone novel that fills in the past where it's needed. Its basic premise is that sometimes adventure and danger find you even if you're not looking for them. Reacher is drifting between odd jobs and finds himself on a train rattling across an empty quadrant of Oklahoma so monotonous that the lights from a late-night piece of machinery provide brief entertainment. Reacher decides to get off the train at the next station solely because of its name: Mother's Rest. The grand plan is to learn why it bears such an odd name and then catch the next train out.  

That would make an awfully short book, wouldn't it? Instead he meets Michelle Chang, who initially mistakes Reacher for Keever, a man she's supposed to assist but hasn't showed up. Treat yourself to a cup of coffee if you're guessing the name of Mother's Rest isn't the oddest thing about the town. Buy yourself another cup if you think the story Chang tells Reacher makes him miss the train. Take the entire pot if you imagine the two of them will become partners (and more).

Chang is a lot like Reacher: solidly built, a stranger to fashion, a loner, and a PI forced out of the FBI by shady superiors. Our anti-glam pair set off to solve a case that begins with the question of Keever's whereabouts and veers into anhedonia, cryptic references to 200 deaths, the Deep Web, a Ukrainian mobster, a Los Angeles Times science writer, a suicide support network, and side trips to Chicago, LA, Oklahoma City, and San Francisco. At every step of the way, all signs point back to Mother's Rest and something even more sinister. But what?   

Child—the nom de plume for British writer Jim Grant–is very good at building suspense. He won't dazzle you with sterling prose or sparkling dialogue–Reacher is more laconic than the wisecracking Spenser and more jaded than Ryan­–but Child's books are plotted in ways that make you keep turning the pages, even though you suspect that what you're reading is on the lowbrow border of the middlebrow stop on the literature spectrum. Like many mystery novels, Make Me is best enjoyed with your improbability and skepticism meters set on low. Tolerance for the grisly is also in order. And don't go ballistic over the MacGuffins–one of which is the title, which seems to have been chosen for no reason other than it sounds like what one might name a hard-boiled detective novel.  

This book is exactly what it appears to be: a frisson-inducing diversion you can read in two or three sittings. It's pulp fiction, not college lit material; a guilty pleasure, not an intellectual workout. Go for it–at this time of the year it won't be the least nutritious thing you consume.  Rob Weir  

Concussion (loosely) Tackles the NFL's Unspoken Problem

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CONCUSSION  (2015)

Directed by Peter Landesman

Columiba, 122 minutes, PG-13 (violence)

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If you were buying a new car and read that a particular brand had a 28% chance of blowing up, would you buy it? If a drug caused 28% of its users to suffer such serious side effects that suicides ensued, would the FDA approve it? Now consider that we have such a product/drug going out to tens of millions of addicts every Sunday: the National Football League.

Concussion is a sports/biopic film that spotlights Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), a rising Nigerian-born pathologist living in Pittsburgh. His immigrant dream receives a rude shock in 2002; on his dissection slab lies Mike Webster, a Hall of Fame center for the Steelers who died a broken-down bum at the age of 50. The initial verdict, cardiac arrest, made no sense to Dr. Omalu, so he decided, over the objections of several football-loving colleagues, to take a look inside Webster's brain. Dr. Omalu found intensive brain trauma, the likes of which could have easily led Webster to drugs, glue-sniffing, and antisocial behavior. Concussion tells the story of how Omalu, former Steelers team doctor Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), Dr. Joseph Maroon (Arliss Howard), and Dr. Steven DeKorsky (Eddie Marsan) wrote the pioneering study of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), which linked repeated concussions to dementia, depression, sociopathic behavior, and suicide.

More harrowing, it shows some of the lengths to which the NFL was willing to go to try to suppress CTE research. In my review of Spotlight, I suggested that the Catholic Church was the biggest crime syndicate in Boston; the NFL might qualify as the biggest mob racket in the nation. Only money can explain why CTE findings were suppressed until one of the conspiracy's doubters, former Players Association chief Dave Duerson committed suicide in 2011 and left a note saying that Dr. Omalu was right. (Junior Seau's suicide hit the front pages a year later.) At several junctures of the film, comparisons are made between the NFL and Big Tobacco's efforts in the 1990s to deny the science of smoking's health effects. Yes, we're talking that level of evil.  

Concussion is a good film. I wish I could tell you it was a great one, but that would be false. Will Smith is fabulous as Dr. Omalu–so good, that we instantly stop seeing the star and think of Smith as an African man with a lilting accent honed in British universities. His is one of the better portrayals of the pure scientist's naïveté: the blind faith that reason and science speak an objective voice immune to politics, power, and money. Smith would probably be considered a Best Actor Oscar favorite were the film better than it is.

Alas, Director Peter Landesman pulls punches he should roundhouse. The film is as much about Omalu's relationship with his eventual wife, Kenyan immigrant Prema Mutiso (Guyu Mbatha-Raw), as it is about the NFL. Ms. Mbatha-Raw is also very good, but she's central where she ought to be secondary. The film ought to be less about romance and more about dirty deeds. The attempts to quash the truth certainly took a toll on the Omalu household, but the story of Concussion should be like Spotlight–about the cover-up, not domestic life under the covers and about masses, not just individuals. Speaking of cover-ups, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (underplayed by Luke Wilson) ought to be a central villain in the script, not a mostly silent presence. It's also rather hard not to gag over some of the overwrought snap-ons about the meaning of America through immigrant eyes. So too are obligatory references to the "beauty" and "grace" of football–sentiments completely at odds with the ugliness of Dr. Omalu's findings.

By mixing romance with science, Concussion cheapens the latter. It also allows too much wiggle room for football lovers to imagine that the NFL (or, indeed, science) has "fixed" the problem. Not so. The day I viewed the film, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story about Syracuse University quarterback A. J. Long, who–per university rules–was banned from football after suffering his third concussion. You might call that the least that can be done to address CTE, but Long and others like him have been actively recruited by other colleges willing to overlook a mere three concussions. Concussion might/should have asked hard questions about the American addiction to sports that sanction the sacrifice of young bodies for the vicarious thrills of spectators  (Why, for example, doesn't hockey ban fighting or full-body checking? Why do we watch the UFC?) It ignores the question of whether we are any better than ancient Romans signifying thumbs-down at a gladiator spectacle. Nor does it help explain why there were a scant dozen people in the movie theater on NFL Sunday. Concussion is a decent movie, but it fumbled the chance to be a landmark film. Rob Weir

Postscript for parents: See this film, especially if you have sons. Buy those sons baseball mitts and soccer balls. Football? Can you justify a one in four chance your son will suffer brain damage?