For anyone over 30 years old, NFL Football is probably considered the greatest and most exciting sport in the United States. Most people can agree that the highlights in football are the most exciting, the most spectacular and invoke the most respect and awe for the skills of a great athlete than any other major sport. Unfortunately equal to the great highlights there are some great low-lights of some unfortunate player taking a very bad hit, perhaps breaking a leg, a knee, or suffering a concussion, which is one of the most common injuries in this league. For as long as the NFL has been around nobody ever heard of or talked about the long term effects of being a player this very violent sport. Then on September 24, 2002 the news that Mike Webster the NFL Center for 18 years with the Pittsburgh Steeler’s died at only age 50 and then everything changed.

At the end of Webster’s life he was in a state of financial and personal ruin and was having massive cognitive dysfunction, which was later diagnosed as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy by a pathologist in Pittsburgh Dr. Bennet Omalu . This new disease, known as CTE was discovered by Dr Omalu as the direct cause of constant head trauma that can only happen while playing football. For years prior to this discovery, the NFL routinely dismissed the many incidents of NFL players either going insane, dying young or having dementia as the result of premature Alzheimer’s, which considering the age of these men and the statistics was an implausible reason for these medical problems.

After Webster’s death, several other NFL players starting showing symptoms of this disease and 4 of them (Andre Waters , Dave Duerson , Junior Seau and Terry Long ) committed suicide. Duerson and Seau committed suicide by shooting themselves in the chest to enable doctors examine their brains after they killed themselves and Terry Long committed suicide by drinking a gallon of anti-freeze. CTE caused not only dementia but also violent behavior which in some cases even resulted in murder. What is very obvious from this story is that this discovery of CTE is not something that has happened recently, but it has been in fact part of the medical history of all NFL players after they retire. What was suggested in this movie is that the NFL has been covering up this problem for many years and even conducting tests to prove that concussions were not that important of a medical issue. At the end of the movie it was stated that 28% of all NFL players currently have some form of CTE, but you are made to believe that just about all of them have some form of the disease.

This movie was extremely well done and well acted, not only by Will Smith who played Dr. Omalu but also by Alec Baldwin who was great in his role as a former NFL neurologist and Albert Brooks who played the boss of Dr. Omalu at the Pittsburgh coroners office. It was no surprise that after the discovery of CTE was made, that the NFL not only denied that it was true, but threatened Dr Omalu and his boss with a Federal investigation that was later dropped and even had people following Dr Omalu’s wife around in her car and causing her enough stress that could have cost them their first child during a miscarriage.

So what is next for the NFL and this big problem with concussions and long term brain damage? I for one have always been surprised that the helmets the players wear provide such inadequate protection over so many years and so much technology. Perhaps there is no solution to this problem through the creation of much better helmets. Several rule changes have been made, and there have been improvements, but as is said in the movie, if just 10% of all parents forbid their son to play football then its likely that eventually the entire sport will fade away. The bottom line here really is, what is the point of great fame, exciting highlights and potentially great wealth when you might be so brain damaged and insane that you might kill someone in your family or take your own life? At the end of this movie, Dr Omalu is watching a high school football game and the movie ends with a huge collision between two young players. This is where we stand now in the NFL, inadequate head protection and where do we go from here?

I give this movie my highest recommendation and predict that it will be one of the 10 movies up for best pictures in the Academy Awards this year. The story behind this movie is also available on Amazon and is entitled Concussion.

Concussion IMDB

As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, which is the subject of the movie The Big Short, reviewed in this blog, many 20 year old’s have had their potential lives either put on hold for a long time or ruined outright. Due to the greed of already rich individuals who wanted more money at the cost of ruining or completely destroying the world wide economy, the end result is that many young people just trying to start out in their careers have been badly hurt and their futures compromised. After college with huge student loan debt, many young people cannot even get a decent first job and this will affect their financial futures for the rest of their lives. This is unfortunate and was completely avoidable if the disaster of the 2008 Financial crisis in this country was prevented or never happened in the first place.

Most if not all of us who lived through the 2008 financial crisis would rather forget about what happened, instead of reliving how bad it all was and our fear that the end of the financial world had arrived. This movie not only reminds you how bad it was, but educates you to the fact that it was far worse than we all knew at the time. Everything about this movie; the acting, the story telling and the teaching of all the complex concepts in this financial crisis by using the actor talking to the audience or several cameo appearances that included Selena Gomez and Margo Robbie are all extremely well done throughout. In my opinion, this movie will definitely be nominated for a best picture Oscar. This movie is based on the book “The Big Short” , by Michael Lewis.

The concept of Deregulation of financial institutions which allows companies on Wall Street to do whatever they want to make profits with no government regulation is essentially what caused a financial disaster in the housing market and the associated “Las Vegas” like gambling that went on where bets were placed on CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) which are essentially baskets of both good and very bad mortgage loans but also on what are called “synthetic CDO’s” which are peripheral bets on the original loans, which created outlandish and extremely high levels of risk. This combination of insanity is what resulted in a financial crisis that almost brought down the economy of the entire world. It was all allowed to go on because the government officials who were suppose to monitor what was going on and rank mortgage securities accurately just looked the other way.

Many things about the 2008 housing bubble, which really started in 2007 are infuriating, but what is most outrageous about all the debt, panic and misery this causes is that it was even allowed to happen in the first place. From the beginning of this tenure as the Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan was calling for financial deregulation and when he finally got what he wanted, based on the decision of a very weak president in 2002; the ability of financial institutions to run free and do whatever they wanted became possible. The people involved did not care that their obscene greed would cause a generation of pain for millions of Americans in their 20’s and early 30’s and so many people who lost jobs and homes. All these criminals cared about was getting even more rich as easily as possible and worse than this was when all the smoke had finally cleared, nobody went to jail except for one wall street employee; although his sentence was not disclosed at the end of the movie. What was disclosed when this movie ended was that 8 million people lost their jobs, 6 million people lost their homes and 5 trillion in wealth was wiped out in a about 2 years. For me the fact that was mentioned in this movie that stood out the most was that for every 1 percent of unemployment in the Unites States, as many as 40,000 can die due to the stress, homelessness and misery of not being able to make a living in this country .

March 2009 is now known as the “generational low” in the stock market and after that incredible low of 6400 on the Dow and about 1100 on the Nasdaq, things slowly started to normalize and now the market seems to be back to where it should have been anyway, even if the financial crisis never happened. But in the back of everybody’s mind is the fact that something like this could happen again or perhaps the bail out that occurred at the end of 2008 is just a temporary band aid that really did not fix the real underlying problem that was caused by the sick greed of a few already rich individuals who right now should be in jail. Then we all remember that because of this crisis and some bad decisions and a very bad war in IRAQ, this country is now close to 21 trillion dollars in debt. After Bill Clinton left office, we were only 5 trillion in debt. Yes, most of the bailouts were necessary, especially Obama’s decision to bail out the car companies, but its very tragic that because of some very stupid decisions by some very greedy people, this country may never be financially healthy again.

This movie is about the 2007-2008 Housing bubble and financial crises as told through the experiences of 3 groups of individuals who had the foresight and courage to realize that the mortgage bond securities that were being sold as high quality investments to institutions around the world were not only mostly garbage, but also fraudulent. Their plan was to short these mortgage bonds known as CDOs or (Collateralized Debt Obligations) but the ability to even short these bonds that were considered so safe and high quality was not even possible at the time, so the method to short them called CDS (Credit Default Swaps) had to be invented by the financial institutions to make shorting possible. These individuals were actually laughed at by the employees of the companies where they attempted to buy these CDO’s because they were so sure of the safety and integrity of the housing market. All of these investors were so sure that they were right about the impending housing disaster that they bet billions of dollars that the entire housing and mortgage industry in the United States would collapse. What they didn’t realize was that they would be so right about these bets that they would have a great deal of trouble collecting their money because so many of the institutions who sold these CDO’s would become bankrupt. The acting in this movie by the 4 main actors, Steve Carrel, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gossling and Christian Bale is outstanding throughout and I would guess that several of these actors might receive Academy Award nominations. This movie is a 100% must see and I give it my highest recommendation.

The Big Short on IMBD