“Joy” is a true story based on the life of Joy Mangano, but the story is only loosely based on her life and career as an inventor of household products, which all started with the miracle mop.

What is the essence of a great movie? Why do so many movies fail at being great or even good? I go to the movies as often as I do because the 10% payoff of seeing that one great movie is so compelling and unfortunately rare that its worth sitting through the 90% of the average and bad ones. The movie Joy is a great movie because it captured the essence of what lower middle class squalor feels like. What desperation looks like. What a lifetime of never having your fair share and the lifelong injustice of what this represents can mean to an entire family who are just barely scraping by. This movie pulls off the very rare movie experience of providing an escape from the mundane reality of life by visiting the harsh reality of life at the same time. I cannot remember the last time I have ever experienced something like this in any movie.

The movie “Joy” starts with a scene from a very strange and badly acted soap opera where even Susan Lucci makes an appearance. The apparent point of this was to show that life can sometimes be a strange soap opera and this is opening scene is tied to the fact that the main character in this movie, Joy, had a mother that did nothing all day but watch soap opera’s but despite all of this, the opening scene of this movie was completely unexpected and unusual which was just another reason why this movie was so superior and different than anything we have seen before.

Joy is Joy Mangano who is a person that despite her her broken family; her father was married and divorced 3 times, she herself is divorced with 3 kids, managed to somehow break out of a lifetime of misery to invent a miracle mop with after many trials and bad times was a huge success. Joy took incredible financial risks and through the a contact she got through QVC via her x-husband, managed through a series of unlikely events to become a QVC star and the inventor of many new products .

What makes this movie so great is that it does not show any clear or “Hollywood-like” path to miracle success; instead what is shown, are the very harsh realities of what its like to pull off a new business of manufacturing mops in your fathers car repair garage, and the fighting with investors; the main one being her fathers current wealthy girlfriend (played by Isabelle Rosellini ) who he met through a dating service. Joy also had to fight with the criminals who were constantly raising the prices of the plastic parts that were the components of the miracle mop she was trying so desperately to sell for a profit. Just like real life, even when Joy thought that her dreams were realized by a miracle presentation on QVC that started out so badly, the criminals who were trying to ruin her revealed themselves again and then her jealous half-sister made matters worse by getting involved in a business that was not hers and she had no knowledge of. The point of all this is that real life is hard and breaking out of a bad reality is even harder. Very few people are able to create and sell a product that they invented and start their own business, no matter how great the idea. The enormous pitfalls and financial risks are depicted perfectly in this movie and I was so impressed with how well this story was told and the reality of life and business that was always at the forefront of this story. The question was asked to the audience, “could you do this”? Could you take out second mortgage out on your house and risk permanent financial ruin to follow your dream even if it meant putting your entire family in even a worse financial condition? Most people would answer no to this question.

One scene that stands out the most in this movie was a great speech by Joy’s father, played by Robert Deniro . After it appeared that Joy’s business had failed and she would lose everything and have to declare bankruptcy, Joy’s father tells her that it was all his fault. He never should have allowed her to believe that she was anything but average or below average. That she should never aspire to achieve anything great and that essentially she was like everybody else in the family, destined to never achieve anything. This speech represents what is perhaps the biggest and constant obstacle for anyone trying to break out of a bad situation; overcoming the people around you, who want you to fail because if you succeed, they would feel less about themselves.

This movie consists of many of the same actors and director of the movie “Silver Linings Playbook” and receives my highest recommendation. This movie is a must see one of a kind revelation. Jennifer Lawrence has never been better and deserves to win her 3rd Academy Award for best actress and if she does not win its only because she won 2 awards already. The rest of the cast is also outstanding and this movie will be nominated for best picture.

Joy: The Unofficial Biography of Miracle Mop Inventor, Joy Mangano
Joy Magnago is available on Amazon.

Joy – IMDB

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.