Pixar films are generally very good. “Finding Nemo” (2003) is a very, very good Pixar movie about persistence and helicopter parenting. But reviews of Pixar films don’t matter. We watch them because we are kids of a certain age or parents of kids of a certain age and all the other kids (and parents) are watching the movie and we’ll be social outcasts if we don’t watch the movie (and buy the action figures). So let’s instead talk about the underlying morbidity of this Disney flick. About a thousand fish embryos and an expectant mother die before the opening sequence.
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“Concussion” (2015) has the feel of a corporate espionage flick, what with all the liars in suits, suspicious suicides and a lonely hero raging against the machine. Except the machine is the NFL and we know how the story ends. Actually, the story hasn’t ended. For the next 40 years (think about that) retired athletes are going to be going mad and then dropping dead due to repeated blows to the head on the football field. Worse, for them, it’s already too late (think about that, too). It makes the film somewhat anticlimactic, despite a solid performance by Will Smith.
It’s amazing how relevant “Broadcast News” remains nearly 20 years after its release. It’s a witty menage a trois with id-ego-superego undertones played against the backdrop of an existential crisis within journalism. Although the Internet (the word “blog” didn’t exist in 1987) now drives the argument, journalism continues to struggle with the issue of style versus substance. (They shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive. By accepting the argument as binary, we perpetuate it.) When it came out, I was a too-cynical-for-his-years broadcasting student on his way to a short-lived career in TV news. “Broadcast News” still hits close to home.
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