Spotlight (2015)

[Frayed Knot]

An investigative team for a newspaper undertakes a task to take on a very large and powerfully entrenched institution - and predictably more stonewalling than hi-jinx ensues.

[Guest sharpie]

Liked it a whole lot. Was suspenseful without anyone getting killed or anything. Really good performances.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

You knew how it was going to turn out but it was interesting and the performances were strong enough to stay with it.

I recognized many of the everyday journalistic jams they get into from my own work, and of course am very jelly they have resources and leadership to eventually overcome them. I barely have co-workers anymore much less resources. (waa)

Good movie!

[Guest El Segundo Escupidor]

Frayed Knot wrote: An investigative team for a newspaper undertakes a task to take on a very large and powerfully entrenched institution - and predictably more stonewalling than hi-jinx ensues.

I notice the use of "hijinks" runs in the family.

[Vic Sage]

Top 20 newspaper movies:

The Front Page (31, 74)
It Happened One Night (34)
His Girl Friday (40)
Citizen Kane (41)
Meet John Doe (41)
Woman of the Year (42)
Call Northside 777 (48)
Ace in the Hole (51)
Sweet Smell of Success (57)
All the President's Men (76)
Superman (78)
Absence of Malice (81)
Year of Living Dangerously (82)
Killing Fields (83)
The Paper (94)
LA Confidential (97)
Zodiac (07)
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (09)
Spotlight (15)

[Frayed Knot]

I notice the use of "hijinks" runs in the family.

Eh, more just an all-purpose CPF film review tradition.





The one thing I heard a longtime journo say that did NOT ring true to him about this movie was when the spotlight crew went and back-checked what the paper had previously written on the topic. That, he claimed, would be the absolute first thing you'd do, before the first word was ever written. In the movie, they didn't get around to doing this until they were long into their series. Dramatic license most likely.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I'd need to see it again but that bit bothered me a little too. It was as though the filmmakers wanted you to suspect Ben Bradlee was burying it the whole time, then the twist.

Shirley would have come up amid all the other research they'd done over the course of a year.

[Edgy MD]

There's definitely some dramatic license. There's certainly some people who are crying that they've been painted wrongly (with some support), who are getting the talk to our lawyers response from the studio, which is unfortunately something akin to what the Archdiocese of Boston was too long offering the victims of the pedophile priests. Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer appear to have created Peter Brand-type composite characters, but unfortunately put their words in the mouths of real people. I note that while believing that Tom McCarthy has been in recent years about the best thing going these days in the dying field of screenwriting.

It's interesting that McCarthy played the plagiarizing Jason Blair figure in the last season of The Wire and now has a chance to be remembered for writing and directing a story about journalistic heroism.