Spotlight

Spotlight
AKA: How the US were last to call the church on its crimes.

This movie follows the team of reporters that got this note and turned into news all across America, or better said across the US because in the rest of the continent it was old news already, anyway we follow them and see what happen during their investigation.

The movie starts when they are changing chief editor in the paper, and he sit with the spotlight group and tells them that the note of the sexual abuse in the church and covering up is a good piece to pursue, even after they dismissed the story time ago; this shows us that sometimes you need a pair of fresh eyes to see what is in front of you.

The story takes some turns because they reporters are overwhelmed by all the evidence and because everything is just there for them for the taking, so they have to act before someone else decides to make the story. That is our tension, not stop it, but win and be the first to publish the story, but the characters deliver to the point that you actually want them to publish first, because they are working so hard.

It has some great moments, like Mark Ruffalo getting the papers and asking for the copier (you have to watch the movie to understand it) and some parts very irrelevant like 9/11 is quite long scene or people watching TV and discussing about it when it could have been just a line like, “We can’t publish this after the WTC, nobody will read it” I know that was a very important moment for the US but in a movie like this you want to keep the energy, the momentum, also with one phrase you stop it cold turkey, with a long scene you give time to slow down, and I’ll prefer the shock.

The characters behave like they should and you see that there was not a great cover up in the paper, it was more like incompetence and tedious from checking tons of possible notes and letters most of them garbage and how just a new perspective can make a change.

Fun fact the office was so accurate recreate that they invited the actual spotlight group and they naturally sit at their desks and started to put everything in order getting ready to work.

Everybody at least has heard the accusations against the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and stuff but when you set it chronologically you see that the US was one of the last countries to make it public and attack the problem publicly. The movie starts at 2001 and during the 90s all Latin-American, a place way more catholic than Boston had already denounced this crimes, also Canada, Europe, Australia, lots of Asia and Africa. So the US were very late to the party, I think it had been a South Park episode before of that.

The movie was well realized and it doesn’t feel as long as it is. You might learn something about how the cover ups work and what happen after, but beyond that it is not great still one more for the “meh” pile.

*** 3 stars out of five, if you have like 2 hours to burn this is an option.