Spotlight

Excellent, excellent film. I highly recommend it.

I was once an investigative reporter, I was once an altar girl. This film hit me on so many levels. The priest I served under never physically abused me but he was a miserable person and told me I was stupid--during mass. You hear that on the altar and you never forget it.

I never worked on an investigative team like the Boston Globe had--what a thrill it must have been to uncover the city’s darkest secret and have the backing of your paper. The film was so very well done. Mark Ruffalo captured the quirkiness of reporters who are completely absorbed in their craft--their tenacity, hunger, sacrifice, passion, poor diets. One of the great things about being a reporter was some of the people you met. Many of them were strange but many of them were also alive in a way people in cubicle farms aren’t. OK, a generalisation, but I remember for years after I left newspapers missing the conversations that happened every day between inkies who were passionate about politics, fairness, and a finely crafted sentence. I never found in the corporate world the camaraderie that reporters enjoyed. Maybe the long hours and low pay provided a fraternal dividend lacking on the 8:30-5 shift.

2-9