You want to sue the Church?

[sovay]

And tonight I made a sautéed mushroom and black olive quiche for dinner, using the cheddar and the goat's milk gouda on hand. rushthatspeaks made the crust out of Emergency Biscuit. The quiche itself took at least twenty minutes longer to bake than expected because of the insulating properties of Emergency Biscuit, but fortunately the extra filling had already gone into a buttered cake tin on the top rack of the oven and therefore there was a quiche-like object available before people got so hungry that the cats were in danger. Overall, a success. We plan to use the biscuit crust for all relevant pies from now on. I was really happy with the mushrooms. I made them in the small frying pan, in three batches, while fending off a cat.

1. Courtesy of schreibergasse: what the Magdala Stone tells us about concepts of sacred space in ancient Judaism.

2. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: Julia Lillard's "The Alchemist." I saw it first without the title and thought it was a Tarot illustration of The Star.

3. nineweaving asked me what I thought about Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight (2015). My textbrick response, recopied here:

Worth seeing. It is a solid, genuine ensemble picture, meaning that all four of the Spotlight reporters get their own threads, no single character is the protagonist, and all sorts of recurring, significant supporting characters come and go and reappear as the story moves on. As a retelling of historical events, it gains a lot of power from its restraint, by which I do not mean that Spotlight is not an angry film—it's a very angry film—but the material is inflammatory enough that it would feel cheap if sensationalized and so I really appreciate that, as far as I can tell, there are no melodramatic twists and turns to confront the reporters with the awful truth; it is taking enough of a toll on them to live for months with the study of systematic sexual abuse and conspiracy, day in, day out, and worse every time a new piece of information comes to light. (In a quirk of statistical distribution, all members of the Spotlight team at the time were Catholic. Even for the most lapsed of them, there's an element of personal betrayal—and the subjectivity of being embedded in a system. In 2001, the new editor of the Globe was a Florida Jew who had no compunction about investigating the Church. He is played very well by Liev Schreiber as an undemonstrative figure with acute social instincts; he never gets a scene where he opens up, but by the end we trust him. He is the outsider; he can see some things more clearly than people who have lived in this culture all their lives. He has no affinity whatsoever for baseball.) It's a very good movie about silence and the ways that the factors in institutional complicity are not all malevolent, like the reporter who doesn't know how to tell her devoted Catholic grandmother who goes to Mass three times a week and whose heart will break as soon as she finds out about the child abuse; it's a very good movie about the hard work of speaking out, how the real trick is often not the willingness to speak, but the willingness of other people to listen and then to amplify. Some of the survivors have been trying to get this story out for years. Even the Globe brushed them off: it's awful, but is it news? I've seen the movie compared to All the President's Men (1976), but even that was more of a thriller. In its deliberate, almost documentary procedural pace, Spotlight reminded me more of The Naked City (1948). It starts when Marty Baron suggests investigating a story; it ends when the story goes to press. Anything that doesn't occur within that six-month window is not the movie's problem. One of the reporters is separated from his wife, living in a basement apartment while his colleagues drop by with pizza because otherwise he will patently starve to death on a diet of boiled hot dogs and beer; we never find out what happens to their marriage, because it didn't resolve before "Church allowed abuse by priest for years: Aware of Geoghan record, archdiocese still shuttled him from parish to parish" came out in January 2002. I like that sort of thing. I like that all of its characters are people, even the ones we see incompletely or antagonistically; I applaud the casting of Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, because as soon as he opens his mouth, all you can hear is Sweeney Todd. The cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Brian d'Arcy James, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, other character actors I like. I don't have much to say about the cinematography or the music, but Boston is played by itself rather than Vancouver or mostly Toronto. I don't know if it's the best possible film that could have been made from these events, but I don't know what that would look like, either. I was not sorry to have seen it and I rather hope it wins some awards when the season comes around.

Comments

[gwynnega]

That quiche sounds excellent.

I liked Spotlight very much. I appreciated that it steadfastly does not Hollywoodize the story (i.e., shoehorning in a love story, etc.). It did remind me of All the President's Men in that both films focus on the unglamorous, painstaking work of old-school journalism.

[sovay]

That quiche sounds excellent.

I do not think it would be difficult to reproduce. For the filling, I used a cup of whole milk, about two cups total of grated cheese (cheddar, gouda, a smattering of already shredded mozzarella), four eggs, a can of black olives minus the liquid, about a pound of mushrooms that reduced in the usual way to a third of their volume after being sautéed with butter, and white pepper, nutmeg, and paprika to taste. We expected it to bake at 350°F for about thirty-five minutes and instead it took closer to fifty or an hour. The spillover in the heavily buttered nine-inch cake pan was done by the thirty-five minute mark. I was really pleased with the results.

I appreciated that it steadfastly does not Hollywoodize the story (i.e., shoehorning in a love story, etc.).

Yes. And when the story gets too close to home, it's not because any of the reporters are hiding repressed, abused pasts; the unease comes from less familiar directions. Nothing ever happens with the house full of suspended priests living around the corner from Brian d'Arcy James' Matt, but it's important that the discovery causes him to ask permission from his editor to tell the other parents in the neighborhood, because saying nothing for the sake of the story feels like furthering the danger. There's a strange kind of anxiety in retrospect when Michael Keaton's Robby realizes that one of his high school teachers was a predatory priest, because nothing ever happened to him: sometimes it doesn't. Rachel McAdams' Sacha never does tell her grandmother until she can hand her the first article. That mattered to me. Not everything needs to develop as dramatically as possible. Sometimes the ordinary difficulties are dramatic enough.

It did remind me of All the President's Men in that both films focus on the unglamorous, painstaking work of old-school journalism.

I agree with that and am glad to see the work recognized. I just remember All the President's Men playing out with more suspense, whereas in Spotlight the gripping sequences aren't the reveal of information, they're the methods of collecting it and the implications of the ways in which it is or is not readily accessible to the public eye.

[gwynnega]

Not everything needs to develop as dramatically as possible. Sometimes the ordinary difficulties are dramatic enough.

Yes, exactly. I wish more current Hollywood movies understood this!