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

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for the reminder--I have been forgetting that mushroom and black olive suit one another, even when they are not pizza toppings. (I haven't had such a pizza for more than a decade and have known that I'd better not for nearly four years.) Omelet sometime, perhaps.

[genarti]

Mmmmmm, sautéed mushroom and black olive. That sounds like a truly delightful quiche.

I hadn't even heard of Spotlight. (Which doesn't necessarily mean it hasn't been well advertised; that may be the case, but also I generally live under a rock as far as movies are concerned.) It sounds like a hard movie to watch, but a very good one, and a very responsibly done one too.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I am most fascinated by the bit of the first article that talks about the altar motifs. The idea that we have a depiction of the fiery chariot on an altar makes my inner merkavah mysticism kink light right up. Also the idea that we have a depiction of symbolism that was on the pargod seems almost incredible (I would love to see the reasoning behind that, because the idea of a rose as an early Judaic symbol makes me happy for complicated reasons).

[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.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the Spotlight review. I like all those qualities of restraint, collaboration, insight; I like that Boston gets to play Boston.

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.

Nice. Accusation by association--and he can't say that he's been slandered.

Nine

[drwex]

Thank you for your commentary on "Spotlight." I've been wavering on whether or not to see it because I expected it to be sensationalized in typical "Hollywood thriller" fashion.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

therefore there was a quiche-like object available before people got so hungry that the cats were in danger. very good, very good :-)

I probably have told you, but the priest who married us had a history of sexual abuse. We didn't know that at the time (duh), but he had a vibe neither of us particularly liked. (We were married in your hometown, just a year before the priest died.)(story here)