MOVIE REVIEW: SPOTLIGHT

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SPOTLIGHT

[Note: During this week leading up to the SAG Awards, I’ll be reviewing a quartet of the top films of the year. Any of the important ones that I don’t get to this week, I’ll review the week before the Oscars. And please don’t miss my critique of the best film of the year, by far, The Revenant, which you can still read here: itsnotaboutme.tv/news/movie-review-the-revenant.]

I seriously do not get the big deal about this film! I sent an invite to a screening of it to twenty of my peeps, and nineteen of them asked to go to it! And several of them had already seen it once! I just don’t get it.

Unknown Spotlight is good enough, but far from riveting. It’s the story of how the Boston Globe reporters discovered the wide extent of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church in 2001. Just like how, in Concussion this season, we found-out the story behind all the concussions in the National Football League, it was interesting to know the backstories of these events. But I don’t get the audience frenzy over it, nor all the awards.

Someone asked me if I didn’t think the actors were good, and, yes, of course I do! But these are all top names, making the big bucks, so they should not have delivered performances that were less than what they were! But no one was special.

Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight.

Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight.

As a matter of fact, I had no idea what Mark Ruffalo, one of my favorite actors, was doing with his face the whole time! (I hate to say it, but he far from deserves all the nominations he’s received this season! Even his own performance in the recent Infinitely Polar Bear is a zillion times better than this one.) I kept wondering if he was working while suffering from Bell’s Palsy, which I had never heard about. His mouth mechanics were sooo distracting!

As was the lighting. I kept checking to see if I was still wearing my sunglasses! I had to hold myself back from going into the booth to ask them if perhaps we had a really deficient print of the film. I realize the lighting design was probably to match the bleakness of the topic, but give a girl’s eyes a break, for goodness’ sake!

There’s not much more to say about the banality of this movie. And in a year with the brilliance of The Revenant, (which Mr. X admiringly said after seeing it, “That’s a whole other level of film-making!,”) Spotlight really pales by comparison. It seems like a movie that was made in the ’70s, and I don’t mean the special ones.

See it for yourselves, if you must, and you’ll know of what I speak. Better yet, just wait till it comes on television, so you can also get some shut-eye.

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