I was reading a memoir by a bestselling fiction author, in hopes of making it the Monday Book. But 1) it was the most boring book I’ve read since grad school and 2) I was trying to finish an afghan on a tight deadline so that led to an allnighter with Netflix.

SPOTLIGHT is a movie about the Boston Globe breaking the cover-up of sexual predator priests by the Catholic church, not just in Boston, but internationally. It’s an amazing movie. The journalists are not unbelievable heroes. The tedious build-up of info includes research details I remember from my days behind the desk. I LOVE the scene where they realize they can use annual directories of priests to figure out who is on “sick leave” and other code names.

There’s also an intense moment where the “good guy” reporters confront the “bad guy” lawyer who’s making money off hushing up the scandals, and discover he sent them the names of 20 predator priests five years before, hoping to get off the gravy train and redeem himself. The Globe buried the story. Spoiler alert: the guy who buried the story then is leading the charge now, but not for redemption. He literally doesn’t remember  burying the story.

“Just doing my job.”

Spotlight had me riveted, and now I want to read the books (by the journalists and by Robert Sipe, a psychotherapist who wrote about the problems and was hachet-jobbed by the church). The icky details are handled with sensitivity, and the story of Spotlight centers around how they carefully built the story.

You really want to see this. It deserved its best picture Oscar last year and it is now available on Netflix.