“Battleship Pretension” Sets Sail at Oscar Time

Classic film enthusiasts are well acquainted with Battleship Potemkin, the thrilling 1925 silent Soviet epic in which director Sergei Eisenstein showed the Russian people rising up against their Tsarist oppressors. But do these film fans also know “Battleship Pretension”?

This latter is something totally unknown in Eisenstein’s day: a podcast. It’s been around for 13 years, regularly doling out opinions about movies. As the “Battleship Pretension” site makes clear, it offers  “movie talk from two guys who think they know more than you do.” Frankly, I’m not convince they know more than I do about The Graduate. I first met Tyler Smith, one of those two self-confident film dudes, when I climbed aboard “Battleship Pretension” to talk about my new book, Seduced by Mrs. Robinson. Tyler may not have been the ultimate expert on The Graduate, but he was savvy and charming. That’s why we scheduled a second conversation to compare notes on the upcoming Oscar race. Afterward, I couldn’t resist asking Tyler about himself.

Tyler is currently a graduate student in the UCLA film school, majoring in critical studies. He’s the rare film geek who holds conservative social values, and considers himself a committed Christian. (By contrast, his co-host and longtime friend David Bax is, in Tyler’s words, “a liberal atheist.”) One thing that fascinates me about Tyler’s perspective is that – unlike a good many Christian conservatives – he has no use for censorship of any sort. Devices like Vid Angel that remove nudity and rough language from an existing film, are for him completely missing the point, and he wouldn’t dream of favoring a cleaned-up version of a Scorsese or Tarantino film, because “that stuff is the movie.” No fan of most overtly Christian movies, he points to the evolving Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction as an unlikely but genuine Christian role model.

Each year’s Oscar season is a special time for “Battleship Pretension” and its fans. Since 2013, Tyler and David have been handing out the BP Awards, based on the votes of about 30 movie experts, including site contributors, fellow podcasters, and previous guests. The winners are announced at the end of February. Alas, there are no fancy gold statuettes, but the BP folks do generally stage an impressive ceremony that is featured on the podcast. OK, so it’s faked – but they have fun adding music, crowd noise, and celebrity photos. Tyler has loved putting these bogus events together: “I don’t know if anybody enjoyed it as much as I did.” 

Most of the BP award categories are familiar ones – best supporting actor, best documentary feature – but Smith and Bax have given themselves the right to invent categories of their own. That’s why there’s an award for best stunts, as well as the unique “The Bruce McGill in The Insider Award for Best Performance Under 15 Minutes.” Past winners of this prize have included Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf of Wall Street and Channing Tatum in Hail, Caesar! But Tyler seems most jazzed about the 2016 award, which went to journeyman actor Neal Huff for his tiny but key scene as an abuse survivor who gets the ball rolling in Spotlight. Tyler loved the fact that Huff was hardly a movie star. “Battleship Pretension” contacted his publicist, and learned that Huff would be happy to tape a gracious acceptance speech. 

This year’s nominees, who include Bruce Greenwood as a frantic reporter in The Post and Harriet Sansom Harris as a soused client of couturier Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, are by no means celebrities. Let’s hope the BP Bruce McGill Award really makes someone’s day.

 

Turning a Spotlight on Newspaper Journalists

The new film Spotlight (starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and a stellar ensemble cast) arrives just in the nick of time. Back in 1976, when the film version of All the President’s Men was in wide release, journalism seemed like the most exciting profession in the world – and the most important. After all, the central figures in that real-life story, Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) , had launched the investigation that led to the fall of President Nixon and his Watergate cronies. By heeding the advice of an informer code-named Deep Throat to “follow the money,” Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a political scandal that pointed toward the nation’s highest-ranking government officials. Their investigative work, it can be argued, saved American democracy.

In the aftermath of All The President’s Men, it was no wonder that ambitious young people started enrolling in J-school in droves. But all that seems like a long time ago. In the forty years since All the President’s Men, the journalistic profession has undergone some cataclysmic changes. Newspaper advertising, once an important source of revenue, is no longer a cash cow.  A host of young Americans get their news off the Internet, bypassing newspapers altogether. Some prominent daily newspapers have merged; many have disappeared. Even if you’re lucky enough to nab a staff newspaper job, you can’t count on holding it for long. As a proud member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, I see gifted newspaper journalists struggling to have viable careers. For a number of them, it’s been necessary to leave traditional journalism in order to make a living writing advertorial materials and what’s euphemistically called “custom content.”

Which is why Spotlight is so refreshing. Here’s another true story about newspaper journalists whose investigations make a difference at the highest levels. Spotlight, which takes place circa 2001, is the story of a small, dedicated team, led by Michael Keaton, at the Boston Globe. A smart new editor, well played by Liev Schreiber, urges them to look further into the dead-end case of a Roman Catholic priest who was accused of molesting children decades earlier. The team—made up entirely of lapsed Catholics—discovers that in the heavily Catholic city of Boston any hint of malfeasance by clergy is enveloped by a conspiracy of silence uniting the Church, the courts, local politicians, and even newspapermen. By the time the truth is fully out, it implicates almost 100 priests and sets the scene for ever more wide-reaching accusations of illegal cover-ups in Boston and elsewhere.

I love the way Spotlight’s journalists (who also include Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) really act like journalists, expending lots of shoe leather as they raise around Boston, button-holing officials, searching through dusty files, pulling out their ever-ready reporter notebooks as they assure interview subjects of their good intentions. Ruffalo, in particular, is the pitbull among them, the brash young man who’ll never let go of a promising lead. McAdams, meanwhile, is particularly good at gently persuading abuse victims to tell their tragic stories.

This is not the first time Michael Keaton has played a journalist. In Ron Howard’s charming The Paper, which chronicles 24 hours in the life of a fictive New York daily, he was as dogged and driven as he is here. But that film was more of a fantasy, with justice quickly served and a warm-and-fuzzy ending. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about Spotlight, but it’s impossible to look away. Maybe it will help bring back investigative journalism as an honorable career.