I got up at 5:30 am to give myself time to write a proper Suffragette review, but I got so caught up that I failed to make the 9 am screening of Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight, which people have been calling a total keeper and an exceptionally solid journalism flick in the basic shoe-leather and note-pad tradition. It’s not a tragedy — I’ll catch it today at 4:15 pm at the Galaxy and also listen to a post-screening q & a. But now I have to blow off Cocksucker Blues.

I spoke briefly to costar Michael Keaton during last night’s Suffragette party. Me: “During initial discussions did McCarthy suggest that Spotlight might play as a kind of All The President’s Men-type thing?” Keaton: “Later on, yeah, but at first no, not at all. It was just, you know, ‘here’s the script, we’re doing it straight and plain’…very down to business, no pretensions.”

The Spotlight buzz is fairly hot right now, of course, and Keaton mentioned he’s starting to get a little bit worried about this. The second wave, he meant. The old pushback from the pushbackers. As he put it, “People are gonna see it and say, ‘Ehh, good but not as great as what I heard.'” That always happens, I said, “but then comes the third wave who push back against the previous guys and say it’s really as good as the initial hype and maybe better.”