When one uses sites like Netflix or Amazon, they keep recommending things to you based on your past searches and purchases. Most of the time, one can see why they recommended the items. But sometimes, they are real head-scratchers where the recommendation seems wildly off or to make no sense whatsoever, and today I experienced one such case.
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Soon after discussing the film Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer and how minority communities view with concern films that play on minority stereotypes, I watched Growing Up Smith in which the minority is now Indian.
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The actor, who at the somewhat late age of 46 gained international stardom as James Bond and played the role until he was 58, has died at the age of 89. Interestingly, when they were first casting the role of Bond, they passed on him in favor of Sean Connery because they thought he was too old for the part. He was then just 35.
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I love pretty much everything about the film High Noon (1952), from the story, the acting, the music, and the morality it represented. I have reviewed it before and discussed some of the plot holes. But this is the kind of film where one easily forgives such things. The filmmakers seemed to have ignored those things that did not affect the main story.
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I was quite disappointed with this highly acclaimed film, based on a true story, that was nominated for six Academy Awards (though it did not win any) including for best film and for best supporting actors for Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.

The first half of it is about a five-year old boy Saroo in India who lives in a remote town with his mother, older brother Guddu whom Saroo idolizes, and sister Shekila. His family is extremely poor and his mother works as a laborer gathering rocks in the heat of the day. Guddu and Saroo engage in petty thievery to buy food for the family and help out their mother. But one day while he and Guddu are out on another such mission, Saroo gets separated from his brother and, after falling asleep on a train, ends up in Kolkatta, a teeming city over a thousand miles away. After wandering the streets fending for himself and fending off people who seem friendly initially but have darker motives, he ends up in an orphanage with a large number of other street children. A kindly official, after failing to locate his mother, arranges for him to be adopted by an Australian couple (mother played by Kidman) living in Tasmania.
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I tend not to watch films that deal with major historical atrocities such as slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights struggle, and the like because my anger at the unbelievable and pointless cruelty on display tends to obscure my appreciation of the film as a whole. This film tells the story of the important but largely unknown role that women, and black women in particular, played in the early days of the NASA space program and sure enough, I got furious, but the film was able to overcome my resistance.
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