What I've heard (bad) about Netflix is that once you become a good customer, you have to wait longer for top choices. They are busier "hooking" the newbies so they'll purchase the more expensive packages.

Doubt could not have been any closer to my own early days, having done eight years in a Bronx Catholic grade school in the '50's. I recognized the church interior as that of St. Gabriel's in Riverdale.

The film was extremely powerful for me, getting all the atmospherics exactly right. Streep, all pinched-face and on constant guard against any slight deviation from her imposed order, who rules by terror "because it works" and never with love, is that severe autocrat who I and my contemporaries had in class at least once. What was a given was that, while the Fr. Boyle character and others may have disapproved of her, no one challenged her authority to run her fiefdom the way she saw fit; and looking back, this was the root of so much abuse handed out to kids every day.

Viola Davis, playing a black mother, gives us only one scene, but it is the best supporting role I've seen in a year. In it, the movie turns sharply, and that's all I dare say. kudos to John Patrick Shanley.

19th C, you say? You have a good eye, as all of us already know. They are the Sisters of Charity. Teaching and nursing. They run at least one grammar and high school in the Bronx called Our Lady of Mercy. Their head cover in those days was unique. They were founded by Elizabeth Ann Seton, in New Jersey, in the 1800's. I suppose their headgear fits the time of their founding, while most orders of the classic veil date from much earlier. Of course, just a few years after the time of the story, all such trappings were being discarded.

BTW, there are many different orders of nuns who call themselves Sisters of Charity, most going back to St. Vincent DePaul, of 17th C France. They used to wear what looked like giant paper airplanes, like you saw in The Third Man.

Gary...

It is also scary to see how Australian aborigines were treated in their own schools of this type. And the abuse continued longer than in N. America, I believed.

BTW on a recent visit to Australia, I asked about the possibility of a "home visit" to an Aboriginal family. I was told to forget it.

At the same time, we had part-Aboriginal leaders (of mixed blood) who were absolutely fantastic.

I guess Rod could tell us more.

Twilight's not bad. Kristen Stewart's very fine, but Robert Pattinson is highly unexciting - the world's first boy band vampire, he's about as Byronic as toothpaste ad - and the film's rather better before the schlocky vampire biz gets into gear.

I admit shamelessly.......I loved Twilight and Robert Pattinson makes a strong impression. I don't care to see him in any other venue or real life but there are been times when an actor is so uncannily gorgeous that you know you'll see him again. Examples: Antonio Banderas in Philadelphia, Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It.