Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The Oscar nominations are out, and the NYT lists all the big ones (and more) in the article below, which you can access by clicking. But I’ll list the nominees for eight categories as well:
Part of their summary:
Oscar voters lined up behind a classic studio blockbuster on Tuesday, giving 13 nominations to Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” the most of any movie, and setting up the long-awaited coronation of Nolan as Hollywood’s leading filmmaker.
The recognition for “Oppenheimer” had been expected. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw surprises into all of the other major categories.
Most prominently, Greta Gerwig did not receive a nomination as best director for “Barbie.” Instead, the increasingly international academy gave a first nomination to the French filmmaker Justine Triet, who directed “Anatomy of a Fall,” a did-she-or-didn’t-she thriller. “Barbie” also failed to figure into the best actress category, with Margot Robbie overlooked for bringing the doll to zany life. Instead, Annette Bening was honored as a best actress candidate for her obsessive, aging swimmer in the Netflix film “Nyad.”
In the best picture category, “Oppenheimer” will contend against “American Fiction,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Barbie,” “The Holdovers,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “Oppenheimer,” “Past Lives,” “Poor Things” and “Zone of Interest.” The entries in this field had been widely expected; no surprises.
Sadly, I’ve seen few of the Oscar-nominated pictures this year: only two— “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and I’d give the nod to the latter. Readers are welcome to weigh in with their favorites in each category
I just realized that the categories of “actor” versus “actress” (terms that are no longer politically correct), the Academy is assuming a sex binary. This will, I suspect, lead to big trouble in the future when we have transgender actors in movies.
The story of Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) is about as heartwarming as it gets, but also has, as I’ll claim, a double overtone of sadness. Born in London in 1909 to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Germany, Winton was a broker and stockbroker, but in 1938 moved to Prague to work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. (The country was at that time already occupied by the Nazis). And he became a man on a mission: to save Jewish children from falling into the hands of the Nazis. It was tough, and he had to get the kids through the Netherlands, where they could board a ship to England.
In the end Winton saved 669 children, nearly all of them Jewish, though, sadly, their parents remained in Europe because only children younger than 17 could be rescued. Nearly all their parents later died in the camps or ghettos. Here’s the account from Wikipedia.
Alongside the Czechoslovak Refugee Committee, the British and Canadian volunteers such as Winton, Trevor Chadwick, and Beatrice Wellington worked in organising to aid children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis.Many of them set up their office at a dining room table in a hotel in Wenceslas Square. Altogether, Winton spent one month in Prague and left in January 1939, six weeks before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Other foreign volunteers remained, such as Chadwick, Warriner and Wellington. In November 1938, following Kristallnacht in Nazi-ruled Germany, the House of Commons approved a measure to allow the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of £50 (equivalent to £3,397 in 2021) was deposited per person for their eventual return to their own country.
Netherlands
An important obstacle was getting official permission to cross into the Netherlands, as the children were to embark on the ferry at Hook of Holland. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Dutch government officially closed its borders to any Jewish refugees. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee searched for them and returned any found to Germany, despite the horrors of Kristallnacht being well known
Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. Following the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother worked with him to place the children in homes and later hostels.Throughout the summer of 1939, he placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to accept them. By coincidence, the names of the London and North Eastern Railway steamers which operated the Harwich to Hook of Holland route included the Prague and the Vienna; the former can be seen in a 1938 Pathé Newsreel.
Back in Britain, Winton lived to the ripe old age of 106, and the children he saved had become middle-aged. Many of them, unknown to him, were in the audience during a 1988 episode of the BBC show “That’s Life”. At that time Winton was 79. He knew the show was celebrating his life, but had no idea that the audience consisted not only of the children he saved (now grown up) but of their own children and grandchildren. When they stood up to identify themselves, seen in the clip below, the magnitude of what he’d done became clear, and he wept. I always do, too, when I see this video. I challenge you not to mist up when you watch this!:
Winton was modest and didn’t flaunt his achievements. In fact, they were unknown to his wife, who discovered them only when she found a scrapbook in their attic with the names of the children and of their parents. She gave the scrapbook to a Holocaust researcher, who tracked down many of the children, finding 80 of them in Britain. Many of them are in the video above. The rest is history.
Winton eventually accrued the honors he deserved, and got a knighthood in 2003 for “services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia”.
As the old Jewish proverb goes, attributed to Hillel the Elder, “Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world.” I interpret this to mean that “the entire world” refers to the world apprehended by the person who lives or dies. (I often think of this when saving ducklings.) Well, Winton saved 669 entire worlds, and that’s something to marvel at.
Recently the BBC made a movie about Winton, using the title “One Life” taken from the proverb above. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Winton—an excellent choice—and has been critically acclaimed, garnering a 89% critics’ rating and a 96% public rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Well worth seeing, I’d think. (It also features Helena Bonham Carter and Lena Olin.)
But watch this 2-minute trailer, which includes a version of the scene above. But you may notice that one thing is missing: the trailer doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” They say “the children” and refer to them several times, but you’d have no idea from this trailer that they were Jewish children. The only sign of what’s happening is one scene in which there are a few Nazi flags.
Is this omission an accident? I tried to convince myself that it was, but after seeing the video and reading the articles below, I decided that it was no accident. They left “Jewish” out because they thought it might turn off the prospective audience. (Of course, once the audience has their butts in the theater, the movie can use the word more often.) But I’m not sure how often they use it. Can you imagine “Schindler’s List” having a trailer that doesn’t use the word “Jew”? It is, after all, about another man who saved Jews. (Winton is often called “The British Schindler”). And sure enough, it does: it mentions the word several times and shows lots of people wearing yellow stars, a Jewish wedding, and other tropes. What’s going on is very clear. Things sure have changed in the last thirty years (“Schindler’s List was released in 1993.)
Now, what about “One Life?” Here’s “Israeli filmmaker, director, and activist Yuval David [speaking] about the antisemitic environment in Hollywood and the purging of Jewish references in marketing of ‘One Life.’” David, who knows what he’s talking about, has absolutely no doubt that the omission was deliberate, engineered by the progressive ideology that pervades Hollywood (I’m starting to wonder if “Jew” or “Jewish” even appears in the film!). Have a look:
And below is an article from the popular entertainment magazine Variety that discusses how, in the movie’s promotion, they omitted mentioning the religion of the children who were saved, which of course is why they had to be saved. Click the headline to read. And here’s an excerpt from that piece about how they erased “Jewish” from the marketing materials, using instead the words “Central European.” That is shameful:
The marketing materials for Anthony Hopkins latest feature film, a Holocaust biopic titled “One Life,” are set to be amended after controversy ensued over the lack of reference to Jews.
“One Life” tells the story of Nicholas Winton (played by Hopkins), better known as the British Oscar Schindler. Winton helped save the lives of over 600 children – the majority of them Jewish – from the Nazis during World War II.
But there has been disquiet over marketing for the movie after it was claimed Jews had been erased from the synopsis.
The furore started after British media retailer HMV tweeted about the film and referred to the children saved by Winton as “Central European” rather than Jewish. A number of independent cinemas also used the term “Central European” instead of “Jewish” while describing the film on their websites. [JAC: This makes no sense: children who were “Central European” but not Jewish weren’t usually endangered.]
See-Saw Films, who produced “One Life,” and Warner Bros. Pictures., who are distributing it in the U.K., subsequently also came under fire for omitting the word “Jewish” from their marketing materials when describing the children saved by Winton, although they did not use “Central European.”
Warner Bros. in the U.K. declined to comment but Variety understands that following the criticism all Warner’s official marketing for the film will be amended to describe the children as “predominantly Jewish,” which reflects the fact that while most of the 600+ Czechoslovakian children were Jewish, a handful of them were non-Jewish political refugees.
Click:
At least they fixed the materials, but it’s clear that they left Judaism out of the materials on purpose. It’s the progressive Zeitgeist: Jews aren’t exactly the world’s most popular group.
The BBC itself, however, continues to omit any mention of Jews in its article below (click to read). There is not a single mention that the children were Jewish, which of course drives the whole movie. In case the BBC has a social-media promoted “change of heart,” you can find the original BBC article archived here.
Click to read:
I’ve put the entire text of this article below the fold, and you can do a search for “Jew” or “Jewish”. You won’t find it. That has to be a deliberate omission, for the reason the kids were saved simply must be part of the story.
Finally, there was a series of tweets about whether the BBC used the word “Jewish” in stores about the Holocaust. Their score: 50% (2 out of 4). Given the history of the BBC’s antisemitism, I call the omission deliberate, especially for the Winton movie. And, as you saw, I’m not alone,
Here are the tweets. Reader Jez says this about the first Tweeter:
Cath Leng, whose tweet alerted me to it, is a former BBC employee herself. She just posted a piece about how the BBC broadcast an unbalanced piece about the man who won a recent women’s pool competition – the woman he was going to face in the final politely declined to take part, forfeiting the prize. The BBC didn’t even interview her, and just focused on the man’s feelings.
Glenn Loury and his podcasting buddy John McWhorter are back on Loury’s Substack page with a video (there’s also a transcript) answering a reader’s question:
Ibram X Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University raised around $43 million (estimates vary), and there’s very little to show for it. The Center has produced almost no meaningful research in that time, despite the outlandish funding at its disposal. In the Q&A from October of last year, a viewer asked John and I what we would do with that kind of money, if our goal was ending racism.
Click to read, or, better yet, watch the eleven-minute video below, as the entire transcript comes from the video:
Below: the video. I’m going to give just two brief excerpts of the answer, as you’d best watch the whole thing—or read the whole thing—yourself.
Loury suggests a race-centered equivalent to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, hoping that a group of academics could produce something that could ameliorate racism or improve the situation of black people. McWhorter, on the other hand, would use the money to make a movie set in 1966—a year of racial ferment that changed black centrism to black activism and separatism. McWhorter’s idea is apparently that showing that “something went wrong in 1966” would re-center discussions about race from the extremes to which he thinks it’s gone.
Two quotes:
LOURY:
I’ll go first. I haven’t got a clue. I have no idea. I mean, I can tell you what I’d like to do. You know me. I would like to create a center where the best and most interesting and most provocative and deep-thinking and learned students of the subject could gather together. Some of them I’d hope to recruit to the faculty of the university by being able to offer departments funds to underwrite the appointments of senior members who would be members of the history department or the sociology department or the political science or psychology or economics department, but who would also be principles [sic] in my center. They’d be half-time teaching, half-time researchers. They’d have their own research programs. I wouldn’t have to figure out what they were researching, because they would already be leaders in their respective fields.
I’d try to combine that kind of initiative with the overall strategy for growth and improvement of the university. The psychology department is looking for a person who specializes in this, the history department for someone who specializes in that. I’d develop relationships with my colleagues in those departments and try to enrich the faculty and so forth by bringing people around.
Another thing I do is to try to develop programs for students and colleagues who are interested in the general subject of race and racial inequality. Speakers series, postdoctoral fellowships for young scholars who are just completing their dissertations and trying to convert them into books who could come in and work on that thing. A vital center of churning, people stimulating each other, sitting around the seminar room listening to somebody’s early draft of their chapter and critiquing it, and so on. That’s among the things that I’d like to do.
To anyone who’s been in academia—and that includes Loury, who should know better—getting together a bunch of scholars who will undoubtedly pursue their own interests, be it race-centered or not, is not a good way to solve a problem, especially a problem that hasn’t been clearly posed. The center at first sounds like a bunch of synergistic humanities scholars, but clearly the program is to deal with issues of race. But try doing that in today’s climate! Clearly Loury himself would have to specify who gets hired so that heterodox thinkers like him are included. (He says, “I think I could be very happy ensconced in such a circumstance.
McWhorter’s idea is more inventive and creative: he wants to make a movie. But he adds that nobody would make such a movie today, nor would it change the world. But you can see his aim in the last para of his answer below:
McWHORTER
JOHN MCWHORTER: I would put that money into making a movie. Spike Lee would do it well, but it would be against his ideology. I would like there to be a movie about what happened to black thought in 1966. I wish more people understood how we got from integrationist to separatist, how we got to the idea that, for black people, we have to question what standards are and that just showing up is excellence and all of that. That’s so normal now. We’ve got, depending on how you count it, three generations of people who think of that as normal. If black people come up, you have to reserve judgment. Only so much can be expected of us. And maybe there’s a black way of doing things that’s better than the white way. But that’s new, and it’s easy to miss it now unless you’re very old or you’re a history buff.
There should be a 1966 movie with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, turning against white people. That should be shown, with Stokely Carmichael deciding that. Somebody playing John Lewis kind of caught in the middle of all of this. Bayard Rustin should be in it.1 Francis Piven and Richard Cloward, the white sociologists promulgating the National Welfare Rights Organization should be in it, and getting people onto the rolls on purpose. Viola Davis and people like that should be playing the women who are treated that way. And there should be a really great soundtrack, because of how black music sounded at the time. That would be part of it.
You’ve got the afros and the dashikis but also the older civil rights guard with the cat eyeglasses and the suits and the cigarettes being kind of pushed aside. There would have to be—and I don’t mean me—a careful speech coach, because in this film I would like it to be seen that there was a way of speaking that many black people had that would sound very white today to a lot of people, and people like that were taken seriously. I want Bayard Rustin to talk like him. He should not be played by Samuel Jackson.
There are clips of Bayard Rustin speaking, so you can hear his style.
And when Loury asked him if he thought such a movie could change the world, McWhorter responds:
Not change the world any more than the institute that you’re talking about would, but it would be a handy reference point. Too many of the film reference points are, “Slavery was bad. Racism is bad. Racism is still there.” Well, you know what? We’ve learned that there is an, I guess you’re going to have to call it, a black conservative perspective—but really I think it’s just a black centrist perspective—that is not shown as much.
So those are the solutions, and while I’d love to see the movie (I suspect I’ve seen much of it already), neither seems to me effective. But pondering what I would do, I couldn’t come up with anything. Neither am I black nor any kind of expert in creating equality.
Chapter 5 contains McWhorter’s recommendations for how to really help black people. They may sound too few, or too silly, but the more one thinks about them, the more they make sense. In his view, there are only three correctives.
1.) End the war on drugs
2.) Teach reading properly (he recommends phonics, and knows whereof he speaks)
3.) Get past the idea that everybody must go to college
#1 and #3 aren’t associated with higher costs, but with a change in attitudes. Spreading the teaching of phonics, which many experts now agree is the best way to teach kids to read, would cost a lot more, but perhaps the $43 million could be used in one state or one area along with a “control area” to see how well it works.
As for Kendi, he’s experienced a serious fall from grace, with mass layoffs at his Center for Antiracist research at Boston University, and a spate of people attesting that the Center was mismanaged (see here, here and here). And yes, the output of the Center was essentially nil.
If you have better ideas, please put them in the comments.
I guess today’s theme is bigotry. I had no idea that Frank Sinatra was an outspoken opponent of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In fact, there’s a Wikipedia article called “Frank Sinatra and Jewish activism“. Here’s an excerpt:
Frank Sinatra was a strong supporter and activist for Jewish causes in the United States and Israel. According to Santopietro, Sinatra was a “lifelong sympathizer with Jewish causes”. Sinatra participated in Hollywood protests and productions supporting Jews during the Holocaust and the formation of the State of Israel. He actively fund-raised for Israel Bonds, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and helped establish two intercultural centers in Israel which bear his name. Due to his support of Israel, his recordings and films were banned by the Arab League and by Lebanon.
Personal relationships with Jews
Sinatra became friendly with Jewish individuals in his youth. His Jewish neighbor, Mrs. Golden, often babysat him while his mother was out working. She spoke to him in Yiddish and served him coffee cake and apples. For many years Sinatra wore a mezuzah charm that Golden had given him. In 1944 Sinatra insisted on a Jewish friend, Manie Sacks, serving as godfather at his son‘s baptism over the vociferous protests of the priest.
According to Swan, Sinatra despised racial prejudice and was quick to put a stop to it. Sinatra said: “When I was a kid and someone called me a ‘dirty little Guinea’, there was only one thing to do – break his head…Let anyone yell wop or Jew or nigger around us, we taught him not to do it again”.[4] Once he heard a reporter call someone a “Jew bastard” at a party and punched out the speaker.[4] When Sinatra heard that some golf clubs restricted Jews from membership, he became the second non-Jew to join a club with a majority Jewish membership.
And he is in the 11-minute 1945 film below, called”The House I Live In“. Although it seems a bit schmalzy now, remember that the U.S. was rife with anti-Semitism then and largely ignored the Holocaust. The film won an Honorary Oscar and a special Golden Globe awared.
The YouTube notes:
This short film, which earned an honorary Academy Award for director Mervyn LeRoy in 1946, exhorts the message of religious tolerance and post-war hopefulness. Frank Sinatra, then the idol of teenage bobby-soxers, takes a break from a recording session and finds a group of children bullying one boy because he’s Jewish. Sinatra reminds them that Americans may worship in many different ways but they still remain Americans. The film ends with Sinatra performing the title song, penned by Abel Meeropol, best known for the song “Strange Fruit” which denounced the horror of lynchings. Named to the National Film Registry in 2007.
Well, he does use the word “Japs,” twice, which was standard during the war but is not regarded as a slur. So be it. But one thing’s for sure: Old Blue Eyes sure could sing!
A few weeks ago I discussed the movie “The fall of Minneapolis”, which you can watch free here. The movie maintains that George Floyd was not murdered by racist cops, but died after he was arrested due to a combination of stress, use of dangerous drugs, and heart and lung problems. Here’s how I summarized the movie at the time:
Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
The [police] bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.
This was followed by a lively discussion among the readers, many of them doubting the evidence given in the movie. I highly recommend that you watch it, as it makes a decent case that not only was Floyd not murdered, but the cops followed official protocol, Floyd was not asphyxiated, and that the mayor and police chief of the city lied under oath in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the accused murderer. As I’ve discussed the evidence before, you can review it here. Meanwhile, click below to watch the movie if you haven’t:
In my earlier post, I showed a 48-minute discussion between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, both of whom watched the movie and were pretty convinced by its thesis. Now, they’re back on the “Glenn Show” (video below) discussing the movie with its two producers, Liz Collin, and JC Chaix. YouTube, however, put restrictions on this one-hour discussion, so Loury decided to put it on his Substack site. If you click on the image below, you can hear that discussion for free. Here’s Loury’s explanation for not putting it on YouTube:
As you may be aware, YouTube restricted this week’s episode of The Glenn Show to viewers 18 and older. My team and I determined that the reason for this restriction was the inclusion of footage and imagery taken from the scene of George Floyd’s death. I want as many people to see this conversation as possible, and an age restriction has the potential to severely limit the video’s reach. So we decided to re-edit the video and remove the footage and imagery that led to the restriction, and then re-upload it. The conversation itself remains intact—only the visual elements have changed.
However, I found it unacceptable to simply capitulate to what I believe to be an incorrect decision on YouTube’s part. Accordingly, I’ve made the version of the video I originally intended to release available here on Substack. This isn’t the first time The Glenn Show has been penalized by YouTube, and I doubt it will be the last. Rest assured that, no matter what happens, I’ll find a way to get my show—uncompromised and unfiltered—out to you.
Click to watch:
At the beginning and throughout, McWhorter plays the role of “bad cop,” even though he buys the film’s premise. He does this by asking the hard questions that have led people to diss the movie. For example:
Was the bodycam showing Chauvin sitting on Floyd’s shoulder rather than his neck produced by AI? The producers say definitely not: AI manipulation arrived long after the bodycam videos were made public.
Why did Chauvin sit on Floyd’s neck for so long when Floyd clearly said he was in trouble? In fact, the cops called for medical help within a minute, but the emergency help bot confused with directions and took longer to arrive.
Did Chauvin, even if he didn’t intend to murder Floyd, or killed him unintentionally, contribute to Floyd’s death by sitting on his neck or shoulders? That’s doubtful; Chauvin was unaware of Floyd’s medical condition at the time of the arrest (an arrest that Floyd fought vehemently). Also, Floyd was crying “I can’t choke! I can’t breathe!” before he was ever on the ground—indeed, before the cops ever touched him. Further, the official autopsy said there were “no signs of asphyxiation.”
Did the cops violate department policy by restraining Floyd the way they did? No, in fact they were strictly adhering to the department policy of “maximum restraint technique” (MRT), which all Minneapolis cops are taught. The mayor and chief of police lied about this, denying that it was taught, and then someone removed the MRT pages from the online police manual.
Why did the prosecution witnesses lie, and why did they show only 90 seconds of the 18-20 minutes of police bodycam video (that video’s in the movie)? It’s not completely clear, but the producers suggest there was a narrative that had to be adhered to and that narrative was of a white cop, motivated by racism, murdering a black man. In fact, the coroner admitted there was such a narrative and was scared that he’d be fired because his autopsy report didn’t adhere to that narrative.
Why didn’t the movie show all nine minutes of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s back/neck? The explanation is a bit unclear, but apparently the producers wanted the viewers to get hold of the whole nine minutes and judge for themselves. But where would we get that video? This is the only waffle-y part of the producers’ explanation.
The discussion ends with a bit about the interviews with the Minneapolis police officers who weren’t arrested, and who are sometimes moved to tears by what happened to their department and by the lies of the prosecution witnesses and other officials. There’s also some discussion about the $27 million that Minneapolis gave to Floyd’s family. Apparently another person arrested and subject to the MRT also sued, though he wasn’t injured, and got $8-9 million.
If you’re not in the mood to watch Loury and McWhorter yet, at least watch the original movie. But I recommend watching the original movie and the Substack discussion above.
This is one of the best American movies ever made, and it’s free—in its entirety—on YouTube. Here’s the Wikipedia summary:
The Best Years of Our Lives (also known as Glory for Me and Home Again) is a 1946 American drama film directed by William Wyler and starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Harold Russell. The film is about three United States servicemen re-adjusting to societal changes and civilian life after coming home from World War II. The three men come from different services with different ranks that do not correspond with their civilian social class backgrounds.
The film was a critical and commercial success. It won seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Film Editing (Daniel Mandell), Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood), and Best Original Score (Hugo Friedhofer).
In addition, Russell was also awarded an honorary Academy Award, the only time in history that two such awards were given for a single performance.
It was the highest-grossing film in both the United States and United Kingdom since the release of Gone with the Wind, and is the sixth most-attended film of all time in the United Kingdom, with over 20 million tickets sold.
In 1989, The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Here are the Rotten Tomatoes ratings (click to read):
It’s a superb film and it’s free. It’s almost three hours long, so if you have the time, get some popcorn and kick back to watch. (Note: it’s in black and white.)
Here’s a filler post as I’ll soon be boarding for Miami, and have little to say except to express sorrow for the wildfires on Maui, whose latest toll is at least 55 lives, as well as a ton of property destroyed.
Here’s a video showing how they make animal noises for the movies (you didn’t think the animals made them, did you?).
The YouTube notes:
Foley artists use objects to create sounds based on a character’s movements and interactions in movies and TV shows. Sometimes, they will find themselves making sounds for animals. Marko Costanzo is a veteran Foley artist for c5 Sound, Inc. He has who worked on movies like “Ice Age,” “Life of Pi,” and “True Grit.” Costanzo explained how complicated it was to make the sounds of a dragonfly flapping its wings in “Men in Black,” and how he captured the footsteps of a dog at different ages in “Marley & Me.” Then, we showed him an animal clip he has never seen before and had him come up with the proper sounds on the spot.
