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dwk wrote:In a puzzling move (SOP for them), Sony is releasing a 50th Anniversary edition of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Blu-ray on February 7th.

Bonus Features on Blu-ray Include:
ALL-NEW: Commentary with Director Robert Englund and Set Decorator Nancy Booth Englund
Alternate home video version of the film with 12 extra minutes of footage
976-EVIL has a run time of approximately 92 minutes and is rated R for adult situations/language, nudity, violence.

dwk wrote:Yes, Sony themeselves. Maybe they are copying Lionsgate's Vestron line. Here is the cover:

George Kaplan wrote: Wed Jun 02, 2010 8:45 am

domino harvey wrote:Some of these are good films, but Christ, can I really justify owning a set devoted to the worst actress of the studio era?

YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING?!?!?!?!?!? I'm sorry, but those, for me, are fightin' words!

Acting, schmating who gives a flying FUCK? Novak emerges at exactly the point in cinematic history that "acting," before the camera implodes and post-Stanislavsky "being" begins to assert itself.

The undervaluation/misunderstanding of Kim Novak's supreme value is the sport of fools (rethink it man - RE-THINK IT!)
She is THE goddess who articulates, with precision unparelleled, the burden of being of being a beautiful woman/commodity in a world ruled, all but exclusively, by men. PLEASE read Richard Lippe (Lippe, Richard, "Kim Novak: A Resistance to Definition," in cineAction (Toronto), no. 7, December 1986) or even David Thomson.

Novak, unlike MM (whose all-but-useless-ass she could kick from one side of the frame to the other [Howard Hawks's films notwithstanding]) survived, and with a respectable body of work. The two Marilyn's (Baker & Novak) form the pivot point that delineates the old, studio-era goddess, received passively, dreamily by the spectator [all but the Dietrich of Sternberg] and the modern goddess, such as Vitti, etc and supremely Karina, who must be reckoned with in a new way - dare one say intellectually? When Scottie Ferguson (in VERTIGO) says "your hair..it can't matter to you" to the brunette Judy and, invariably, audiences laugh,... whether they understand it or not people are not laughing at the conventions of old Hollywood or the clumsiness of the dialogue but the horrifying spectacle of one human being's inability to recognize the essential need of another human being's need to be loved, to simply be recognized for themself - the naked horror that is the solipsism of male sexual privelege. This dilemma articulates itself time and time again in the roles that Novak was cast in. (Did she choose these roles consciously? Does it matter? These are the roles she played - the life she has led on-screen.) In PICNIC - "I'm just so tired of being told I'm pretty" - in BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE - the witch who learns to cry (read, to be human and who needs to be loved), THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, the supremely melancholy heroine of STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET [a masterpiece btw] who simply wants to be seen as a woman, not a "thing" [watch her pain as Kirk Douglas's son surprises her in the hall, saying "You're pretty"]. Kim Novak, in a manner unchallenged by any other actress of the studio era, articulates the soul-obliterating anxiety that can confront beautiful woman.

The cult of Marilyn, (one of the defining, and most lamentable, cults of the latter half of the 20th Century,) and its worship of the failure and the vanquishing of the female, leads inexorably to veneration of the cold, hollow, facsimile presented by Madonna (who along with Ronald Reagan and HIV combines to form the three great plagues of the '80s - the callous degradation and dismissal of basic human need). Novak, on screen, articulates the path - mistakenly, tragically - not taken, the lesson not learned, the need to strip away the illusions promulgated throughout the studio era; and to recognize the essential humanity of the female of the human species as something other than the receptacle for male fantasy.

And, totally, as a PS...Novak the worst actress of the studio era??? Really? REALLY?? Have you ever seen a movie with Merle Oberon, Loretta Young (MAN'S CASTLE notwithstanding - she was just a kid then, and who could refuse Borzage a human presence?) or Geraldine Page ferchrissakes? Not to mention the excremental Maria Schell (Astruc notwithstanding - pardon me, all rules have their exceptions)?