Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

I must be some kinda sap. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner gets me every time. Sure it's a movie with some cheesy elements where the sentimentality is overt, yet my eyes start welling up about when Spencer Tracy's character, Matt, the liberal newspaper owner, disappoints his beautiful wife played by Katherine Hepburn with the news that he will not accept the pending marriage of his daughter to a black man. And Sidney Poitier is so moving throughout the movie, particularly when he explodes while talking to his father, explaining his place as a black man in modern society. He tells his father that he sees himself as a colored man while John, Poitier's character, sees himself as a man. With one short speech he gives a glimpse of what it might be like to be black in America and makes me think of how everyone's way of looking at being black in America has changed again, with Barack Obama's amazing and unlikely catapult to election win. Poitier plays an amazingly accomplished doctor who just came from Hawaii. Sound familiar? Adding to the emotion of the film, is knowing that this movie was Spencer Tracy's last (he died just 17 days after the completing the film). He expresses his love to his wife in the movie so movingly while we know that she, Katherine Hepburn, is his real-life love -- that really gets the tears going.

I wasn't going to watch a movie after a long weekend away from home and homework to do --- but Guess Who's Coming to Dinner sucked me again. And I've seen at least 4 times before. It's like a red-light food for me (A red-light food is a weight-watcher's term meaning a food that you know you won’t stop when you eat just one). Just five minutes into this movie I was binging.