Check the back of the box and see if it has closed captions. I have several titles in my own collection that have no subtitles, but they do have closed captions (Cube springs to mind; it has subtitles, I believe, but not in English. For English, you have to turn on the captions). And I could swear that when I rented John Q, I turned them on once to figure out some indistinct dialogue.
Now, why DVD makers would include closed captions but no subtitles…you’d have to ask them.
Singing in the Rain wasn’t shot in widescreen, which didn’t become common in Hollywood releases until the later 50s-early 60s. The new 2-disc DVD (bought it, love it) was released in its original screen aspect ratio.
Kewl! Is the print cleaned up from the craptacular earlier DVD release, which looked like it was taken from a 2nd generation video-tape which had been recorded from a bad TV station?
Fenris
You will be amazed at the brightness and clarity of the Technicolor restoration. According to DVD File.com:
It also has two documentaries, a trivia track, a commentary track, trailer, and a series of scenes from old movies where the songs from SITR were first introduced. There’s also a feature on the first disc that discusses the evolution of film from silents to talkies, using clickable frames where you can see excerpts from the first talkies, like The Jazz Singer.
The usual practice in Hong Kong is to have everyone speak their own language - Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Russian, whatever. Then the whole thing gets re-dubbed into the appropriate language. Cantonese for local and SE Asia consumption, Mandarin for mainland China, etc. The dubbing is rather indifferently done and may not even be performed by the same actor. So even if you selected the Cantonese track to watch Jackie, the lips might still be out of synch, and it might not even be his own voice!
Just to nitpick, Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong and his native language is Cantonese. Mandarin he might have a problem with.
That’s the point, gobear. I know Jackie Chan speaks Cantonese. They’ll still dub Cantonese over the Cantonese. If Jackie isn’t available for the redubbing, they’ll use some other actor. Everyone knows that these things are dubbed over, anyway, so getting the voice exactly in synch with the lip movements isn’t a high priority.
BTW: regarding the Goodfellas DVD, it’s two-sided because it’s a lazy-ass straight port of the LaserDisc (which are almost always two-sided). Here’s hoping that Scorsese will do this film right.