How do they do it?

Last night Randy and I watched American Gangster. When I bought it two weeks ago I only had a vague idea what it was about, but the girl at the shop assured me it was a "good" copy, meaning not appearing to have been filmed inside a theater. With many movies in current release, the DVD's we can buy here are usually filmed from inside a theater. However, lately we've been getting increasingly more current theatrical releases on high quality DVD. How on earth do they do this. In one movie we watched recently, something like, "Copy for Academy Member" flashes on the screen a few times, so it is obvious the source of that movie. But American Gangster was a perfect DVD. Oh yeah, we liked most of it. I wonder what Antoine Fuqua would have done differently (the director attached to this movie before Ridley Scott), because sometimes the pace of the movie seemed uneven to me, but the look of the film (particularly any scene that had Josh Brolin) was fantastic. I also thought Cuba Gooding was underutilized, but he's one guy you either have too much or too little of in a movie, since Jerry McGuire. But one of the biggest problems I had was the way the blossoming friendship between the Prosecutor and the Gangster, which actually happened in real life, was played towards the end of the movie. I was cringing through all the grinning and the laughing over the music, wondering if they were going to slap each other high-fives or something. I mean, there has to be a way to show that their cooperation led to collaborating led to Roberts becoming his lawyer led to their becoming friends without it being cheesy.

Lest you think, though, that all is rosy in the land of the 5RMB DVD, several of the TV-show boxsets are missing the last episodes of their season. It happened to me with an HBO show that I like (Jeremy Piven loves me), and then again with FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Even Randy was starting to get into this show, and we don't even get to see how the season ends. I know what happens because I wiki-ed it, but we'd like to see how.

Updated 9:32 p.m.: Wouldn't you know there's a Catholic angle to the Frank Lucas story? Not a big one, but apparently he joined the Catholic Church when he was in prison in Elmira. Back in 2000, New York magazine ran a profile of Lucas, and a lot of the lines in the movie come from this article. About becoming Catholic

As far as Frank was concerned, his place in the hereafter was assured after he joined the Catholic Church while imprisoned at Elmira. "The priest there was getting crooks early parole, so I signed up," he says.