Word: conning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...
...Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. That was so he could do the next film from the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, Anthony Minghella. Damon will play the title role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella's adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel about a charming con man driven to murder. Until recently, scripts sent to him had multiple sets of fingerprints on them; this one came straight from Tom Cruise's reject pile. "There's something so apple pie about him," says Minghella. "You know he was the best-looking kid in his school...
...failure so far to come to a clear position is due in part to the difficulty I have in following some of the arguments, both pro and con, to the conclusions at which they are directed. When the logic seems dubious but the conclusion is forcefully held, one can only wonder if the real basis for the conclusion is something other than the stated argument...
...credit, there is no old-fashioned, romantic heterosexual love in the original Midnight. Its most interesting and lovable characters are con men, hustlers, drag queens and witches. Berendt's narrator revels unrepentantly in Savannah's decadence and its culture of closeted scandal. He falls in love with the city's roguishness, its peculiar brand of dark but endearing degeneracy cloaked in gentility. In short, he is nothing like Cusack's dippy, sententious young idealist. The closest he comes to romance is a date with a drag queen. And he certainly bears no resemblance to the late Elvis Presley, whom Cusack...
Suffering from amnesia about her pre-Revolutionary childhood, she is raised near Petrograd as an orphan named Anya, rather than being brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the Fox flick barely mentions that neither Anastasia's parents nor siblings survived the Revolution. Running into a pair of con artists--who, in Fox's twist on history, are looking for an Anastasia impostor to claim the Romanov fortune--Anya leaves cold, miserable Russia and discovers her own identity as Anastasia as everything ends up happy in Paris...