Word: fakeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...founders of the Toronto-based theatrical production company Livent, Inc.; by a federal grand jury; on 16 counts of criminal fraud and conspiracy; in New York City. The U.S. alleged that the partners, who produced such Broadway extravaganzas as Showboat and Ragtime, led an eight-year scheme to fake earnings or hide financial losses and siphon off some $4.6 million. In a separate civil complaint, the SEC charged the two with securities fraud. Drabinsky denied the charges and blamed the company's "new management" for the imbroglio...
...honor a Danish patriarch on his 60th birthday, the favored son rises to make a toast. His father, he says, sexually ravaged him and his twin sister, a recent suicide, when they were kids. This acerbic farce-melodrama, laureled at Cannes and by critics' groups, is directed in a fake-verite style that distracts a bit from the entertaining spectacle of the rich airing their bloody silk underwear in public. But it's still creepy fun to watch the upper class pretend a family isn't in tatters. When propriety meets outrage in a chateau, guess which one wins? Cognac...
...deLima and Richard Snee, the 40-member Revels Chorus, a merry company of Music Hall "artistes," the Pudding Lane Waits, the Dingley Dell Dancers, a parlor orchestra, the Cambridge Symphonic Brass Ensemble, The Pinewoods Morris Meri and the Rose Galliard Northwest Morris, the Pearly King and Queen, and a fake ferret. Do you know what that means? Again, the press release speaks through me. Basically there are a lot of people on stage, no one is particularly charming or memorable, they do ridiculous things for adults under uninspired direction and the audience laps it up. They sing competently, okay, even...
...topics. This is perhaps most evident in his treatment of Christmas, a holiday so over-wrought with symbolism that any statement can seem trite. O'Donnell couples Tad's cynicism and mocking attitude with an underlying sense of hope and faith in the holiday. Tad is aware of the fake forms Christmas can take on; upon walking into his brother and sister-in-law's showcase of a home, he observes that "the impersonally tasteful X'mas tree Bonny had set up was an X'mas tree, not a Christmas tree...
...remembers Brian Hughes? This 1920s box-manufacturing tycoon liked nothing better than to patrol the sidewalk outside Tiffany in New York City, an envelope tucked beneath his arm. When the moment seemed right, and pedestrian traffic sufficient, Hughes would let loose its contents, sending a spray of jewels (all fake) clattering across the sidewalk. The melee that ensued never ceased to please him. On rainy days, he would exit a restaurant and deliberately leave behind an expensive umbrella. When opened by a misappropriater, the umbrella released a shower of leaflets saying THIS UMBRELLA STOLEN FROM BRIAN G. HUGHES...