Word: legerdemain
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...guilt, the gigantic firm has agreed to pay a record $51 million to the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal body managing the assets of failed S&Ls. According to the RTC, Jones Day attorneys -- hired by Keating in 1986 -- were well aware that Keating was practicing financial and legal legerdemain to conceal Lincoln's serious problems. Yet Jones Day raised no alarm. The resulting failure cost taxpayers at least $2.5 billion and led to a prison term for Keating. Jones Day contends that Lincoln's demise was not caused by any advice it gave Keating...
Such was the moral of the Dutch Vanishing: curiosity killed the cat. It's a provocative premise, but it wants some legerdemain and a third act. Enter screenwriter Todd Graff (Used People). He takes the original's perplexing flashback structure, flattens it out and fattens it up, mostly by creating a new character, a waitress (Nancy Travis) who falls in love with Jeff. Graff changes the theme: now knowledge is just a cue for righteous revenge. The Dutch movie had no gun; in a Hollywood thriller there must be a gun, and it will go off. The original's ending...
...Hollywood comedy Barton Fink, Von Trier threw a snit fit, angrily claiming that his movie was bolder and better. He was right. Zentropa plunders the film vocabulary -- back projection and superimposition, black-and-white with shrieks of color -- to anchor its weirdness in classical technique. The legerdemain reminds you of the artificial nature of movies even as it draws you back to the era when pictures seduced the audience into a communal trance...
Even Arab experts consider that many of the financial practices of B.C.C.I., including its attempts to cover up its losses, may have been beyond the pale. But they view such legerdemain as a crude attempt to comply with Western regulators' demands for acceptable profit and loss statements. U.S. and British authorities would naturally scoff at that explanation. They contend that B.C.C.I. flourished as a criminal enterprise largely because it was carefully constructed to take advantage of such tax havens as Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, which provide virtually no regulation...
...Grifters is the gem -- small, cold, bright, brilliantly crafted. The movie traces the slug tracks of three con artists who play their deadliest tricks on one another. Roy Dillon (John Cusack) works the "short con," using loaded dice and legerdemain to skin cashiers and sailors. Roy's girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) is cheaper, perkier, ever ready to try the "long con" -- the elaborate scheme that takes suckers for big stakes. Roy's mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) is the con woman supreme. Abused and abusing since girlhood, she can stand up to her sadistic boss or pull off a motel-room...