What Movies Have You Seen Lately?

Basically we have a confidence game perpetrated on a group of people that the writer sometimes has us sympathize with, and sometimes despise. They are too gullible, and it is their liberal leanings that help set that up. I certainly can say this guy would have never taken me in for a second, but you could see how and why the people portrayed would. For one thing, their real children are horrid ingrates, despicable privileged whites, while the confidence man, who is the age of these kids, portrays himself as the deserving opposite. But mostly it is just that they are well to do and I think we are to understand their whole environment is progressive people, including key associates, they don't dare offend; they themselves would be vulnerable if they dared be otherwise, making them vulnerable to this man. I bet this forced vulnerability is a perspective the writer knows quite well.

And it is a weird confidence game where the rules are to inflict emotional damage without doing anything like perpetrating financial fraud or stealing. The police can't do much. I guess this had a lot to do with getting me hooked.

I don't necessarily like a movie/play where homosexuality is much shown, and at one point it seemed like that which *was* shown was intended to please the gays watching, a bit of soft gay porn with rub-it-in-your-face. But I had to re-evaluate that. The confidence man (confidence kid?) after all is a reverse-Midas touch guy for everyone he interacts with, a gay who turns everything he touches to shit walking disaster. One character even commits suicide after being manipulated, and after having to face his evidently un-faced-till-then sexual reality. At the end a marriage falls apart [at least temporarily, we don't know] from the strain; the guy won't stop messing with them. This is not the way to make you sympathize with the gay lifestyle. It may be that the writer just knew somebody like this and 'told it like it was', except this man could never have been as good a confidence operator as shown, perhaps not a confidence man at all. That the confidence man is Af/A is critical too, just essential. Outside of the idea of 6 degrees of separation, the story seems to be very original.