Josh and Benny Safdie's UNCUT GEMS starring Adam Sandler as a jewelry dealer with a gambling habit

I will say I appreciate that we get zero sense -- none, whatsoever -- of who is he and where he comes from beyond the patently obvious. We get his wife's family in overload (excellently), absolutely nothing about what family he himself might have, much less extended family.

wages of sin are shown on screen is Gaspar Noe’s shtick of recent small theaters imo

everyone in this movie is a bit of a sinner but overall it’s about one man’s inability to just stop the one thing completely fucking his life. it’s frantic but overall, outside of whether basketball goes well, no one is in danger but Howard. the stakes aren’t necessarily small, but in the grand scheme of things only one person is subject to being ruined, bodily harm, etc. unless the bookies are going to go after his family — and that’s never seriously put on the table

it’s one addicted shmuck running a rolling grift

Best short performance: his teenage daughter.

“Ok so just stare at Adam like you stare at your actual dad anytime he says anything…perfect”

Sometimes it's all true to life.

that kitchen scene was incredibly real. think that it’s something i’ve walked through!

Did anybody else read Arno as small-time and in over his head?

release the Arno cut

not out in UK this yet is it... bg, how you see this

son, lemme tell u about this li’l thing called ‘piracy’

all the screeners I found were low res. I do not hate myself that much

It was brave of The Weeknd to appear as a coked-up asshole.

i do xp

I barely notice the difference these days, at least being half blind has some positives!

I like the guy's music, but I did not like this score that much. I thought it was kind of generically generic.

I thought KG did really well in this. Oh, and where has Bogosian been? Anyway, he was the heavy in Speed 2, right? Or the one on a train?

I don't know if this is a morality play, but it did seem to be about karma. It's so intense you almost forget it takes place over just a couple of days, so you get the feeling this may be just another weekend in the guy's life, and that he's gotten away with so much for so long just by hurtling forward. From the cancer scare to the conclusion, you know Howard knows it's just a matter of if, not when, which existentially may be why he does it. There might as well be an early scene where he has his fortune told, doesn't pay, and is cursed by a carny.

Oh, and where has Bogosian been? Anyway, he was the heavy in Speed 2, right? Or the one on a train?

Recurring guest on Succession as kinda-but-not-really-Bernie.

xpost to me, when, not if.

Well, maybe poorly phrased, but it felt like a 'wages of sin are death' tale in the end. Totally legit subject, and the whole idea about how you balance out attraction and repulsion to a character like Howard is part of the point, but I dunno, it was like I was watching the whole time going "This guy represents a general mindset that drives me fucking nuts so I'm not THAT invested."

― Ned Raggett, Monday, December 30, 2019 10:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i was investe in large part bc of how fucked up he was. like i kept waiting for the shoe to drop, theres no way he could just keep doubling down like this without some reprecus--ohhhhh ok there it is

my experience was not one of attraction/repulsion but of pure adrenaline

it was precisely because there was such an absence of a moralizing tone in the rest of the movie that the end truly surprised me. I was thinking it would end with him victorious and inevitably upping the stakes once more.

what a safdie film feels like pic.twitter.com/rTecIfzsia

— jara (@suspvria) December 27, 2019

lol yes

an unexpected comparison that occurred to me while watching this is aliens - a relentless forward motion piling disaster after disaster on the protagonist

Any significance to this taking place in 2012?

It was the year that the relevant basketball games occurred in im pretty sure would be the main reason

end of the world

^^^ gets it

the year Adam Sandler secretly died so they had to film the movie real fast

had to do with the stretch of games Garnett played + The Weeknd right as he was becoming big... and A LOT of other crazy bets that parallel the movie in a way, that indie wire interview where they talk about all the different arrangements and versions they went through since 2009 was really... something

aside from those specifics, it also formally means that the audience can be tipped to see it all with hindsight, whatever that amounts to.

from all the talk i was expecting this to be a lot more intense and a lot more funny, but i also watched mad max this week and i dunno i guess i might have missed some of the humor in all the noise of the dialogue. it's not quite a substitute for what i was expecting, but i did find it interesting how un-stagey and un-spectacle-ish the action and the acting continuously were, it seemed like that meant that howard was just in this closed-off world for nearly the entire film. i didn't connect much with it emotionally or viscerally, it actually seemed a little cerebral, maybe as a sensible response on my part to the chaos onscreen, like it's encouraging you to withdraw. i watched some of 'good time' the other day beforehand and i felt like there was supposed to be a noticeable affinity between the safdie brother's character in that and sandler's here, in their affect and the way they are closed in on themselves.

the ending didn't strike me as definitely moralistic or not, one way or the other. (and from the way it had been described i was expecting the concluding game to be WAY more of a peak than it was.) but i thought it was not just idle that the goons and bogosian were trapped in there, so that they were basically forced to take in howard's reactions to the game in light of his bet, with there being no point to offering any of the sort of resistance or pushback to his perpetual thing they had at any other time, since they were depicted as otherwise sensible, non-crazy people, and could see there was nothing to be done right then. which just put pressure on what they might do once something could be done, after howard forced them to endure his moment of agony and exultation. the most interesting thing about that being, you even see them starting to get caught up a bit at the end, don't you? and there's a cut to the son watching the game, with the mom nearby, and the whole sequence seems to mirror the early one where howard won't go upstairs, and then is sneaking a look at the game on his phone with the kid nearby. seems like that all might have to do with why make bogosian a relative, so that there can be a sharp contrast drawn between what family will put up with versus what others will, from a gambling addict.

that all seems like it makes the julia fox character the least obvious to read. rather, not her character but what effect her presence has on the meaning of the above. i notice that she's linked throughout to little rooms and confined spaces.

there’s an interesting feedback loop between Howard progressively shifting money and ramping up the stakes and the escalating anger and violence from the guy who is there to intimidate him. regardless of how the final bet goes, the violence only has one way left to escalate

Yeah, as soon as he flashes the gun and Sandman waves it off, too caught up in his own shit ...

There are definitely other moments where he starts fights he should not be fighting, iirc. Not a coincidence, maybe, that the movie more or less starts up his ass.

xpost yeah, that is what was great and frightening about the last 20 minutes. Arno really wasn't enjoying the violence, he was worn out by it all, he just wanted his money. Whereas his hired goons seemed to be reveling in it.

Howard kept defying them after every form of physical torture, and whereas Arno is thrilled that Howard won the bet and looked relieved, the thugs know that they can't let a loser jewelry salesman embarrass them like that without retaliation (plus i'm guessing their plan was to take Howard's winnings as soon as his mistress comes back).

Goddamn I can't wait to see this again

Actually on my way into the theatre to see again now lol

https://uproxx.com/movies/uncut-gems-scary-guy-interview-keith-williams-richards/

god this dude is so damn lethal. first acting gig!

like some career actors struggle with conveying menace without being too over the top about it, the whole scene in the vestibule, he has these shifting facial expressions, his eyes though consistently staring daggers.

like you can see his rage mixed with a little excitement that he is about to fuck Sandler's shit up when he naively opens the door

oops sorry just saw Simon posted it upthread. but yeah the point remains.

it's another one of the similarities with Altman, mixing real people with movie stars to create a hyperreal effect

The actor that played his girlfriend is a first-timer too, right? That's an important role, since I suppose it's among the closest anyone comes to sympathetic in this film. Kind of ironic that the tough guy and the sensitive girl that drive a lot of the action are both the newbies.

Julia Fox gave one of the year's best supporting performances.

yeah, she was fantastic. the fact that so many new actors / non-actors gave such killer performances in this movie makes me wonder how much of the hype surrounding Sandler's performance is actually deserved, lol (but he was great of course)

I think the role of human pinball required someone with a certain degree of charisma, at the least to overcome the character's off-putting nature, which in turn required a name/star, especially not one associated with being tough. But while I think Sandler was great, I do agree his performance is a tiny bit overrated, since we already knew he could act (Punchdrunk, Funny People, that one where he plays a chef -Spanglish?) and some other actor who could convincingly play a slimy schlub could probably have pulled it off just as easily. (Didn't they say they wanted Jonah Hill?) I will say, regardless, that Sandler was as perfectly *cast* as those non-actors (and actors). They should give a Best Casting Oscar.

supposedly the role was more or less written for Fox, then in development financiers wanted a "name" instead, but she ended up winning out against a large number of competitors

A large part of acting is being natural, and some first-timers embody that real well. Especially in a filmed medium where you get multiple takes.

But the Safdies probably helped by letting them be comfortable rather than being overbearing on set.

Also still LOLing at

"Jews and colon cancer, I mean what the fuck. I thought we were the Chosen people."

KG was fine in his scenes, certainly good enough, but what was truly uncanny was the seamless folding in of his "performance" in the game footage.

KG is one of the weirdest mfs to ever play the game, a god

josh otm re:casting. Sandler is great in this but i think some of the rapturous praise for his performance has been a little over the top, its not really an exceptional stretch for him to play an annoying perpetual adolescent who yells all the time

lol yeah he wasnt v out of character in those scenes. the one time i was like dang sandler is killing this was when he was hunkering down in his office after getting his nose broken and falling apart

It's more that this film plays to his strengths than anything.

But a lot of what he does well in this film is the sliminess of the character. He is very believable as that one family member you have, that neo-Willy Loman who prattles on about himself and all these big deals he's making, and they're mostly bullshit. The guy who will bum ten bucks off you and treat you like you're the asshole for asking for it back.