{"id":46872,"date":"2020-06-01T12:54:14","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T16:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=46872"},"modified":"2020-06-01T12:54:22","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T16:54:22","slug":"uncut-gems-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2020\/06\/uncut-gems-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncut Gems – review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NOTE: I am reviewing this film because it had the highest domestic box office ($50 million) of any film in my cable provider\u2019s \u201cNew and Popular\u201d On Demand section that I have not yet reviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The masks of Michael Myers and Ghostface scared me to death as a kid. I would spend hours at night lying awake hoping their visages wouldn\u2019t appear before me. Today I regard \u201cHalloween\u201d and \u201cScream\u201d as two of the greatest horror movies of all time because I respect their ability to push my buttons so effectively. \u201cUncut Gems,\u201d while not a horror movie, is a film I respect for the same reasons. The film is a 135-minute anxiety attack that made me skittish for hours afterward, which is exactly the effect the movie wants to have, and oh how that goal has been accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Adam Sandler stars as Howard Ratner, a jeweler who comes into possession of an enormous, valuable, and possibly cursed black opal. He\u2019s already earmarked it for auction, but NBA star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) wants it, believing it to be good luck. Howard, who compulsively turns everything into a hustle, lets him borrow the opal to prove that it is indeed good luck. Of course, he then needs to get it back in time for the auction, and Garnett doesn\u2019t exactly make a priority of returning his good luck charm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The opal may be worth as much as $1 million, and it\u2019s just one source of stress in Howard\u2019s life. He also has to juggle a gambling addiction, an impending divorce with his wife (Idina Menzel, shame she doesn\u2019t get to do more here), a girlfriend (Julia Fox) who might be cheating on him with The Weeknd, a mountain of debt to his loan shark brother-in-law (Eric Bogosian), an automatic lock to his store that doesn\u2019t unlock properly, drama with employees, drama with customers, numerous connections who know he\u2019s untrustworthy, and a potential colon problem that serves as our introduction to the character. And that\u2019s before getting into spoilers. Nothing is easy for Howard, but then again he doesn\u2019t allow anything to be easy. He probably dismisses people as unambitious if they want to take a route that doesn\u2019t give them a heart attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At the center of it all is Sandler, giving the performance of a lifetime. If you automatically associate him with garbage comedies, then you\u2019ll\u2026 be right about the better part of his career, but he\u2019s capable of greatness too, and this movie proves it. He makes you sympathize with a detestable character, a little weasel who in another movie would be a sleazy side character that gets killed after one or two scenes, and you\u2019d probably just shrug. I was panicking just watching Sandler\u2019s performance, and he had to give it (and Josh and Benny Safdie had to direct it, big kudos to them). I\u2019m sure the Academy snubbed Sandler because of his history of movies like \u201cJack & Jill,\u201d but forget about those, this is Oscar-worthy work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The film\u2019s ending is more of an epilogue to the nerve-racking sequence that came before it. It\u2019s intense and important things happen, but what led up to it was so insane that even the final developments seem anticlimactic, perhaps because they are so inevitable, though even then there are a few surprises. Chalk it up to Howard\u2019s insistence on going through life wheeling and dealing and trying to keep his life from crashing for just one more minute. It\u2019s no way to live, but it\u2019s a heck of a story to follow. \u201cUncut Gems\u201d is a highly respectable form of torture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: A-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUncut Gems\u201d is available On Demand through online streaming and likely through your local cable provider. The film is rated R for pervasive strong language, violence, some sexual content, and brief drug use. Its running time is 135 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver NOTE: I am reviewing this film because it had the highest domestic box office ($50 million) of any film in my cable provider\u2019s \u201cNew and Popular\u201d On… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":46873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}