I swear this will be the final 2019 movie I talk about! Blame Australia for releasing the best films months after the rest of the world.
A24 are renowned for being one of the few studios to consistently release amazing movies year after year. I’ll catch them as they become available to me, but as of now the two other films I have seen are The Farewell and Midsommar, both of which are very solid. But what about Uncut Gems, is it the best of the year?
No it’s not, but it’s very close.
I have seen Uncut Gems twice now so I feel pretty confident with my overall perspective on the movie. What I can say is it’s very unpredictable as we follow a loud mouthed fast talking jeweller, played by Adam Sandler, who is constantly pushing his luck. Most of the film has him on the phone talking to numerous clients and getting into little feuds for neglecting or forgetting about them because he’s more focused on using these people to make bigger bucks, which of course gets him into alot of trouble. So Howard Ratner is a pretty terrible person, but you strangely root for him because of the perfect casting of Sandler.
Adam Sandler always plays either a weird loser or a rich man baby and the Safdie brothers obviously know this because they played with that concept and showed that even Adam Sandler can be a great actor. This is not only limited to our lead as on a second viewing I really appreciated the supporting cast as well. The NBA player Kevin Garnett gave a convincing performance and Julia Fox gave a terrific debut performance.
I enjoyed the score which is quite reminiscent of the original Blade Runner. The cinematography is a little bit hit and miss because of the overabundance of close-ups. This was also in The Safdie brothers’ 2017 movie Good Time, which I found equally annoying, maybe even worse. It just feels weird and I never liked it, but the fast editing does salvage it. There are a few scenes of Howard talking to a group of people and it’s not like most movies where just one person speaks at a time, here about five people are constantly talking over each other. After a second viewing I already knew where the plot was going so the point of these scenes wasn’t such a blur.
In the end the movie does feel pretty plotless, like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it surprisingly builds up to a nicely satisfying ending. The only thing I hate about this movie is:
- I had to watch it on Netflix instead of in a cinema.
- This amazing movie was completely snubbed by the Oscars and our reward for that is Adam Sandler wants to make more terrible movies. Great!
9/10. An easy recommendation if you’re a fan of Adam Sandler or want a good thriller. I swear that’s the end of the 2019 movies as the next one will probably be that Harley Quinn girl power team movie. Until then I have been The Blog Complainer, signing out.
