![]() ![]() He’s received the best reviews of his career, and may well be on his way to an Oscar nomination. No, not even when it stars Adam Sandler, although the Sandler factor has clearly been the key to the film’s success. Simply put, this is not the kind of movie that makes $20 million and counting. It’s an extreme way to make a movie, and if “Uncut Gems” is a ride, it’s the sort of ride that John Cassavetes would have applauded. It all builds on techniques that the Safdies, in little-seen critical darlings like “Good Time,” have made their signature - but in “Uncut Gems,” it’s as if they’re kicking the electricity of vintage Scorsese up to the fourth power, creating their own Jewish-mook-from-Lawn-Guyland version of a shaky-cam psychodrama that’s all noise and street-smart jabber and half-baked scams coming apart at the seams. The Safdie brothers give you your bearings (just barely), yet they immerse us in a scruffy, charged-up, hyper-drive reality that’s just random enough to make it feel like you’re watching a live-wire documentary about a fictional character. “Uncut Gems,” by contrast, is a drama that offers a pure, undiluted hit of mad-dog momentum and pinwheeling existential ordinary-dude insanity, to the point that even a number of hardcore indie-film buffs say they find the movie a bit too relentless for comfort. And in its lithely expressive and true-note way, it always struck me as a highly accessible and commercial movie: a coming-of-age story, and a bold new kind of teenage girl’s story, expressing the outlook of a new-to-movies generation (you might say that Gerwig, in that film, did for millennials what Richard Linklater did for his own on-the-cusp-of-boomers-and-Gen-X era in “Dazed and Confused”). “Lady Bird” was my favorite film of 2017, and it’s on my list of the 10 Best Films of the Decade it’s a great movie. Two years ago, when Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” was released, also by A24, and made $49 million at the box office in the midst of gathering up a slew of highly deserved awards, I was pleased as punch but not really surprised. Yet lest we take the success of “Uncut Gems” for granted, let’s pause for just a moment to consider what an astonishment it is. But in the grand scheme of things, so what? ![]() That’s great news for A24, the film, and everyone involved in it. Last week, it collected the best five-day tally ever for A24, the distributor that has made its mark through its singular fusion of taste and edge. The presence of Sandler, along with a great deal of critical adoration, has put “Uncut Gems” on the radar, where it now occupies a very bright spot. In the midst of all this brain-boggling evolution, the fact that “ Uncut Gems,” a critically acclaimed independent feature by the Safdie brothers, starring Adam Sandler as a sleazy, flyweight hustler-spieler-chiseler-gambler who works in New York’s Diamond District (but spends most of his time hiding out in the chintzy casino of his mind), has succeeded in making $20 million at the box office may not seem like that big a deal. ![]() Movies and television increasingly flow into each other, and the streaming revolution is only just starting to wash away old categories. A couple of years ago, Netflix was an interloper now it’s poised to dominate the Academy Awards. The film business is now caught in such a swirling hurricane of change that few pretend to know which way is up. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |