Saturday, February 01, 2020

Uncut Gems (2019)

After hearing so much about Adam Sandler's performance in it, I finally went to see Uncut Gems today. For some reason, I'd had the idea that this was a Netflix original production and had thought I might be able to watch it on that service, but I was wrong.

Sandler plays a jeweler with a gambling addiction. Just as he manages to pull himself out of one bad situation, he gets pulled right back in to another. This is a very high-energy, intense movie. There's one scene, early on, when Sandler is in his shop surrounded by chaos that almost brings to mind the madcap energy of the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. We follow Sandler through one scrape after another, as his debts mount and tension builds, until he comes up with one final scheme that might save the day.

I saw that Martin Scorsese was one of the executive producers. That makes sense. This felt like the kind of film Scorsese might have made back in the '70s.

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