The Ringer - Everything You Need to Know About ‘Uncut Gems’2020-05-27T05:30:00-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/207846402020-05-27T05:30:00-04:002020-05-27T05:30:00-04:00The ‘Uncut Gems’ Guide to Becoming a Millionaire Sports Bettor
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VpceOHH7gewCUlF5Ix8AyA0pS1o=/37x0:1104x800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66847989/UncutGemsWagers_A24_Getty_Ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A24/Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is how you win </p> <p id="AeGUpS">Howard Ratner makes a lot of bad bets in <em>Uncut Gems</em>. He bets that Kevin Garnett is willing to pay $200,000 for a rare black opal; he bets that his younger girlfriend will not, given the opportunity, hook up with The Weeknd; perhaps most incorrectly, he bets that hired thugs will react rationally to being locked inside of a bulletproof closet for the length of an NBA game. </p>
<p id="hTjPzS">However, the movie is best known for the series of increasingly desperate wagers Ratner places on the 2012 NBA playoffs in an attempt to claw out of mountains of debt. Adam Sandler’s character has become <a href="https://wompampsupport.azureedge.net/fetchimage?siteId=7575&v=2&jpgQuality=100&width=700&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Ffacebook%2F000%2F032%2F261%2Fthis.jpg">the face of degenerate sports gamblers everywhere</a>: <em>Uncut Gems</em> is not the first movie to feature sports gambling as a plot point, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first one that forces viewers to watch a character sweat out an over/under prop as its dramatic climax. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="meaUxF"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Full Genius—and Idiocy—of Adam Sandler Shines in ‘Uncut Gems’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/23/21035046/adam-sandler-uncut-gems-punch-drunk-love-oscar-chances"},{"title":"How Kevin Garnett Landed in ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="KyAYiw">The NBA action around which the story revolves is also uncut. Some movies create fictional sports leagues to match their narrative needs; the Safdie brothers, who wrote and directed this film, searched long and hard for a set of real NBA games to fit into the script. As they <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers">explained to <em>The Ringer’</em>s Alan Siegel</a>, their initial plan was to use a stretch of Knicks games from the 2010-11 season in which Amar’e Stoudemire scored at least 30 points in nine consecutive outings, but eventually decided to work with Kevin Garnett and home in on the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/12/17/21025172/boston-celtics-philadelphia-sixers-2012-playoffs-uncut-gems">2012 playoff series between the Celtics and 76ers</a>. The footage and details from the games are all unaltered—for example, Ratner mentions that the Sixers were a one-point underdog in Game 3, and they were <a href="https://www.oddsshark.com/nba/boston-philadelphia-odds-may-16-2012-435107"><em>actually one-point underdogs</em></a> in that game. </p>
<p id="V2WnaQ">With <em>Uncut Gems</em> streaming on Netflix (<a href="https://twitter.com/espn/status/1265262597982560256">and the anniversary of Game 7 of that Celtics-Sixers series!</a>), now feels like the perfect time not only to revisit the movie and that series, but also to break down Ratner’s sports betting tendencies. He’s shown as being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but it’s never specifically stated whether that debt came from gambling. (Ratner has plenty of other expensive habits.) I wouldn’t take his advice on marriage, business ownership, cash management, or basically anything else—but just how well did the guy know sports? Let’s examine each of his wagers to see what we can learn.</p>
<h3 id="RWVU2q">Bet No. 1: Wagering Without the Opal</h3>
<p id="NvaKId">Ratner’s first bets come just minutes into the movie, when he visits his bookie, played by Mike Francesa. It remains odd that the New York sports radio icon is Ratner’s bookie; plenty of famous nonactors make cameos in <em>Uncut Gems</em>, from Garnett to The Weeknd to “All Gold Everything” rapper Trinidad James, but almost all of them play themselves to demonstrate the strange world in which Ratner runs. So one might imagine that Ratner also knows Francesa, and that the movie implies that Francesa supplants any income from his very prominent radio show by accepting massive sports bets. Apparently not! Francesa actually plays a character named Gary. All hail the Gambling Pope! </p>
<p id="SNo4Pf">But I digress. Ratner comes to Gary with three bets:</p>
<ul>
<li id="Knx9t2">Over on Game 2 of the Lakers-Thunder series</li>
<li id="gYuheL">Under on Kobe Bryant’s point total</li>
<li id="4ZPCfX">Sixers +1 on Game 3 of the Philadelphia-Boston series</li>
</ul>
<p id="ostRrO">These bets all would have been disastrous. That Lakers-Thunder game was hideous—the final score was 77-75, miles away from hitting the over of 196 points. (The over <a href="https://www.oddsshark.com/nba/los-angeles-oklahoma-city-odds-may-21-2012-420446">hit on four of the five games in this series</a>, so maybe Ratner was on to something.) Ratner doesn’t specify what the over/under was on Kobe’s point total, but his reasoning is colossally flawed. He says he’s taking the under because Kobe is “passing more”; Bryant went 9-of-25 shooting with four assists. Kobe averaged 3.4 assists in that series, well below his career average of 4.7 assists per game. And I would’ve wanted a bigger spread to bet on the eighth-seeded Sixers against the Celtics, who ended up winning Game 3 by 16 points. </p>
<p id="EzMzj2">Before the game starts, however, Ratner changes his bets after meeting with Garnett and lending him the opal that puts many of the movie’s events into motion. So while Ratner doesn’t technically play these bets, we get a glimpse at what type of bettor he is without the inside knowledge that one team’s star player has a magical stone. It’s not pretty. </p>
<div id="aK0SF3"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1Qp1uwri_M?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<h3 id="BbtCWJ">Bet No. 2: The Dumbest Bet Mike Francesa Has Ever Heard</h3>
<p id="zCpWbk">After lending Garnett the opal, Howie sprints back to Gary and places a six-way parlay:</p>
<ul>
<li id="j6kijt">Celtics to win the opening tip</li>
<li id="GnPkU2">Celtics to win and cover a one-point spread</li>
<li id="z2zIk1">Celtics to win the first half</li>
<li id="mY0J2R">Kevin Garnett over points</li>
<li id="B7fMxi">Kevin Garnett over rebounds</li>
<li id="xj9rQ8">Kevin Garnett over blocks</li>
</ul>
<p id="YrNo6p">Ratner also places a lightning bet on the Celtics—win $1,000 for every point by which Boston beats the spread, but lose $1,000 for every point by which the Sixers do.</p>
<p id="UTdpW0">Francesa—I’m done calling him “Gary,” because come on, it’s Mike Francesa—is baffled, because Howard just bet <em>against</em> the Celtics before returning a few hours later to place a massive parlay banking on the Celtics to dominate in every way. Francesa derides the bet with his best line of the film, delivered with enough New York accent to momentarily transport me to the bagel place across the street from my grandma’s house: <em>THAT’S THUH DUMBEST FUCKIN’ BET I EVAH HOYD OF</em>. </p>
<p id="C8XAbE">I’m gonna agree with Mike here—it’s a dumb bet. Howie’s back is against the wall, with an increasingly large number of people chasing him for cash. And he just placed a six-way parlay, which means he needs <em>six separate prop bets to hit</em> for this to pay off.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="y5Wblf"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/1Q2movMrqEFjE6ro7DIklw" width="100%" height="232" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="jsOAst">And one of these bets is on the <em>OPENING TIP-OFF!</em> To be clear, I have never heard of anyone betting on the opening tip of a basketball game. Considering that NBA teams don’t really benefit from winning the opening tip—the team that loses gets the ball to start the second and third quarters, so you don’t even gain a possession by winning the tip—nobody puts significant effort into winning the opening jump. Bookies <em>could</em> set lines on opening tips—<a href="https://fansided.com/stats/jump-ball-statistics-1998-present/">the stats are out there!</a>—but it seems like a foolish thing on which to gamble large amounts of money. According to that link, KG won 52.2 percent of jump balls in his career, essentially making it a 50-50 prop. And remember, Ratner would lose everything if it misses.</p>
<p id="8lSDqs">Luckily for him, things go well. Garnett won the tip and dominated the action. Boston led Game 3 by 11 points at halftime, and took a 27-point lead late before a meaningless Philly run cut the final margin to 16. That means Boston won both team-related legs of the parlay, and netted Howie a good sum on the lightning bet. Plus, Garnett led all players with 27 points and 13 rebounds. We don’t know exactly what the over/unders on the prop bets were, but Howard seems confident that Garnett cleared the points and rebounds portions of the bet.</p>
<p id="HXgs3U">Howard watches the game and celebrates his big score, sexting up a storm with his girlfriend and preparing for life as a man free of debt. He briefly mentions that he won $600,000 on his $40,000 bet, which sounds about right for a six-way parlay. Unfortunately, Ratner soon discovers that his brother-in-law/loan shark Arno met with Francesa to cancel the bet and ensure that $40,000 wasn’t lost. Howie’s payday is ruined.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="uwSTjh"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Inside the Diamond District, the Grimy, Shiny Setting of ‘Uncut Gems’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city"},{"title":"The Exit Survey for ‘Uncut Gems,’ Now Streaming on Netflix","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/16/21024220/uncut-gems-exit-survey"},{"title":"What Happened in the Celtics-Sixers Series Featured in ‘Uncut Gems’?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/12/17/21025172/boston-celtics-philadelphia-sixers-2012-playoffs-uncut-gems"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="yQAAzs">However, Arno actually did Ratner a favor. Howie apparently must have gotten so wrapped up in the Celtics’ winning the tip, leading at halftime, and winning the game while Garnett hit the overs on points and rebounds that he forgot that he also placed a bet on Garnett hitting the over on blocked shots. Garnett <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/pbp/201205160PHI.html">had no blocks in Game 3</a>, making it impossible for him to hit the over and killing the whole parlay. The movie doesn’t mention KG’s lack of blocks, simply taking Howard at his word that he would’ve won the bet. Given the Safdies’ interest in the basketball accuracy of the film, I think it’s safe to assume that Ratner would have lost the bet canonically. </p>
<p id="2pfFKS">This demonstrates why Howie’s bet was <em>The Dumbest Fuckin’ Bet Mike Francesa Has Evah Hoyd</em>: If Howard had simply bet on every leg of his parlay individually, he would have won five of six bets and gone up tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, he made a parlay dependent on Garnett dominating in every possible statistical category, and should have lost. </p>
<h3 id="TmHl3z">Bet No. 3: Howie’s Big Score</h3>
<p id="xWVuGX">Garnett buys into the opal’s powers, especially after returning it to Howard and <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/201205180PHI.html">going 3-of-12 from the field for nine points</a> in Game 4 of the series. So he agrees to buy the opal directly from Ratner for $175,000 ahead of Game 7. Desperate to climb out of his financial hole, Howard takes the cash and hands it through a window to his girlfriend Julia to prevent the goons in his waiting room from snatching it away. Julia then flies via helicopter to the sportsbook at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut to bet on Game 7. (The Mohegan Sun doesn’t actually have a sportsbook, since sports gambling is illegal in Connecticut; apologies to any poor souls who watched <em>Uncut Gems</em> and headed to the middle of Connecticut in hopes of throwing down $50 on an NBA game.) </p>
<p id="4AMdEv">This is the climactic scene of the movie. If Howie wins, he’s debt-free; if he loses, it seems like gun-toting thugs in his office might kill him, or at the very least take everything he owns. With everything at stake, Howie is slightly more risk-averse with a three-way parlay:</p>
<ul>
<li id="aT59Mx">Celtics to win the opening tip (OK, he’s not <em>that</em> risk-averse)</li>
<li id="QTTrvi">Celtics to win straight up</li>
<li id="Sn2lCe">Kevin Garnett to have more than 26 combined points and rebounds</li>
</ul>
<p id="IcT6vL">By placing a combined points-rebounds bet, Howard eliminates the danger of losing $175,000 because KG failed to record any blocks despite having an otherwise great game. And as Howard tells Garnett personally, 26 is way too low a line for KG’s combined points and rebounds. Garnett would have hit the over in six of the seven games in that Celtics-Sixers series, and 14 of the Celtics’ 20 postseason games in 2012. </p>
<p id="HZo52J">Plus, betting on the experienced Celtics to win Game 7 at home was smart—like I said earlier, the Sixers were the no. 8 seed, and made it to that matchup largely because Bulls MVP Derrick Rose suffered a cataclysmic injury against Philly in the first round. The bet hits: Garnett tallied 18 points and 13 rebounds, well above the 26 combined points and rebounds required to hit the over, and the Celtics won Game 7, 85-75. </p>
<p id="xWX9nq">The Mohegan Sun hands Julia some duffel bags full of money—about $1.2 million, although hey, it’s possible the casino subtracted a few hundred for the suitcases. She heads back to New York to share the winnings with her Howard.</p>
<p id="32Nsga">Although his pre-opal bets were trash, and his six-leg parlay showed rash overconfidence, Ratner displayed his sports-betting savvy with his final wager. He took advantage of a mispriced line on a specific prop (as well as some inside information) and parlayed it with a conservative moneyline bet to cash out big time. And that’s the last bet of the movie! Howie wins! What a happy ending to an exceedingly stressful film! </p>
<p id="IuCTI7">So what can we learn from Howie’s progression from an unsuccessful sports gambler into a gambling-related millionaire?</p>
<ul>
<li id="tFx8dc">Don’t get overaggressive with parlays. Even if you know almost everything there is to know about a game, you still might lose. Besides, the desperate nature of your parlays may convince your debt collectors to reach out to Mike Francesa and cancel your bets.</li>
<li id="QBibLN">Sportsbooks should start taking bets on the opening tip. Clearly, Howie identified something telling about KG’s jump-ball matchups with ground-bound Sixers big man Spencer Hawes, going 2-for-2 on those gambles.</li>
<li id="qnAqCp">It is very helpful to know whether a basketball player playing a big role in an important NBA game has recently come into possession of a magic opal, through which one can see the entire universe. </li>
</ul>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ds7stX">Follow these rules and your sports betting experience is guaranteed to turn out great—just like it does for Howie. This is how <em>you </em>win! </p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/5/27/21270986/uncut-gems-gambling-guide-adam-sandler-howard-ratnerRodger Sherman2019-12-26T08:11:35-05:002019-12-26T08:11:35-05:00The Genius of ‘Uncut Gems.’ Plus: the Safdie Brothers!
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AKIEbVlQZ1PnxUSnBoD4Hxqhrls=/320x0:1280x720/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65969400/uncut_gems_netflix_release_schedule.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A24</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sean shares the 12 highly specific things he loves (with spoilers!) about the New York brothers’ new film</p> <p id="feau1T"><em>Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This was originally published during </em>Uncut Gems<em>’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as it begins streaming on Netflix.</em></p>
<div id="AP3927"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/1Q2movMrqEFjE6ro7DIklw" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="vUtYiM"><br><a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Q2movMrqEFjE6ro7DIklw?si=Am9PsNCIQo-aVcwOhQ61lQ">This is how the Safdies win.</a> Sean shares the 12 highly specific things he loves (with spoilers!) about the New York brothers’ new film (0:55). Then, Josh and Benny Safdie join Sean to talk about the long road to its creation (16:04).</p>
<p id="NNAKOb"><strong>Subscribe:</strong> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6mTel3azvnK8isLs4VujvF?si=-jINGmeZR_OLiG7y-KbiIg">Spotify</a> / <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-big-picture/id1439252196?mt=2">Apple Podcasts</a> / <a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-big-picture">Art19</a> / <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/the-big-picture-2">Stitcher</a> / <a href="https://rss.art19.com/the-big-picture">RSS</a></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2019/12/26/21035657/genius-of-uncut-gems-plus-safdie-brothersSean Fennessey2019-12-23T09:43:06-05:002019-12-23T09:43:06-05:00The Full Genius—and Idiocy—of Adam Sandler Shines in ‘Uncut Gems’
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/t23zrOFnev-IUIWqqsqO-1DTNts=/0x0:1067x800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65959095/PrestigeSandler_Getty_A24_Ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images/A24/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Does the Sandman deserve an Oscar for his turn as Howard Ratner in the Safdie brothers’ new film?</p> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Spoiler warning" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pDKv4_m7A233BOwrxpbciIp1c2k=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19021663/spoiler_warning_v2.2.jpg">
</figure>
<p id="GfFjSE">“Look in my eyes,” mews inveterate gambler, liar, philanderer, and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city">NYC Diamond District</a> hustler Howard Ratner to his exasperated wife, Dinah. “They’ll tell you what I’m feeling.” He is played by Adam Sandler, a.k.a. the guy who sang <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eB4PkCo4Lo">“The Hanukkah Song”</a>; she is played by Idina Menzel, a.k.a. the lady who sang <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVVTZgwYwVo">“Let It Go.”</a> In the midst of a tense Passover seder, the two are struggling through a rare quiet moment within Josh and Benny Safdie’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/16/21024220/uncut-gems-exit-survey">panic-attack-inducing</a> new thriller <em>Uncut Gems</em>. Reluctantly, she sizes him up, and considers this pathetic attempt to salvage their marriage despite all his aforementioned hustling/gambling/philandering, and smothers a disgusted giggle as she renders her verdict: “Your face—it’s so stupid.” </p>
<p id="3a7Tj4">There is just no way that nobody has told Adam Sandler that, verbatim, in a movie before. Ditto “I think you are the most annoying person on the planet,” which is another of Dinah’s remarks. He’s made, like, <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/best-adam-sandler-movies-ranked.html">41 films and counting</a>, and he played an objectively annoying person in the vast majority of them, and moreover at least half of those flicks are, as a whole, objectively stupid. And yet only here, only now, does someone (namely, the lady who sang <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBhmFzH2Uc">“Show Yourself”</a>) finally nail the Sandman’s essence, the genius and the idiocy, the <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/12/adam-sandler-is-hot-in-uncut-gems-movie.html">hopeless attraction</a> and the total repulsion. <em>Uncut Gems</em>, for both good and (for him, anyway) profound ill, gives Adam Sandler what he deserves. The question now is whether he also deserves an Oscar. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="NNlTmQ"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The ‘Uncut Gems’ Exit Survey","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/16/21024220/uncut-gems-exit-survey"},{"title":"New York State of Mind: The Hallucinatory World of ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/23/21034349/safdie-brothers-mike-francesa-new-york-city"},{"title":"How Kevin Garnett Landed in ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="SpFaS4">We’ve done this before; we started doing this with Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 rage comedy <em>Punch-Drunk Love </em>and never stopped. The notion that Adam Sandler <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2FCCZ50VU">screaming at people who scream back at him</a> for 90 minutes might somehow register as award-worthy and Prestigious had not yet occurred to most people. But there he was, the shameless and deified (and screaming) star of <em>Billy Madison</em> and <em>The Waterboy</em>, now cosigned by one of the most critically acclaimed directors on the planet and engaging in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5vkuRteNs">hilariously disturbing pillow talk</a> with Emily Watson. (“I wanna chew your face off,” she tells him. “I wanna scoop out your eyes, and I wanna eat them, and chew on them, and suck on them.”) </p>
<p id="9ZPCE0">The critical verdict on Sandler for a generation has been He’s Great When He Wants To Be: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4X42D5Gg7o">soulfully self-loathing</a> in 2009’s <em>Funny People</em>, tenderly flustered in 2017’s <em>The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)</em>. I melt every time Sandler and Grace Van Patten do <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AIMi5sB2jY">their twee father-daughter piano duet</a> in that one. “You got my hands, you got my toes,” he sings; “But luckily, I got Mommy’s nose,” she sings back. </p>
<p id="6WTKhH">That’s pretty close to “Your face—it’s so stupid,” but not quite close enough. <em>We put Adam Sandler in a good movie for a change </em>no longer suffices as an event, as a compelling argument, as the blueprint for a true contender. But <em>Uncut Gems </em>is the film that’s truly clicking, that got the reluctant superstar to do <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/magazine/adam-sandler-movies-uncut-gems.html">a lengthy magazine interview</a> for the first time in 200 years, that compelled Sandler to threaten, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-sandler-threatened-to-make-bad-movie-if-he-doesnt-win-oscar-uncut-gems-2019-12">on the air with Howard Stern</a>, to make another movie “that is so bad on purpose just to make you all pay” if he doesn’t get a gold statue for this one. (He didn’t get a Golden Globes nomination, it’s true, but at this point <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/9/21002724/golden-globes-nominations-2020-winners-losers-joker-game-of-thrones">that might be a compliment.</a>)</p>
<p id="jSPzlb">So why now, why this? What makes <em>Uncut Gems </em>special is that it’s a good-to-great Adam Sandler movie that after 40-odd tries best replicates the experience of living in his head, of not so much feeling his hot breath in our faces as <em>actually breathing it </em>in the faces of others. Everyone in this movie is screaming at everyone else all the time, bathed in sickly neo-noir light and drenched in flop sweat and seized by constant fearsome spasms of cartoonish rage. A very vivid and specific and almost comforting sort of cartoonish rage. The sort that can come from—or be inspired by—only one man. It is Peak Adam Sandler in terms of both (arguably) quality and (inarguably) the experience of being around, or just plain <em>being</em>, Adam Sandler. It is all the Him anyone, him included, can handle. </p>
<div id="vd9xkx"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vTfJp2Ts9X8?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="sjZlV8">As I am <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/6/11/17450110/hereditary-wikipedia-horror-movie-review">constitutionally averse</a> to horror, terror, bleakness, or cinematic anxiety in general, I approached <em>Uncut Gems </em>with my usual tremulous wimpiness. But the stress of this movie, to my mind, is not the too-empathetic <em>I can’t bear to see anything bad happen to him </em>variety, as indeed there is no movie at all if bad things (punched in nose; dumped naked into own car trunk; roughed up by the Weeknd’s entourage) aren’t happening to him constantly. What Sandler instead achieves, with Howard, is that he makes you root for him without, for a second, feeling sorry for him or even really liking him. He is coarse, and cruel, and gross. (“Holy shit, I’m gonna cum,” he announces upon first laying hands on the titular gems.) He is also helplessly self-destructive, and unfaithful in multiple respects, and loathsome even in his precious few quieter moments, and yet the more loathsome the more relatable he becomes. (The sight of him petulantly watching an NBA playoff game on his phone while putting his young son to bed wounded me deeply by resembling me slightly.)</p>
<p id="XUqRL1">The stress, then, is in the pure cacophony. A half-dozen tough guys mashed into a car and shouting at one another about resurfaced swimming pools. A lengthy jewelry-store dispute punctuated (but not quite interrupted) by a call from Howard’s doctor about his recent colonoscopy. An excruciatingly lengthy battle with that jewelry store’s faulty automatic door. It’s just <em>chaos</em>: grating, bewildering, nauseating, endless chaos. It is the apocalyptic sound of every cinematic Adam Sandler antihero ranting at one another simultaneously, Happy and Billy and Nicky and Barry and Sandy all struggling to burn the same oxygen. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="qekGpD"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/50LLEAiZApyPnTaQyF3tDV" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="1c1XnT">This can also be, of course, very, very funny: Sandler has especially great rapport with both <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/style/julia-fox-uncut-gems.html">Julia Fox</a> (as Julia, his jewelry-store employee and mistress) and, bizarrely but transcendentally, Kevin Garnett (as a spectacular version of himself). With Julia, his best moments tend to be either phenomenally loud (a post-Weeknd-brawl screaming match outside a nightclub) or relatively quiet. (As a peace offering, she gets his name tattooed on her ass, to which Howard, who has previously been described as a “fucking crazy-ass Jew,” responds, “You can’t get buried with me now.”) But Howard’s late-movie pep talk with Kevin Garnett, just before an extended climax involving the most stressful reairing of a real-life NBA playoff game ever committed to film, might be the highlight of <em>Uncut Gems</em> overall, if not Sandler’s whole career: He invests the words <em>Let’s fuckin’ bet on this </em>with more motivational gravitas than the locker-room speeches in <em>Hoosiers</em>, <em>Miracle</em>, <em>Friday Night Lights</em>, <em>Rudy, Remember the Titans</em>, and (in spirit) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7vtWB4owdE"><em>Animal House</em></a><em> </em>combined.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="g3wHoz"><em>Uncut Gems</em> is the grinding, electrifying sound of Adam Sandler hitting yet another gear, sure, but it’s also the first time since his <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2019/12/10/21009802/happy-gilmore-with-bill-simmons-sean-fennessey-and-the-safdie-brothers">gleefully knuckleheaded ’90s glory days</a> that an Adam Sandler movie has successfully hit his gear and stayed in it. Blockbuster comedians have generally chased Oscar glory by Getting Serious, by tamping down their wanton charisma in the service of something more dignified. (Think <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/3/16038698/ecstasy-anxiety-of-jim-carrey-im-dying-up-here-1b7809b7c10c">Jim Carrey</a>’s own late-’90s attempt at respectability via <em>Man on the Moon </em>and <em>The Truman Show</em>.) But the Safdie brothers may have finally unlocked the Sandman’s true potential by amping up the righteous fury and man-child hedonism until it’s just too terrifying to be funny anymore but still manages to be funny anyway. The movie looks him in the eyes without winking, without even blinking. Sandler might very well deserve an Oscar for dragging us through it. Then again, we might all deserve some sort of award for surviving it.</p>
<aside id="AP754B"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/23/21035046/adam-sandler-uncut-gems-punch-drunk-love-oscar-chancesRob Harvilla2019-12-23T06:30:00-05:002019-12-23T06:30:00-05:00New York State of Mind: The Hallucinatory World of ‘Uncut Gems’
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2bKYY-3zOzYiEBbHXfCQVQ5jhu4=/300x0:1200x675/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65958395/katie_baker_getty_A24_ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images/A24/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How the Safdie brothers re-created—and embellished—a very specific slice of midtown, as told by their collaborators, stars, and friends </p> <p id="qIvRYu"><em>Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This story was originally published during </em>Uncut Gems<em>’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as the film begins streaming on Netflix.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="UlO6vq">
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="imTsGa">Jonathan Aranbayev was, in his words, just goofing around when the three ladies saw him, a 14-year-old kid hanging out on 47th Street in midtown Manhattan last summer in front of his family’s precious gems business, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/aviannejewelers/?hl=en">Avianne & Co</a>. “Then I walk in the store,” he says, “and these ladies walk in, and they ask where am I.” His cousin found him in the back and delivered strange news.</p>
<p id="N80AwE">“He’s like, Jonny, these three ladies, they want to see you, they want to talk to you, they want to film you,” Arabayev says. His uncle, standing nearby, was skeptical. It wasn’t until later, after the casting scouts had left the building and his father had gotten a phone call from a major motion picture producer, that “we started understanding,” Arabayev says. “Like, we started realizing that this is real, you know?”</p>
<p id="XZHjKs">The teenager is speaking by phone from Los Angeles. He has never been to California before now; the farthest west he’s ever traveled has been Florida, he thinks. He’s in town with his family to attend the premiere of <em>Uncut Gems</em>, in which he was cast as Eddie, the earnest oldest son of a slimy, toothy diamond dealer named Howard Ratner, who is played by Adam Sandler with award-buzzy abandon. It is Aranbayev’s first IMDb credit. He turns 16 on December 24, one day before the film’s national Christmas release. His role is limited, though not insignificant; in a movie full of inventive and at times amusing forms of dread, a scene in which Eddie has to pee is both comedic and crushing. His character is obsessed with basketball in the movie, but “I’m more of a gamer,” he says. Describing how it all happened, he tries to remember some film industry jargon.</p>
<p id="wW1viy">“First,” Aranbayev says, “I had to go to the—I forget what it’s called. To see if they want me to be in the movie? You know, like, you show up, you do what you gotta do?” He’s talking about the audition, for which he didn’t really prepare. “I didn’t really know what I was going into,” he says. “So I just did it. My dad’s like, just go in and do your thing. So I just did it.” On his Instagram account, Aranbayev <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BzNzsSBAY_g/">posted a short clip</a> of himself successfully doing his thing at the audition, magnetic in a Billionaire Boys Club jersey.</p>
<p id="Y2rcFo">For the past decade, writers-directors-brothers Josh and Benny Safdie dreamed of (and tried) making what they would often refer to in interviews as “the diamond district movie,” a passion project that, while not directly autobiographical, was highly personal. Their father, Alberto, had worked for one of midtown’s jewelmonger kingpins for years during the Safdies’ childhood. His stories of the eccentrics he met and the places he wound up were family lore. Over the years the Safdies pursued and made other projects, like a basketball documentary <a href="https://filmmakermagazine.com/82772-hoop-dreams-josh-and-benny-safdie-on-lenny-cooke/">about Lenny Cooke</a> and a crime caper called <em>Good Time</em> starring <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/8/10/16124858/robert-pattinson-good-time">Robert Pattinson After Dark</a>, but the diamond district always loomed. They did research and developed contacts up and down 47th Street, refining their understanding of the people and the place, obsessing over authenticity and access. And so, when <em>Uncut Gems</em> was finally getting made, who better to play Howard’s boy than an actual child of the biz?</p>
<p id="Gx4DfA">Aranbayev is one of many first-time actors—don’t call them nonactors—with vital, vivid roles in <em>Uncut Gems</em>, many of them playing characters but all of them selected to just be themselves. The lines between person and performance aren’t so much blurred in the movie as they are woven. The result is hyperrealistic and surreal, warping one’s perspective, like focusing too long on a word or staring too hard into a diamond. With an exacting but still iterative vision, the Safdie brothers built the glittering, grungy onscreen world of New York not only by collaborating with their longest-time creative partners, but also by seeking involvement and input from outside insiders, like <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers">basketball star Kevin Garnett, who plays Kevin Garnett</a>, or performing artist The Weeknd, who also appears as a next-big-thing vintage of himself.</p>
<p id="Y4P08e">Or Aranbayev, as Eddie. “He just had that feeling of what Howard’s son would be like,” says Jennifer Venditti, a New York–based <em>Uncut Gems</em> casting director, “because he is the son of someone like Howard.” She interrupts herself, doubling back, and leaving the hallucinatory world of <em>Uncut Gems</em> for the real one. “I mean, his father is not <em>like</em> Howard!”</p>
<div id="AlRjVM"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1Qp1uwri_M?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="QOFLt0"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="jNyHF3">You don’t want to be <em>like</em> Howard Ratner, an impulsive schemer and compulsive gambler who has a wife and kids out on Long Island and an employee-girlfriend in the city and a ledger that just never balances but most definitely will by tomorrow, he swears. Sandler-as-Howard wears garish Gucci with the tags still dangling; he hawks mega-bedazzled Furbies; he gets stuffed into trunks and pushed into fountains; he connects with his son almost exclusively via FaceTime small talk about the NBA. His facial hair: yikes. His face: publicly slapped by henchmen as fair warning. His wife, played by ice-cold Idina Menzel of Broadway and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVJZ_LVDIw">Disney</a> fame: square-jawed, hates him. His latest venture: smuggling into his claustrophobic jewelry bunker a rare, raw chunk of trippy black opal, a rock that is never far from his mind even as everything around it gets far out of hand. (In this way, the black opal kind of is to Howard what <em>Uncut Gems</em> was to the Safdies for years: an ongoing chase.)</p>
<p id="clPYXj">And yet there are a whole lot of people out there, particularly in the tri-state area, who are like Howard whether they like it or not. He is extreme, but he’s still a type: successful yet insolvent, blustering and bluffing, located in midtown, unacquainted with shame. As the Safdie brothers explained it last year to longtime (and <a href="https://www.nj.com/sports/2019/12/wfans-mike-francesas-retirement-will-have-him-back-on-the-air-every-weekday-numbah-ones-new-schedule-will-please-mongo-nation.html">recently semi-re-retired</a>) sports talk radio host Mike Francesa, one way to think about Howard is that he’s not all that dissimilar to some of the tightly wound guys who dial in to WFAN on the regular.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="06iG7i"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="hWFNhW">This resonated with Francesa, another of the movie’s first-time actors, who plays a restaurateur-bookie named Gary. Speaking by phone during a commute from the WFAN studios in Manhattan to his home on Long Island, Francesa remembers it being the only macro note he was given by directors the day he filmed his two scenes with Sandler. “We want your tone when you talk to a caller and you’re mad at them,” Francesa says. “I just knew what tone to give them. And although they make you do a million takes, because they change camera angles and they do all different stuff, I just was able to give them what they wanted right away, and they were very happy with it.”</p>
<p id="3r2IZH">The shoot took place over 14 hours at an Upper East Side restaurant called Nino’s, not far from where <em>Uncut Gems</em> location manager Samson Jacobson used to live. The place appealed to filmmakers in part because of its colorful owner, Nino, and his choice of decor. “There is this insane mural that he has up there that has, like, every conservative type of hero painted on, and every Italian hero as well,” says Jacobson, whom the Safdies described as “a total G” <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/11/16131062/big-picture-safdie-brothers-good-time-robert-pattinson">on the <em>Big Picture</em> podcast in 2017</a>. “It’s overwhelming and overloading. There’s a Giuliani. I think Bo Dietl’s in there! When we saw the painting we were all just kind of looking at each other like, do you see what’s on the wall right now?”</p>
<p id="RrCBeI"><em>Uncut Gems</em> is the Safdies’ version of that mural, in many ways, with Garnett and Menzel and The Weeknd and Sandler and Francesa and Eric Bogosian and Tilda Swinton’s disembodied voice and Lakeith Stanfield all painted into the same unsettling, entrancing picture. “Our whole thing is that life is made up of lots of different characters,” says Venditti, who has now cast three films with the Safdies. “And there’s an alchemy in mixing a professional actor with someone that maybe is professional in the world that you’re depicting.”</p>
<p id="RYkgo3">Francesa had theoretically appeared on big and small screens before, though only with his voice. In a 2003 John Leguizamo film called <em>Undefeated</em>, he can be heard casting aspersions over the airwaves on Leguizamo’s character, a boxer. The old show <em>Mike and the Mad Dog</em> was playing in the background during one high-profile hit on <em>The Sopranos</em>. It was exactly that ambient local ubiquity that drew in the Safdie brothers, who are huge sports fans. (Even Nino’s owner, Nino Selimaj, says that while most of Sandler’s famous mid-’90s comedies existed outside his frame of reference—“in the restaurant business,” he says, “there is no time”—as a Yankees fan he was for sure familiar with the most famous voice on WFAN.)</p>
<p id="QLh8ao">Over lunch, Francesa remembers, the Safdie brothers told him “the typical story” of their familiarity with his oeuvre. “We started to listen to you in the back of our parents’ car,” Francesa says, imitating how the story typically goes. “We’ve been fans forever. Blah blah blah. Grew up listening to you. Your voice is in our heads.” The Safdies wanted that voice to be in everyone else’s head, too.</p>
<p id="3wkTDK"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="cdRofm">Ronald Bronstein, the Safdies’ longtime creative partner, has somehow never seen <em>Happy Gilmore</em>, nor is he any kind of sports fan. (The appreciation he has for Francesa exists more on a purely aesthetic and, as he puts it, “psychopathological level.”) Even so, Bronstein is a guy so essential to the franchise that Jacobson describes him as “the third leg of the tripod.” He wrote <em>Uncut Gems </em>with Josh Safdie, edited the film with Benny Safdie, and is speaking by phone from Los Angeles, on the morning of a red carpet premiere, about the way he mines small hostilities for inspiration back home in New York.</p>
<p id="DqTHe2">“Like, if I’m on the train,” Bronstein says, “I will zero in on the person closest to me who I imagine to be most likely to have a problem with me. And then I will spend the rest of the ride just sort of mapping out the dialogue for a confrontation that only exists in my own mind. And then, you know, I’ll in turn take that dialogue and then just funnel it into my work. So that’s, like, that’s my method of writing.” A few minutes later, reiterating how this all goes down, he gives a more detailed, though still imaginary, example that involves reading Proust and leveling accusations of halitosis. This image—a preemptively aggrieved genius muttering, “You lookin’ at me?” to himself—likely resonates with anyone who has been to New York City and most specifically to midtown Manhattan.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="2uU3Rp"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Inside the Diamond District, the Grimy, Shiny Setting of ‘Uncut Gems’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city"},{"title":"How Kevin Garnett Landed in ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers"},{"title":"The 2012 Celtics-Sixers Playoff Series Was a Rock Fight Before It Was Fodder for ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/12/17/21025172/boston-celtics-philadelphia-sixers-2012-playoffs-uncut-gems"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="zASYN3">A nexus of global commerce, a punch line, a big mood, midtown is both an entry point to nearby outsiders—for the first half of my own life, I experienced New York City as a place entirely bordered by the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, the theaters of Times Square, and the escalators rising up from the NJ Transit level of Penn Station and into Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game—and a no-man’s-land for locals to pass through, again and again, when they’re heading somewhere else in a cab. On every block in midtown, at all times, the steam rises through the subway grates and mixes with the steam rising from the roasted nut and hot dog carts, creating an olfactory Voltron of hot air. It is a sprawling place, vertically and horizontally, subdivided into infinite pockets of crowded clutter.</p>
<p id="Lg6kGp">It’s home to the garment district, and to the fringes of the flower district, and to that one cursed building where that one weird ex lived, and to the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city">diamond district</a>, each a world unto its own. Growing up on the north shore of Long Island, Bronstein used to tag along with his father to his garment business near Seventh Avenue, “just winding my way through the back rooms of these, you know, <em>shmatte </em>peddlers,” he says. Jacobson remembers visiting the overwhelming wonderland that was 47th Street Photo back in the day. “The summer of ’94, in general, was just like one of the best years of my childhood,” he says. “The [NBA] Finals, the Rangers won the Cup, I went to Hot 97 Summer Jam that year.”</p>
<p id="aoLWHs">Jacobson grew up in the city at the same time as the Safdies, and has become part of the brothers’ increasingly influential orbit of recurring NYC-based collaborators, which also includes Bronstein, the casting director Venditti, the moody-MIDI composer Oneohtrix Point Never (a.k.a. Daniel Lopatin) and the production designer Sam Lisenco, who went to Boston University with the Safdies. Lisenco guesstimates there was a 10-to-15-year stretch of his life when he saw one or both brothers every day, “just breathing the same oxygen,” he says, including on multiple trips to eat Chinese food together on Christmas. He was a producer on the Safdies’ first feature, 2009’s <em>Daddy Longlegs</em>, a loosely autobiographical mumblecore film about two young brothers spending some chaotic time with their divorced dad. (Bronstein plays the titular long-legged daddy.)</p>
<p id="lmFAjc">Lisenco and Jacobson have now worked together multiple times, both on Safdie projects including <em>Good Time</em> and on other movies set in the city, such as Barry Jenkins’s <em>If Beale Street Could Talk</em>. Their contributions to <em>Uncut Gems</em> are perhaps best encapsulated by Howard’s crash pad apartment, a study in tacky midtownish entropy that Lisenco decorated with suede wallpaper, lots of Lucite and “reflective black surfaces,” and a fish tank. (The Safdies love fish tanks.) Jacobson cites the apartment in <em>The Fisher King</em> as an influence, and says they had 80-90 places under consideration for Howard’s pad, choosing the one they did in part because of the mirrored walls that ran the length of the space.</p>
<p id="PGFEAy">“There were a lot of conversations that we had,” Lisenco says, “about not just what the character’s economic status was, but also what they would have strived for had they been wealthy when they were young enough to be developing their tastes.” Howard, he says, “is the kind of guy who really had to have the Sony Trinitron, even though flat screens had already come out, and it’s like five minutes outdated even when it was brand new.” This is in line with Howard’s behavior throughout the film, whether he’s on the streets of midtown or in the audience at an auction house: flashy, but always just a little bit behind.</p>
<p id="9yQFVu"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="swhfB6">Francesa is proud that he didn’t even have to go through wardrobe to appear in the film. He wore one of his own suits—pinstriped—and a Rolex watch “my wife gave me for Father’s Day when my twins were born” that he says is the only bling in his life. “That’s the only jewelry I own,” he says. “I don’t own any jewelry. I’m not a jewelry person. I don’t wear any jewelry.” When the Safdies say they had Francesa’s voice in their head, this is it: repetitive just in case you missed anything definitive. “They have you there because they love the spirit of you, and who you are already,” says Venditti of these sorts of castings.</p>
<p id="7DqzUS">The Safdies are known for creating volumes of content about the backstories of their characters, as they did when working with Pattinson in <em>Good Time</em>, but the flow of information goes both ways. Part of Venditti’s casting process involves little bits of improv but also extensive interviews with the “real people” spotted by casting scouts that yield information, and sometimes even lines of dialogue, that can be incorporated into their roles in the movie. “I think it was great for Adam,” she says about casting, for example, 47th Street jewelers and their offspring, “because, you know, he gets more insight. The more people that are from the block, the better for him.”</p>
<p id="ZXUwxN">Francesa calls Sandler, approvingly, “a conglomerate” whose range he respects. “That’s a real different role for him,” he says. “I liked that he has the guts to expand himself and do that.” He sounds like a guy talking baseball, and during filming with Sandler, he was: The two chilled in Sandler’s trailer during a long lunch break between scenes and watched the 2018 NL Central tiebreaker between the Brewers and the Cubs.</p>
<p id="nFp63F">That there even was a trailer with satellite TV to hang out in is something that wasn’t the norm on the filmmakers’ productions. Bronstein says that much of the camera work in <em>Daddy Longlegs</em> was shot from afar on long-focus lenses, and when he did things like carry a refrigerator on his back down the sidewalk he was doing it on the real city streets. Even <em>Good Time</em>, which had Pattinson and the studio A24 attached and was the Safdies’ biggest production to date, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/8/8/16111358/good-time-film-review-robert-pattinson-safdie-brothers">had a madcap energy</a>: a chase through the New World Mall in Flushing was technically done with permission, but on the day of the shoot it was not so much staged as it was unleashed. “Josh and Benny,” says Jacobson, “are, in a way, kind of like my relief from the Hollywood world.”</p>
<p id="D58uhP">This time around everyone had to dot a few more i’s than usual. “[The filmmakers] really wanted to hang a body out of a window on 47th Street,” he says. “And it’s not just as easy as to say to the guy that owns the building, like: ‘I’ll pay you X amount of dollars if you let me do that.’ Like, the Office of Emergency Management needs a heads-up.” There were more irregular communications channels to manage, too: During shooting, randos would approach Jacobson “out of the woodwork,” he says, “telling me they ran security for the block, and that they should have known we were coming, because a billion dollars, every three hours, goes in and out of the block.”</p>
<p id="09wTPw">Still, there is still plenty of room for organic onscreen magic when you spend so much effort combing the city for faces and people, unknown and well-known alike, who can tell real stories about their worlds. “I mean, I’m 15,” says Aranbayev, who is one of them. “My parents look at me like I’m old enough to do whatever I gotta do. I come in and do sales. I’m just a salesman, right?” It’s easy to see why he appealed to casting scouts. And then there’s Keith Williams Richards, one of the guys doing the window-dangling in that scene, who has such a classic-character-actor mug (David Rasche meets Willam Dafoe) and attitude that it is shocking to learn that he was street-cast and that, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/the-safdie-brothers-full-immersion-filmmaking">according to <em>The New Yorker</em></a>, he’s a former longshoreman. Julia Fox, a downtown-chic party girl IRL who plays Sandler’s magnetic flame, Julia, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/style/julia-fox-uncut-gems.html?smid=tw-nytstyles&smtyp=cur">told <em>The New York Times</em></a> that for a time she would run into actresses who would tell her they were up for the role of, essentially, her. In a role credited only as “Handsome Older Man” is a bronzed dress designer named Wayne Diamond, who Bronstein says used to party with his uncle on 7th Avenue in the ’70s.</p>
<p id="vm9ZKl">All this working with actors who haven’t done this before sounds like something that could cause a real headache for a film editor. “You know,” Bronstein says, “there’s a reason why actors don’t step on each other’s lines. There’s a system in place to create—to ensure that you will be able to deliver a consumable product at the end of the process.” But professional actors or not, that has never been how the Safdies work. “These guys, on the set, are just breaking these rules left and right,” he says. “When you have people that are allowed to just talk over each other, and then on top of that, you’re also miking up everybody else in the room and allowing them to have the freedom to talk, whether they’re on camera or not, when you get into postproduction it’s like a giant surgery. It’s like performing surgery on a Tetris.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ZGWjP1">This fall, when <em>Uncut Gems</em> was screened at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival, the actors took a curtain call up on stage. (“It was such a wild, wild bunch of people,” says Lisenco.) <a href="https://grantland.com/the-triangle/a-yooge-yooge-event-an-audience-with-the-sports-pope-at-francesacon/">This being New York</a>, the crowd greeted Francesa with particular zeal. “I think a couple of the actors were like, what the heck is going on here?” Francesa says; he remembers Judd Hirsch, in particular, as looking pretty confused. “I don’t think he realized,” Francesa says, “that this is my audience on a daily basis.” Watching the film for the first time at the screening, during a scene starring Handsome Older Man, Francesa was delighted to recognize a Mohegan Sun hotel room, the one he always stays in. “If I’ve stayed there once, I’ve stayed there 50 times,” he says; once he was snowbound there for days. (So was Jon Bon Jovi, who gave everyone a free concert.) And he also got to chat with that scene’s actor, Wayne Diamond, just two rookie thespians conversing about their roles in one of the year’s biggest films. “I met him at the thing,” Francesa says. “He was a <em>real</em> character.”</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/23/21034349/safdie-brothers-mike-francesa-new-york-cityKatie Baker2019-12-18T13:14:26-05:002019-12-18T13:14:26-05:00Kevin Garnett: “We Didn’t Give a F**k About LeBron”
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zLTDUyUAppbzMJVk8aKi12rOjhc=/358x0:1798x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65932640/KGthumb3.0.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>KG and Adam Sandler discuss that, ‘Uncut Gems,’ and more on ‘The Bill Simmons Podcast’</p> <p id="cltUa6">On <em>The Bill Simmons Podcast</em>, Kevin Garnett explains how the Boston Celtics “broke” LeBron James in 2010 before facing him in the famous 2012 Eastern Conference finals. Adam Sandler also joins the podcast to discuss the pair’s new movie, <em>Uncut Gems</em>, and whether he thinks he has a chance at an Oscar nomination.</p>
<div id="LwSS8K"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/50LLEAiZApyPnTaQyF3tDV" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="OVhSsu"><strong>Subscribe:</strong> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-bill-simmons-podcast%2Fid1043699613%3Fmt%3D2">Apple Podcasts</a> / <a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-bill-simmons-podcast">Art19</a> / <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/the-bill-simmons-podcast">Stitcher</a> / <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/thebillsimmonspodcast">RSS</a></p>
https://www.theringer.com/video/2019/12/18/21028411/kevin-garnett-lebron-james-adam-sandler-uncut-gems-bill-simmons-podcastBill Simmons2019-12-18T00:00:38-05:002019-12-18T00:00:38-05:00Adam Sandler and Kevin Garnett on ‘Uncut Gems’ and the Iverson Era
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SVuSJRr1ENGCuZ04tbNMHxBDTPY=/480x0:1920x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65928250/bskgsandlerthumb5.7.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>Plus: ‘SNL’ Casts vs. NBA Teams</p> <p id="2cV5Rd"><em>Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This was originally published during </em>Uncut Gems<em>’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as it begins streaming on Netflix.</em></p>
<div id="P94sTQ"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/50LLEAiZApyPnTaQyF3tDV" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="s2UpiC"><br><a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/50LLEAiZApyPnTaQyF3tDV?si=n1rROGbLTMmBBl0UV9pQrw"><em>The Ringer</em>’s Bill Simmons is join</a>ed by Adam Sandler and Kevin Garnett to discuss their new film, <em>Uncut Gems</em>; sneaky athletic actors; dynamic movie sets; stories from the NBA; <em>SNL</em>; and more!</p>
<p id="QtFFw3"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/video/2019/12/18/21028411/kevin-garnett-lebron-james-adam-sandler-uncut-gems-bill-simmons-podcast"><strong>Click here for a video of KG discussing how his Celtics teams viewed LeBron James.</strong></a></p>
<p id="N4GiLQ"><strong>Subscribe:</strong> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/07SjDmKb9iliEzpNcN2xGD?si=dBnPb9nxQbOUPb-zvK6XuQ">Spotify</a> / <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-bill-simmons-podcast%2Fid1043699613%3Fmt%3D2">Apple Podcasts</a> / <a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-bill-simmons-podcast">Art19</a> / <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/the-bill-simmons-podcast">Stitcher</a> / <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/thebillsimmonspodcast">RSS</a></p>
https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2019/12/18/21027458/adam-sandler-and-kevin-garnett-on-uncut-gems-and-the-iverson-eraBill Simmons2019-12-17T06:10:00-05:002019-12-17T06:10:00-05:00What Happened in the Celtics-Sixers Series Featured in ‘Uncut Gems’?
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_80PcPYfJcYRUvQ6cgMUsSDvK6M=/0x0:1067x800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65921452/devine_uncut_gems_celtics_getty_a24_ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images/A24/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 2012 Eastern Conference semifinal was an up-and-down series for Kevin Garnett, which made it a perfect dramatic structure for the Safdie brothers’ film </p> <p id="485BzQ"><em>Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This was originally published during </em>Uncut Gems<em>’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as it begins streaming on Netflix.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="medytJ">
<p id="oelKhp">When directors Josh and Benny Safdie landed Kevin Garnett to play himself alongside Adam Sandler in their new film, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21020599/everything-you-need-to-know-about-uncut-gems"><em>Uncut Gems</em></a>, they needed to orient the NBA-specific part of their story around a string of high-stakes games in which the future Hall of Famer played well, but also experienced some valleys along with his peaks. “The narrative of the story revolved around a good game, bad game, good game,” Josh Safdie <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers">told <em>The Ringer</em>’s Alan Siegel</a>.</p>
<p id="7Lgz3y">The Eastern Conference semifinal series between Garnett’s Boston Celtics and the upstart Philadelphia 76ers wasn’t the most dramatic thing about the 2012 postseason. That spring also featured the KD-Russ-Harden Thunder ripping off four straight victories over the vaunted Spurs in what looked, at the time, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2019/11/19/20971948/book-of-basketball-2-0-spurs-okc-2012-and-kds-almost-dynasty-bob-rewatchables-with-joe-house">like a changing of the guard within the NBA</a>, the ACL tear that completely changed Derrick Rose’s career, and LeBron James winning his first championship. Celtics-Sixers fit the bill here, though.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="OVg5Go"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Kevin Garnett Landed in ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers"},{"title":"Inside the Diamond District, the Grimy, Shiny Setting of ‘Uncut Gems’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city"},{"title":"The ‘Uncut Gems’ Exit Survey","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/16/21024220/uncut-gems-exit-survey"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="072Iu0">It was a tense, grimy, seven-game rock fight. Boston won the series while <a href="https://stats.nba.com/teams/advanced/?sort=W&dir=-1&Season=2011-12&SeasonType=Playoffs&PORound=2&Division=Atlantic">scoring 99.2 points per 100 possessions</a>, a rate of offensive efficiency that would’ve ranked dead last in the league in six of the past 10 seasons. (Shouts to the Process-era Sixers, who were trying to be that bad, and the 2011-12 Bobcats, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/apr/27/charlotte-bobcats-worst-nba-team-ever">who were not, but still were</a>.) And, like <em>Uncut Gems</em> itself—at least, according to the people I’ve spoken to who have actually seen it, which I haven’t—it also featured a hell of a performance by Garnett.</p>
<p id="D72LDG"><em>Uncut Gems</em> isn’t Garnett’s first film role. As a teenager, KG made an <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0307812/">uncredited cameo in 1994’s <em>Blue Chips</em></a>; two years later, he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rvxTokEpqA">played a young Wilt Chamberlain</a> in HBO’s <em>Rebound: The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault</em>. It <em>is</em> his first full-fledged acting performance, though, and one that asks him to play the role to which he is best suited: an almost unbelievably intense professional basketball player who is completely committed to victory, and willing to fully invest himself in anything that might help him gain and maintain an edge. Like, say, a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/9/13/20863325/uncut-gems-marriage-story-review-tiff">“mysterious, seemingly priceless Ethiopian opal”</a> that he becomes convinced might have a positive impact on his play.</p>
<p id="wIPAai">This tracks. KG developed more than a few lasting superstitions during his career. <a href="http://www.citypages.com/news/the-rituals-of-kg-6701539">“Shirt Tuck” and “Fists and Chalk.”</a> Needing <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/cdzzso/ryan_saunders_kevin_garnett_had_his_routines_and/">his warm-up pants to hit the ground a certain way</a> before a game, and needing the same ball boy to throw him passes during every workout—even, according to former coach Dwane Casey, if <a href="https://www.sportsnet.ca/basketball/nba/tall-tales-raptors-share-best-kevin-garnett-stories/">the poor young man was sick</a>. There were also the pre-game <a href="http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/presents18931717/the-nba-secret-addiction">PB&Js</a> and, just before tip-off, his iconic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/sports/basketball/garnett-has-a-system-before-he-is-a-go.html">headbutt session</a> with the padding on the basket stanchion. </p>
<p id="kpotE1">“Having something that you believe in and is giving you something back, I connected with that,” Garnett <a href="https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2019/12/09/adam-sandler-and-kevin-garnett-receive-big-welcome-at-uncut-gems-premiere-in-boston">said at a recent screening of the film</a>. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><div id="b0j14h"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x9X2ynYk1Iw?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div></div>
<p id="DryCP4">You’d believe that Garnett might have been looking for a little something extra in that 2012 postseason. Boston had gone 39-27 in the lockout-shortened 2011-12 campaign, finishing fourth in the East behind the Bulls, Heat, and Indiana Pacers. Everybody expected Chicago to charge past the eighth-seeded Sixers in Round 1, setting up a highly anticipated matchup against the former champion C’s, and the possibility of a heavyweight battle with the Big Three Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. But then Rose went down, and the upstart Sixers pounced, finishing the wounded Bulls in six games behind a breakout performance by a 21-year-old point guard named Jrue Holiday. </p>
<p id="qfa3XX">Suddenly, all that stood between the Celtics and another shot at a Heat team that had <a href="https://twitter.com/mrgordian/status/323826464082509824">gentleman’s-swept</a> them out of 2011’s second round was a young Philly squad whose only rotation players older than 25 were an in-his-prime Andre Iguodala and post-Achilles-tear Elton Brand. (And as good as Miami had looked, the first game of the second round presented an opening, when Chris Bosh <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/chris-bosh-suffers-abdominal-strain-heat-game-1-153621871.html">suffered an abdominal strain</a> that put him on the shelf indefinitely.) For the 35-year-old Garnett, 34-year-old Paul Pierce, and 36-year-old Ray Allen—the trio that had ushered in Boston’s basketball renaissance and won the 2008 title, but saw ill-timed injuries scuttle their championship bids in the <a href="https://www.celticsblog.com/2013/8/21/4638636/what-if-kevin-garnett-doesnt-get-hurt-in-2009">next</a> <a href="http://www.espn.com/nba/playoffs/2010/columns/story?columnist=sheridan_chris&page=Celticsperkins-100616">three</a> <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/kg-pierce-star-rondo-story-celtics-win-game-045537126.html">postseasons</a>—2012 seemed like their last, best shot at a second ring. </p>
<p id="707XaI">But all the miles the C’s had traveled along the way were starting to add up. Pierce had sprained his MCL during Boston’s first-round win over the Hawks; <a href="https://www.espn.com/boston/nba/story/_/id/7934313/paul-pierce-hurting-76ers-know-it">his lack of lift and burst, plus Iguodala’s dogged defense, limited him</a> to just 40.2 percent shooting for the series. Allen had missed most of the final month of the season and the first two games of the Atlanta series, with <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/boston/allen-sits-out-practice-availability-playoffs-unknown">bone spurs in his right ankle</a>. He would need offseason surgery to remove them. Until he could get it, he was either coming off the bench or acting <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2012/5/22/3036108/ray-allen-injury-celtics-vs-76ers-nba-playoffs-2012">as a decoy</a> in the starting lineup. He averaged 8.9 points per game against Philly, shooting just 38.3 percent from the field. </p>
<p id="S1rrGh">Boston ran neck-and-neck with Tom Thibodeau’s Bulls for the league lead in <a href="https://stats.nba.com/teams/advanced/?sort=DEF_RATING&dir=-1&Season=2011-12&SeasonType=Regular%20Season">points allowed per possession</a> that season; they had the defense to stifle the Sixers. But with Pierce, Allen, and wings <a href="https://www.espn.com/boston/nba/story/_/id/7930198/2012-nba-playoffs-boston-celtics-mickael-pietrus-ok-now-need-surgery">Mickael Pietrus</a> and <a href="https://www.espn.com/boston/nba/story/_/id/7952113/2012-nba-playoffs-shoulder-continues-plague-boston-celtics-avery-bradley">Avery Bradley</a> all ailing, the Celtics needed to find enough points of their own against an athletic, smart, and hungry Philly squad. So KG sized up Philly’s bigs—especially Spencer Hawes—dusted off that high-arcing elbow jumper, and went to work. </p>
<div id="mRwvPm"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JmbPy7vYa_A?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="vDaFPK">Garnett poured in 29 points on 12-for-20 shooting in Game 1, but Boston needed clutch late jumpers by Pierce and Rajon Rondo to escape with a 92-91 win in a game that Philadelphia <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/pbp/201205120BOS.html">led for more than 42 minutes</a>. Undeterred by letting a chance to usurp home-court advantage slip through their fingers, the 76ers came right back and threw another punch in Game 2, grinding out an 82-81 win punctuated by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_BhPDzDNw4">an acrobatic Evan Turner layup</a> with 40 seconds left—and a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oREQowJEl_c">moving-screen call on KG</a> with 10 seconds to go—to knot the series at one game apiece. </p>
<p id="WZXc4Y">The Sixers could’ve seized control of the series at home in Game 3. Garnett had other ideas. </p>
<div id="P7dfO4"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z-TEWENmkRU?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="PgPEIB">It wasn’t a solo mission—Pierce got well to the tune of 24 points (albeit on 6-for-17 shooting) and 12 boards, while Rondo chipped in 23 with 14 dimes. But Garnett, again, looked more like the 25-year-old version of himself than the gray-bearded model, popping for a game-high 27 points on 12-for-17 shooting with 13 rebounds and four assists; Boston <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/201205160PHI.html">outscored the Sixers by 27 in his 30 minutes of floor time</a>, and cruised to a 107-91 win. </p>
<p id="YcH3AJ">Philly would get even in Game 4, coming back from an 18-point second-half deficit with a second-half blitz capped by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVNG6kM-zUE">some Iguodala daggers</a>. The Celtics might’ve taken a commanding 3-1 lead … had Garnett not turned in his first rough outing of the playoffs, with nine points on 3-for-12 shooting with seven turnovers, and <a href="https://www.bostonherald.com/2012/05/19/celtics-stray-from-plan-in-collapse/">Boston giving up on running its offense through him</a>. (There’s that “good game, bad game, good game” narrative the Safdies were looking for.) </p>
<p id="Ft1H93">Back in Boston, the Celtics earned their second blowout of the series, a 101-85 thrashing thanks to a career-high 27 points from <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/closer-look-big-night-brandon-bass-ate-well-160505740.html">steady forward Brandon Bass</a>—18 of which came in a third quarter that saw the Celtics take control. After a dodgy offensive foul call against Garnett for using his off arm to clear out Hawes on a shot attempt, the TD Garden crowd got loud, and <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/news/nba--kevin-garnett-s-passion-fuels-celtics--game-5-win-over-sixers.html">KG and the Celtics seemed to get pissed</a>, ripping 10 straight points to start a 25-10 run that tilted the game. </p>
<p id="v5dwyj">After the win, Garnett insisted he didn’t remember the play with Hawes, or any particular change in the crowd. He did, however, try to explain how the energy of the Boston fans felt to him, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-lun5a5TI">comparing “this goddamned crowd” to an outlet he could plug into</a>: “I feel like every minute I look up, I see my family, I see people yelling, I see the drunk fat guy—I can’t decipher one [minute] from the other.” </p>
<p id="s52LYH">Away from that energy source—this whole “mystical gem” idea is starting to make more sense—the C’s sputtered in Game 6. Holiday led five 76ers in double figures, the Sixers held the misfiring visitors below 20 points in three of four quarters, and they white-knuckled an 82-75 win in front of the Philly faithful that Garnett had made a point of calling <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/kevin-garnett-takes-little-shot-philadelphia-fair-weather-140622600.html">“fairweather fans”</a> after Game 5. Just as they had <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/playoffs/1982-nba-eastern-conference-finals-76ers-vs-celtics.html">30 years earlier</a>, the Celtics and 76ers would play a Game 7 on the parquet in Boston. This time, though, the Sixers came up short. The Celtics weathered the loss of Pierce to a sixth foul with 4:16 to go thanks to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lII_ZSj0YWo">some huge late buckets by Rondo</a>, and held on for an 85-75 win to eliminate Philly and move on to face the Heat. </p>
<p id="HzUAMu">Garnett averaged 19.7 points and 11 rebounds per game in the series, taking 21 more shots than any other Celtic and making 50.4 percent of them. While Doc Rivers was fond of saying that Boston had <a href="https://nba.nbcsports.com/2012/01/12/doc-rivers-boston-is-rajon-rondos-team-now/">become Rondo’s team</a> during that ’11-12 season, it was still KG who shouldered the scoring load and captained the defense during that playoff run, and who came up with huge outings in games 3, 4, and 5 of the conference finals to push the Heat to the brink of elimination. LeBron responded with <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ball-dont-lie/lebron-james-45-point-game-6-explosion-four-135034003--nba.html">the signature performance of his career to that point</a>, and Miami dispatched Boston in seven games. The Celtics would win 41 games the next season and get eliminated in the first round; about two months later, <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/news/nba--nets-pursuing-trade-for-kevin-garnett--paul-pierce-171213145.html">Garnett and Pierce were Nets</a>. </p>
<p id="FZvvxB">“I’d die out here if I had to, and that’s real talk,” Garnett <a href="https://www.slamonline.com/archives/kevin-garnett-is-prepared-to-die-for-the-boston-celtics/">said in a radio interview during the Sixers series</a>. “I have no life at this point. I go home, get treatment, come back in here, study tape, film. No life at all. This is what it is.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="C41ujM">As it turns out, Garnett was always a Method actor. It just took a while for someone to put a script in his hand.</p>
<aside id="TOubwa"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/12/17/21025172/boston-celtics-philadelphia-sixers-2012-playoffs-uncut-gemsDan Devine2019-12-16T10:56:31-05:002019-12-16T10:56:31-05:00The Exit Survey for ‘Uncut Gems,’ Now Streaming on Netflix
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GKrGyvWVp-uJFe3MUxGZUceRNt8=/274x0:2941x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65913517/uncut_gems.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A24/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett, and Mike Francesa walk into a bar ...</p> <p id="a4Ps9P"><em>Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This story was originally published during </em>Uncut Gems<em>’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as the film begins streaming on Netflix.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="zL3b4l">
<p id="hGFzi6"><em>Is Adam Sandler hot? Is Kevin Garnett the best basketball player turned actor ever? Were old iPhones better? Here’s the </em>Ringer <em>staff’s thoughts on </em>Uncut Gems.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="Ptjw7a">
<h4 id="n8o5wh">1. What is your tweet-length review of <em>Uncut Gems</em>? </h4>
<p id="gIMl3t"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/katie-baker"><strong>Katie Baker</strong></a><strong>: </strong>Is <em>Uncut Gems</em> a sports movie? Quote-tweet this with your thoughts!</p>
<p id="FpDgVs"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/andrew-gruttadaro"><strong>Andrew Gruttadaro</strong></a><strong>: </strong>If <em>Good Time </em>was 15 percent more stressful, 15 percent sadder, with equal amounts of Queens energy and 100 percent more Adam Sandler and Kevin Garnett.</p>
<p id="PdZe60"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/paolo-uggetti"><strong>Paolo Uggetti</strong></a><strong>: </strong>A two-hour heat check of a movie on caffeine that never stops and completely delivers. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time, but I know that isn’t true because I laughed a lot. </p>
<p id="XVJNW6"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/alison-herman"><strong>Alison Herman</strong></a><strong>:</strong> This <em>Fiddler on the Roof </em>sequel owns.</p>
<p id="qhVEgt"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/sean-yoo"><strong>Sean Yoo</strong></a><strong>:</strong> Gambling is dangerous, kids. Don’t do it unless you have adult supervision, and even then you probably shouldn’t do it. </p>
<p id="EBzhuG"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/justin-sayles"><strong>Justin Sayles</strong></a><strong>: </strong>A two-hour-plus panic attack where everyone yells all the time other than, somehow, KG.</p>
<p id="h5POG3"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/alyssa-bereznak"><strong>Alyssa Bereznak</strong></a><strong>:</strong> I suffered from more concentrated physical anxiety over the course of this movie than I had in maybe the entire year. Yet somehow I love it.</p>
<aside id="0z6yU0"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Kevin Garnett Landed in ‘Uncut Gems’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/13/21015844/uncut-gems-kevin-garnett-casting-adam-sandler-safdie-brothers"},{"title":"Inside the Diamond District, the Grimy, Shiny Setting of ‘Uncut Gems’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/12/21011249/uncut-gems-diamond-district-setting-new-york-city"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="aJcWr5">2. What was the best moment of the film? </h4>
<p id="8rDQoW"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>I NEVER RESURFACED ANYTHING.</p>
<p id="f9zCAj"><strong>Baker:</strong> I haven’t cared and worried so much about an opening tip in my entire life. This movie is the gateway drug to degenerate gambling.</p>
<p id="TdmnI9"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> When KG says, without hesitation, that Tony Allen would win in a fight against Ben Wallace. Second place: The scene when they can’t open the glass door because the magnet isn’t working was arguably more stressful than the ending. </p>
<p id="IObbAp"><strong>Herman:</strong> A hot take: Safdie brothers movies are not actually that stressful! Both <em>Uncut Gems </em>and <em>Good Time </em>are very good at endearing the audience to their antiheroes while making it clear these are terrible morons who deserve to suffer the consequences. They also tend to isolate the (extremely deserved) fate of these protagonists from the fates of their loved ones; just as Connie’s and Nick’s journeys diverge fairly early, Howard’s actions are largely contained to his own life, apart from one terrifying moment when his kids seem to be in danger. It’s therefore easy to sit back, enjoy the ride, and not let all those buzzer noises get to you. I always felt <em>excited </em>by <em>Uncut Gems</em>, but I never felt <em>overwhelmed.</em></p>
<p id="mQB8T8"><strong>Sayles: </strong>The club scene was very specifically 2012, which means it was very specifically my shit. Also, Howard yelling at Julia to go ahead and “fuck the Weeknd” was the funniest line delivery of the film, for my money. </p>
<p id="Bw51Xr"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> I really do appreciate how realistic the Safdie brothers got with illustrating sexting’s inherent idiocy and propensity for typos. </p>
<p id="xPCAP5"><strong>Yoo: </strong>As the film nears its end you realize that Howard is actually going to hit on his massive parlay and potentially solve most, if not all, of his problems with this life-changing win. But hope disappears within minutes of the victory. It’s a brilliant moment that makes you feel elated and devastated at the same time. You had a feeling during the entire movie that Howard’s life would be on the line, but for a split second you forgot about it all and revelled in the joy felt by Howard and Julia. A lone emotional bright spot in an otherwise anxiety-driven movie. </p>
<div id="d4k60Z"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x9X2ynYk1Iw?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<h4 id="aDITtg">3. What was your least favorite part of the movie? </h4>
<p id="BnHQn3"><strong>Baker: </strong>Howard thinking he’s gonna get a few minutes to chat with an NBA player after practice and then getting brutally ghosted by a liaison. Who knew <em>Uncut Gems</em> was going to viscerally remind me of all my career lows?!</p>
<p id="u1vNWM"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> The inclusion of the Weekend into the actual plot of the movie is a move I can’t help but respect, and yet the scene of him and Julia Fox in the bathroom made me cringe so hard that I couldn’t feel my face afterward. </p>
<p id="wB0p3c"><strong>Sayles: </strong>I expected more Francesa and more Furby. </p>
<p id="w4yfzT"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>The ending is a truly brutal gut-punch.</p>
<p id="NzllJK"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> I get that displaying the ugly origin of the titular uncut gem was thematically important to this film, but it was also gross! I don’t need to see a dude’s tibia. I’m not sure we needed to see that. And the aura of the rock could’ve been even more powerful and mysterious if we were required to imagine where it came from.</p>
<p id="L6oF6m"><strong>Herman:</strong> Leaving the theater?</p>
<p id="TNKpar"><strong>Yoo: </strong>That Weeknd concert was weird. All that yelling for a blacklight and it only looked kinda cool.</p>
<h4 id="c2y874">4. Finish the sentence: “Adam Sandler was …”</h4>
<p id="7MMzDp"><strong>Baker: </strong>… the proprietor of the most specific and perfect Manhattan crash pad. Nothing good happens after 2 a.m., and when it doesn’t, that apartment is exactly where.</p>
<p id="nveDXr"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> As greasy as the bottom of a bag of fries. In other words, perfect. </p>
<p id="3vyDEg"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>… absolutely stunning. His sociopathic compulsiveness, his patheticness, his inexplicable charm—these are all qualities Sandler has portrayed before, but they were combined and calcified by the Safdies. </p>
<p id="BpfRIT"><strong>Herman:</strong> Enjoying his once-in-a-decade foray out of his immensely profitable, critically derided lane into highbrow acclaim. In three years we’ll be back to sneering at <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/native-american-jokes-adam-sandlers-791397">his punch lines</a> again, so enjoy this while it lasts!</p>
<p id="srH4Kv"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> … not hot, as some<a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/12/adam-sandler-is-hot-in-uncut-gems-movie.html"> terminally horny viewers</a> have suggested, but definitely riveting.</p>
<p id="w8Uwxw"><strong>Yoo: </strong>Shooting 100 percent from the field with a PER above 35. </p>
<p id="1QLAxQ"><strong>Sayles: </strong>… able to channel his comedic gifts into a pretty good dramatic performance. His work here was reminiscent of his work in his prestige play, <em>Punch-Drunk Love</em>, but it was more reserved and in a lot of ways better.</p>
<div id="WH4hoj"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/1xd84rrEwGEmkmeDhrUlkn" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<h4 id="hduktD">5. What is the most New York thing that happens in <em>Uncut Gems</em>?</h4>
<p id="9FCFDF"><strong>Baker: </strong>Interacting with a gatekeeping receptionist who openly hates your guts but also has a point.</p>
<p id="3aKh7Q"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> Having spent only three months of my life in New York City a few years ago, I don’t feel authorized to go with anything other than what I know: Sandler and Co. shitting on James Dolan. </p>
<p id="tc4ktG"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>I NEVER RESURFACED ANYTHING. (Seriously, though: A bookie finding out he’s not being paid by hearing that a guy resurfaced his pool is Extreme Long Island Energy and I fucking love it.)</p>
<p id="iKUjvz"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> When Howard’s doctor called to give him his colonoscopy results, he was neither annoyed nor particularly alarmed by the commotion Demany was making in the background. That’s a weathered New York gastroenterologist if I ever heard one. </p>
<p id="D6I7z5"><strong>Yoo: </strong>Mike Francesa in a restaurant yelling about food and sports was a chef’s kiss moment. </p>
<p id="OL2dys"><strong>Herman:</strong> I’m gonna take “New York” to mean “Jewish” and seize the chance to talk about that seder scene, the best since the Last Supper and the most finely observed case study of shtetl diaspora culture since <em>Transparent. </em>The Safdies understand exactly how Jews’ white privilege (Howard’s rank exploitation of Ethiopian mine workers) intersects with their ethnic identity (a bunch of dudes in yarmulkes pausing their lives of crime to gather ’round the haggadah), and that understanding yields a film that somehow finds a new way to talk about Judaism through the movies. We may be more overrepresented than any other minority, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more left to say. </p>
<h4 id="PEDDKn">6. What is the most 2012 thing that happens in <em>Uncut Gems</em>?</h4>
<p id="QIiJRu"><strong>Baker:</strong> The line: “Baron Davis is done. We gotta start fresh. Melo, Amar’e, that’s it” is extremely 2012, HOWEVER the line “Cause Dolan saw how happy everybody fucking was and said ‘how can I ruin that?’” is extremely timeless.</p>
<p id="au9HrK"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>An NBA playoff game ending with a final score of 83-80.</p>
<p id="BBvF84"><strong>Sayles:</strong> I’m happy that Ca$h Out and Trinidad James are getting work, even if it’s cameos as themselves designed to remind everyone that the movie is set in 2012.</p>
<p id="h9rOpk"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> The Jeremy Lin–Linsanity mention. </p>
<p id="cIKGdQ"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> The Weeknd being extremely popular.</p>
<p id="SLvJ0x"><strong>Herman:</strong> Howard’s old-ass iPhone. Remember when they tried to make text bubbles look all 3D?</p>
<p id="qS4C02"><strong>Yoo: </strong>I wish I still had my iPhone 5.</p>
<h4 id="tym8Ke">7. Who is the low-key MVP of this movie?</h4>
<p id="ugXR47"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> A moment of appreciation for the totally unnecessary but equally perfect Doc Rivers voice-over in the middle of the final game as KG is caressing the opal. I lost it. Incredible. That being said, shout-out Idina Menzel. Her facial reactions to anything Adam Sandler did were perfect, and in some ways, she made it feel OK to not be fully disgusted at him since she was doing an immaculate job of expressing that repulsion herself throughout the movie. </p>
<p id="1OC4m2"><strong>Yoo: </strong>JULIA FOX AND IDINA MENZEL ARE BOTH HIGH-KEY MVPS.</p>
<p id="mYxIau"><strong>Herman: </strong>Julia Fox! For a movie with so many big names and unexpected performances, I came away desperate to know what she’ll be up to next, despite not knowing her name until a few hours prior. Credit to the Safdies for making the part more genuine partner in crime than generically hot mistress, but even more to Fox for going toe-to-toe with Sandman. </p>
<p id="kJW8LX"><strong>Sayles: </strong>Eric Bogosian, as Howard’s loan-shark brother-in-law, gives a relatively subdued performance—the perfect contrast to Sandler’s flashy, slimy lead.</p>
<p id="t1OSnP"><strong>Baker:</strong> The door buzzer magnet! If the door buzzer magnet is having an off performance, the entire franchise pretty much goes immediately into shambles. And when the door buzzer magnet is feeling itself, it saves lives. The door buzzer is James Harden. </p>
<p id="yuFARf"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> Julia Fox! It’s hard to sell a “let’s get back together” butt tattoo, but she really sold it.</p>
<p id="gPFieB"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>Julia Fox is the easy (and correct) answer. Runner-up is the Weeknd, who really captured what it was like to be the Weeknd in 2012; I gotta imagine Abel’s been confronted in a bathroom at least once IRL.</p>
<h4 id="5snifl">8. Is Kevin Garnett’s performance in <em>Uncut Gems </em>the best ever delivered by an NBA player? If not, whose is?</h4>
<p id="5eiPTS"><strong>Yoo: </strong>Even though KG is playing a heightened version of himself, his performance still had the most range of any basketball player. I’ll put his performance slightly ahead of LeBron in <em>Trainwreck</em> and Ray Allen in <em>He Got Game</em>. </p>
<p id="ASvttE"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> Uh, yes. He not only blends perfectly into the surreal plot, but also feels wholly himself throughout the movie. I also love that there were no scenes with him playing basketball besides the games on TV. They truly let him shine and he did, which made me realize that he should have done <em>Space Jam 2</em>. </p>
<p id="bm7lxZ"><strong>Herman:</strong> I must decline to answer this question until the release of <em>Space Jam 2. </em></p>
<p id="tdoAVi"><strong>Baker:</strong> Yes, but the clear no. 2 is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in <em>Troop Beverly Hills.</em></p>
<p id="BGs0XF"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> I won’t even try to pretend that I’ve seen every movie performance delivered by an NBA player, but I can tell you this: Garnett was leagues above every athlete in <em>Space Jam</em>, but not quite at the level of LeBron in <em>Trainwreck.</em> Sorry, but LeBron is an extremely solid supporting actor!</p>
<p id="tIMG0u"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>It’s KG, and I’m not sure it’s even close. You really feel like he needs that gem, and he’s the perfect wingman/sounding board in the scene where Howie makes his final bets. His reactions to this maniac are what make the scene. </p>
<p id="Ezdzki"><strong>Sayles: </strong>Yes, probably, but let’s never forget Rick Fox on <em>Party Down</em>. </p>
<h4 id="mnCfYO">9. And finally, let’s talk about that ending.</h4>
<p id="Vdh8el"><strong>Sayles: </strong>It’s the perfect bait-and-switch. I didn’t really enjoy Howard’s character for most of the movie: He was a terrible parent, friend, lover, business partner, etc., and didn’t really offer much to make up for those shortcomings. But through the strength of Sandler’s performance and the Safdie brothers’ directing, you find yourself rooting for him at the end. And just when it looks like he’s finally going to win and all of his harebrained scheming is going to pay off, he’s done in by the one person who didn’t have to put up with all of his bullshit. </p>
<p id="oXHrgn"><strong>Baker:</strong> I once covered a Stanley Cup final game in which the Bruins, down 3-2 in the series and up 2-1 in Game 6, were just over a minute away from forcing a Game 7. Instead <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKU7JltB1O8">the Blackhawks scored twice</a> in the span of 17 seconds to win the Cup on the road in the final minute, right in everyone’s face. I bring this up because the energy in the theater where I saw <em>Uncut Gems</em> was exactly as bewildered and bonkers as it was in TD Garden that night. Man. Poor Eddie. :(</p>
<p id="n41r5J"><strong>Uggetti:</strong> I should have seen it coming, and yet I totally didn’t because I don’t think my brain was fast enough to catch up with everything that was being said or happening, as was the case for most of the movie. This is going to be such a rewarding rewatch—especially trying to decipher all of the jumbled-up opening dialogue in the first scene. Also: I need to know how this affects the Eric Bogosian in New York Extended Universe—will Gil Eavis and Lawrence Boyd still live on in <em>Succession</em> and <em>Billions</em>? Thanks. </p>
<p id="Zk1b76"><strong>Herman:</strong> My entire theater breathed a sigh of relief—one I could actually hear after two hours of high-decibel action.</p>
<p id="dNJ2v4"><strong>Yoo: </strong>See no. 2.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="KKsCr1"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>Please respect my privacy at this time.</p>
<aside id="aeYCkf"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/16/21024220/uncut-gems-exit-surveyThe Ringer Staff