Gems Season, Baby!: Authentic New York Shitty Nail Biters to Chase that Howie High

I can’t get enough of Uncut Gems! A laser focused downward character spiral featuring the Sandman and Safdies vibing on the same nervous energy wavelength.  Even though an apple costs like $10 in New York City nowadays, street level weirdos still mill about in ungentrified pockets. Times Square might look like an outdoor mall, but crime still lurks behind high rise offices and Long Island mansions. I love the world Gems builds full of actual gamblers, living Diamond District cartoons, neon grime, and rough faces worn by constant hustle.  Exhausting, but exhilarating like scrambling through a city sized Mouse Trap® board. When the credits rolled, I wanted to buy a ticket and take the mad ride all over again! 

Shout out to Eric Bogosian and Julia Fox for holding their own against a loud and large and flawless Sandler performance. One gets the sense his gambling addiction has exhausted concerned friends and family, and they've seen this behavior too many sad times.  The synth drenched cosmic score ratchets tension to a beautiful seat tearing pitch. Believe the hype. Jewish Scarface rips so hard it made me homesick for Tri-State scuzz.

Here are a few more down’n’dirty New York Shitty pulse pounders if you’re really feeling the gem: 

Basket Case 
Basketbros rise up!  Frank Henenlotter captures a blood and puke slathered Times Square full of punks, C.H.U.D.s, perverts, junkies, pimps, flophouses, porn theaters, and burnouts lost to time.  The inclusion of a people-mauling monster smears a layer of brown icing on the shit stained cake. If a movie is a documentary of its own making, Basket Case preserves true Big Apple lighting in a bottle sleaze that hasn’t been seen since tough-on-crime mayors turned Manhattan into a white-collar playground.  Bless Henenlotter and his love of the seedier side of the city that sent baby boomers screaming to the suburbs!

China Girl
All hail Abel Ferrara, the true King of New York! Pick any of his pulsing and filthy and thrillingly alive work if you want to chase that Gems high.  But I especially love this pre-Giuliani New York Shitty update of Romeo and Juliet where a sewer full of sweaty leather jacket thugs wear sunglasses at night and swing chains and scramble away from asshole cops through neon-soaked alleys as a tense synth soundtrack blares. Despite the star-crossed lovers storyline, China Girl still feels buckwild and raw and unpredictable like only a street rat give no fucks maverick like Ferrara could deliver. A sawed-off shotgun cineblast to the skull of substantive downtown bad boy style!

Cruising
William Friedkin delivers a snapshot of pre-AIDS New York where clubs really did overflow with leather, Crisco, and raw dog fucking. The danger of getting stabbed to death in Central Park at night lurked real. While originally a controversial picture, complete with on set protests from the depicted community, Cruising now feels ahead of its time.  Al Pacino undergoes a sexual awakening amidst all the American giallo murder set pieces. Once he slips undercover, and experiences the club scene firsthand, he can never see the straight world the same again. 

Fleshpot on 42nd Street 

Weirdly not much yelling in this Andy Milligan moving picture, and some kind-of-sweet relationships develop amongst the sex workers, schemers, boozers, and losers of ye olde Times Square before it housed a discount Broadway tickets booth and dancing Elmo. I love the almost documentary like portrait of an NYC lost to time. Even then that rathole was more progressive with its freaks of every stripe than SOME parts of this country claim to be today.

Kids
Larry Clark is probably a pedophile. He can’t resist leering at half-naked prepubescent bodies, but Kids really nails that NYC dirtbag vibe with tons of actual weirdos muttering to themselves on the street and playing accordions in the subway and skating through Washington Square Park and kickin' it in the club. The docudrama look makes shirtless elementary schoolers exhaling weed smoke and humping and shoplifting seem almost exploitative and perverse. I can do without extended takes of tweens slobbering over each other, but I can't deny Kids captures a very specific time and place with startling veracity.

Gloria
A movie so steeped in regional detail, Gloria even gets on a PATH train to Newark Penn Station then leaves 'cause it makes her too nervous. Sweat drips from weathered gangster faces. Graffiti and trash litter crumbling Bronx streets. Taxi cabs putter rusted. Sure, Gloria contains some too precocious child acting, but Gena Rowlands BRINGS IT as a nail tough former moll who's not afraid to drop some slugs in a punk or knee a mobster in the junk if they get in her way.  Don’t provoke the mama bear! Cassavetes combines authentic scuzz, street life, and underworld menace with his trademark tense and unflinching character work. Peep this movie if you crave more of Uncut Gems’ lived-in crime world feel and raw nerve performances! Watch more Cassavetes if you want hyperreal character downward spirals as bracing as Howard’s!

Heaven Knows What 
For their first feature, the Safdies modernize a Christiane F. style teen junkie story with arthouse dirtbag touches like White Castle fights and a ninja star made of razor blades.  Heaven Knows What careens with anxiety inducing synths, rough handheld cinematography, and the energy of a psych ward exploding with violence.  A few sequences legit oozed vibes so bad, I had to look away from the screen. Devastating and alive and true to depressing life like few other urban bugout tales. 

Juice
Long time Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson breaks out to direct an urban realist coming of age horror movie featuring an amazing hip hop score courtesy of The Bomb Squad.  I love the real deal Harlem locations, Tupac acting like a total bloodthirsty psycho, fly '90s fashions, regional accents that make me legit homesick, and a stellar supporting cast including Queen Latifah to Samuel L. Jackson.  There's even a DJ competition in an abandoned warehouse! Juice definitely feels outlaw electric like the best New York Shitty crime dramas.  Pump it up!

Night of the Juggler

Lumberjack-chic trendsetter James Brolin decks crooked shotgun wielding cops, interrogates peep show sex workers, chases down a bigoted kidnapper, and tussles with matching vest gang members in the bowels of a ‘70s Big Apple slime scape.  But goddamn it, his daughter loves this city! She'd rather risk kissing a pedophile on the mouth than go live with her WASP mother in a Connecticut suburb — the lowest of the low according to this film. I like how it portrays the scum of the city in an almost loving fashion.  Sure, you might get cut on the street, but you can also scarf a smorgasbord of street hotdogs and catch world class ballet. Life in the big city, baby!    

I grew up in New Jersey after all the filth had been power washed and painted over.  So, I never knew the New York romanticized and vilified in various media. Watching a movie like Night of the Juggler makes me want to jump through the screen and touch the squalor first hand! 

Q the Winged Serpent 

Uncut Gems contains a surprising amount of wry humor for a movie that thrives on chaos.  If you want more of that New York attitude, you can’t go wrong with any of Larry Cohen’s wise guy genre slam dunks.  My personal favorite? Q: The Winged Serpent! For a NYC scuzz cheapie about a killer Quetzalcoatl nesting in the Chrysler building, Q feels surprisingly smart and wicked. Michael Moriarty yells and sweats and startles his fellow actors in a fast and loose skyscraper devouring performance. He brings a tense and nervy take no shit energy to Larry Cohen’s movies that I absolutely love. What a duo! I also really dig the sharp and darkly humorous editing: cuts between a decapitated head and a floating balloon or a mutilated human dino-lunch and carved Chinese BBQ.  Perfect montage that would make Eisenstein cower in a subway car and weep.  

Cohen squeezed the most pulp from his premise, too! I couldn't help but catch the enthusiasm and reckless glee leaking from every bloody skeleton and unpredictable conversation and an AMAZING beast lair full of garbage and rubble and human debris.  Q takes its monster in Manhattan premise and really flies with it!

Taxi Driver

Diary of an Urban Incel

I almost had an anxiety attack watching this fetid New York wail in a theater.  It grows more horrifying as I age and pick up the nuances of De Niro's performance.  It grows more prescient as the voices of the alt-right and good guys with guns and threatened hetero white dudes amplify.  Manhattan might only pander to the rich nowadays and lacks the texture and life that Bickle despises. But bugnuts like him dominate internet forums and provide "balanced" counterpoints on news networks or work for ICE or shoot up a school 'cause they snap from not getting laid or whatever.  Timeless.

Times Square 

Two teenage runaways squat in actual NYC cruising spots like the Adonis Theater and the West Side Piers, form their own punk band, and mingle with (now extinct) 42nd Street riff raff. A must see for any fan of good music, sleazeball movie houses, female friendship, and ‘80s Manhattan grime!

Who Killed Teddy Bear 
Sexually frustrated Sal Mineo sweats and sprints through Times Square to show he’s troubled!  What more can you ask for?! Who Killed Teddy Bear portrays New York as a horrifying den of vice, crime, and depravity. If you live here, according to this ‘60s psychodrama, you’re already in hell.