This review made possible by our friends at AFS! For more showtimes of UNCUT GEMS and lots more, visit the AFS screenings page.

Rating: 💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥

Spoilers: Uncut Gems, 2011 NBA Finals, 2013 NBA Finals, 2/27/16 GSW-OKC, The Decision

One of the reasons I’m so in love with basketball as a spectator sport is how close you feel to the athletes during competition. There’s no excess helmets and pads to obscure their emotions from view like there is in football. There are “floor seats” in the NBA which allow for viewers at home to see phenomena like Drake yelling at referees, or Justin Timberlake high-fiving Carmelo Anthony, or Jack Nicholson yelling at referees, or Anthony Kiedis giving Chris Paul the finger.

Or shit like this:

These moments stick in my head, filling similar cavities in my cerebral cortex as iconic-but-not-one-hundred-percent-canonical moments in film. Like: Brad Pitt getting shot as he smiles in the closet, Jack Nicholson coming out from behind that pillar with an axe, or that one soldier getting shot in the head on Normandy Beach while the medic is trying to save him.

“Bang!”

There’s this incredible video on YouTube called “Mike Breen Top 10 Bang Calls In NBA”. Mike Breen is a legendary play caller whose signature call is, “Bang!” He makes this call whenever someone makes a key shot in the game. I can imagine that if you are unfamiliar with Breen and/or are disinterested in professional basketball writ large, you aren’t really interested in me spending more time on this video.

Nevertheless:

Number 7: Game 5 of the 2011 Finals. Jason Terry puts the Mavericks up by 7 over the Miami Heat. This was the year that LeBron James had taken his talents to South Beach and joined with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to form what some corny sports media pundits dubbed The Heatles. Ugh. That name is so dumb. But also I hated the Heat and so I’m cool with it. The Mavericks went on to win those finals and saved the world from the evil empire.

Number 4: Jeremy Lin going off in some random game against Toronto during peak Linsanity.

Number 2: The Shot. Game 6 of the 2013 Finals. Spurs lead the Heat 3 games to 2. The Heat’s Ray Allen hits a backpedaling three to send the series to Game 7 which the Heat will win. This is the shot I first think of when I think of Mike Breen saying “Bang!”

Sometimes in sports, moments are so visceral they can only be expressed through onomatopoeia.

Though there have been some great poetic calls in the past:

“LeBron James! With no regard for human life!”

That was Kevin Harlan’s call when Lebron dunked over Kevin Garnett during the 2008 Eastern Conference playoffs. Three years before he left Cleveland to start a dynasty in Miami. Four years before Ray Allen left the Celtics to join them. If you are interested in learning more about how seriously the Celtics of this era took basketball, just watch this clip from KG’s show Area 21. They haven’t talked to Ray Allen in years! It’s not just a fucking game.

Uncut Gems is the most Kevin Garnett movie ever made and I’m going to posit that it would have sucked without him in it. Other players that were briefly attached: Amare Stoudemire, Kobe Bryant, and Joel Embiid. It’s a murderer’s row of outsized personalities. But of all of these guys, Kevin Garnett is the only one who has a pregame routine of headbutting the stanchion.

More specifically, Kevin walks over to the stanchion (the padded structure that holds up the backboard) and stops about six inches in front of it. He leans his head forward and shoves both of his hands into his shorts and adjusts them for approximately 45 minutes. After that, he Bangs his head twice on the pad and goes to work.

Intense right? Here’s a quote from Howard Beck’s excellent oral history (a lot of links today!) of KG’s career published in 2015 for Bleacher Report:

“Ask for lasting impressions of Kevin Garnett, and you will quickly find yourself drowning in sports cliches. Focus. Dedication. Loyalty. Team guy. Lots of heart. Also, intense. Really, really intense. Oozing intensity. Did we mention the intensity?”

Before taking us into the claustrophobic world of New York’s Diamond District, the Safdie Brothers give us a brief moment of breathing room. The first shot is a crane shot flying over a Welo opal mine in Ethiopia. I wouldn’t call it uplifting by any means because the ominous score has already started humming. Compare to the vast notes of doom over the Arizona desert in Denis Villenueve’s Sicario.

But immediately an injured worker is carried into frame by a throng of other workers who are all shouting and pointing and from that point on that’s the tone of the film.

Speaking of tone, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) composes a score here with similar throbbing synth pads as he did with the Safdie’s previous effort, Good Time. There’s swelling synths. Pulsing synths. Arpeggiating synths. Sweeping synths. And synths that are just kind of dicking around? There’s a lot of good stuff happening. But there’s also just a lot of STUFF happening. It’s a bit distracting at times and perhaps a little on the nose at others. Synths are a bit finicky once you ask them to incarnate raw emotion.

They are, however, pretty great for transition music in basketball highlight reels.

Here’s a quote Lopatin gave to Billboard Magazine about the score:

“Especially in Josh and Benny's films, the score’s primary function is to be like the id or the superego of their main character’s trajectory. It's really that inner world to their main characters.”

I would say that mission was accomplished artfully but unfortunately, as Howard Ratner is kind of an annoying asshole.

Adam Sandler’s performance as Ratner shines through his rubbly surroundings with pent up rage and manic addiction. Would I call it “God-tier” the way a Facebook ad on my newsfeed has been for the past two months? No. Is it a top-five performance of the year? Not for me. It was great! And that’s enough.

Kevin Garnett on the other hand delivers the best performance I have ever seen a professional athlete give in a film or TV show. Holy shit is he good in this. He’s of course aided by the fact that he’s playing Kevin Garnett in a film that is specifically designed to be Kevin Garnettesque*. But still — the fact that he is able to pivot from pounding anger to floating amusement in a single scene is insane.

Before Uncut Gems, perhaps the most famous dramatic role performed by an NBA player would be Ray Allen as Jesus Shuttlesworth in Spike Lee’s He Got Game. The movie is great. Allen is not great. I know this is total bullshit armchair psychology but, you think KG went extra hard for this movie just to show up Ray? Like maybe just a little bit?

The Weeknd is in this movie! He delivers perhaps the most unflattering portrayal of oneself that I’ve ever seen. Here are the beats to the Weeknd’s storyline:

He yells at the whoever is running the lights that he needs fucking blacklights
He performs “The Morning” (still one of his best tracks)
He does some cocaine in the bathroom with Julia Fox
He gets uncomfortably sexually aggressive (this scene was odd)
He gets thrown to the ground by an out of shape man in his late 40s
He spits on the out of shape man in his late 40s
Fin

I just don’t know how they convinced him to do this?

“Who is Julia Fox?” asked everyone after seeing this movie. The answer, based off of her performance in this film, is that she is someone whose name you will know in the next few years. Fox is at once affecting, charming, sexy, convicted, and relatable in an impressively small window of screen time. What the fuck is happening with this cast? How do you do that?

I think that this script must be really good despite the fact that I kind of hate it. It’s tight. I know that. Unlike my articles, there is literally no wasted time.

There’s a lot I don’t understand about how this movie works. Like how the fuck do you edit this thing? The entire film is one long run on sentence with more cross talk than a presidential primary debate. I’m getting a headache just thinking about the cutting room floor.

I read a piece in Variety about the Safdies that was half about their partying style and half about their movies. It ended with this line:

“And after you see “Uncut Gems,” ask the person next to you what they thought — if they are repulsed, they probably would not want to go to a party with the brothers. It probably just isn’t their speed.”

That’s not a bad way to end an article. Who wrote that? Oh, Timothee Chalamet did? Sure. Why not.

Whether this disqualifies me from partying with T-Chal and the Safs, we’ll never know, but I did get something close to a headache while watching Uncut Gems. This is owed partly to the incessant yelling and partly to the long lens constantly trying to track character movement like a drunk David Fincher. Also, the whole thing (ignoring the still of Fox above) is shown in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio which — when combined with the long lens and close interiors — traps the characters in frames they desperately need to get out of.

But I get headaches in other things I like. In 2017, I got a headache in Oracle Arena when my wife got me tickets to see the Warriors play the Celtics. This was long after Garnett’s trade to Brooklyn and retirement. Oracle was a notoriously loud arena and the organization was actually accused by some media members of pumping extra resonant noise through the sound system to pump up the crowd volume. But that was an incredible game with stellar performances from Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving. Here’s the highlights with commentary from Mike Breen (“Bang!”), Mark Jackson (“Mama! There goes that man!”), and Jeff Van Gundy (Catchphrase TBD).

There’s a metric driven morality to NBA shot selection. A religion based on expected value and rainbow shaped prayers to Lady Luck.

Okay. Back to that top ten video from earlier:

Number 1: Warriors-Thunder 2016. Steph Curry hits a game winning three pointer with .6 seconds left in overtime.

This is my second favorite** play call in the history of the NBA:

Breen: “They do have a timeout... Decide not to use it — Curry! Way downtown… BAANG! BAAAAAANNNNG!! Oh! What a shot from Curry!”

This was in Chesapeake Energy Arena (originally called the Ford Center), the NBA stadium so notorious for its noise levels that sideline reporters like the late great Craig Sager would pull out a little handheld monitor and show you the decibel level.

So you take that arena and let the anxious pressure build and build deep into an overtime game. The crowd is raucous and nervous and ready to explode when their boys bring it home. Then — they take collective a shot to the fucking face. You can even see some of them in the crowd clutch their heads in agony.

“BAANG! BAAAAAANNNNG!!”

The first Bang shocks you and before you know what to think, the second Bang tells you that it’s real. If you are an OKC fan, you feel the floor drop out from under you. The air seeps out of any hole it can find in your head. It doesn’t feel good does it?

Similarly, Uncut Gems plays out like a morality tale of addiction and doomed thrill seeking. Only after we’ve sat in our misery does it leave us with a nihilistic cosmic grace note to remind us that we knew — all along — that aces get cracked and straights get flushed away. Lady Luck is a cruel mistress and it’s probably best not to keep mistresses in general.

It’s all just a fucking game.

*The Safdie’s noted in their DGA interview that the idea for KG to be obsessed with the opal on a superstitious level was KG’s idea. This detail is also my favorite plot point in the film.

**This is my favorite

UNCUT GEMS: Talkin Up A Storm