![]() ![]() Stanley Sugarman (Sandler) is a long-time international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers whose aspirations have always been to get off the road and move into coaching. ![]() I’m stunned to now tell you not only is Hustle really good, it might be one of my favorite basketball movies of all-time. So my expectations were rock bottom for Hustle, the latest sports-adjacent movie from Sandler’s “Happy Madison” production company - which last gave us Home Team, the movie about Sean Payton that was so bad it caused me pain. Suffice it to say, I don’t share her steely resolve when it comes to Sandler flicks. They’re her two greatest loves, and I like to remind her that cafeterias exist, as does Don’t Mess with the Zohan. In fact, within moments of first appearing on screen, he's slapped in the face it's a sign of the many beatings this character will take throughout the course of the movie.One of the most contentious points of debate in my house is my wife’s insistence there are two universal truths: There’s no such thing as bad mac and cheese, or a bad Adam Sandler movie. He never stops talking, and whether he's schmoozing in his showroom with Kevin Garnett (who is stunningly good playing himself in his acting debut!) or tussling with The Weeknd, he's constantly in one situation or another. His character isn't a villain-we follow him in almost every frame-but from the start we know this character, in essence, is doomed. Even turns in dramedies like Judd Apatow's Funny People and Noah Baubach's The Meyerowitz Stories put Sandler's talent on display sure he can fart in someone's face or make a dumb voice, but if you ask him to portray a real piece of the human condition, he's more than adept at doing that at a very, very high level.īut Uncut Gems, again, is unlike even these. While obviously he's more known for lower brow humor like Billy Madison or The Waterboy (we don't have to get too much into some of these later period works), Sandler has consistently proven to be an adept performer when he feels like putting in the effort.Ī moment in Big Daddy led celebrated director Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) to cast Sandler in Punch Drunk-Love, where he intertwined the suppressed rage he often displays with an introverted personality for a brilliantly awkward character. ![]() It's far from the first time Sandler has shown his chops, of course. Sandler enters the movie's wide release with considerable Oscar Buzz-he joked last week that if he doesn't win a statue for Gems, that he would make a movie "so bad on purpose"-and though the acting field is crowded with the likes of Robert De Niro, Adam Driver, and a number of notable others, his performance is such a complete, energetic revelation that it would be criminal to leave the Sandman out of the conversation. It's runtime is 2 hours and 14 minutes, but there's not a point in the movie where you'll think about that number at all instead, the numbers you'll be thinking about are on the endless bets, parlays, and money dealings that Howard, a relentless Manhattan jeweler, continues to make, against the better judgment of not only everyone in the audience, but everyone around him in the movie, too. But by the end of the movie, somehow, you find yourself rooting for this piece of trash it amounts to the best work the former Saturday Night Live star has ever done.ĭirected by the New York City-bred Safdie Brothers (whose last movie, Good Time, similarly served as a breakout character performance for Robert Pattinson), Uncut Gems is as much of an adrenaline shot as it is a movie. As Howard Ratner, Sandler is nothing you've seen him play before: he's a degenerate through and through, a true piece of trash. In Uncut Gems, you might recognize Sandler's familiar mug hidden underneath a a goatee, a new haircut and some tinted glasses straight out of 2003, but the character he plays is entirely of new creation. When you hear the name " Adam Sandler," there are probably a few character types that spring to mind: the man-child stuck in a state of arrested development the goofball who loves fart jokes the 'everyman' prone to an angry blow-up, and more rarely, the sensitive nice guy.
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