The movie of the year, and more, Adam Sandler is unleashed in what is one of the fifty greatest performances I’ve ever seen; Sandler is blustery and raging, chancy and impulsive, jealous and truculent, high-wire and manic, and very, very hysterical in his need to risk everything and go for broke.
I’m not even sure at what point did I realize that I did not like Sandler’s New York Diamond District jeweler Howard Ratner. I had realized the film was indeed self-aware when his fed-up wife (Idina Menzel) called him annoying. Uncut Gems is not about a decent individual trying to climb out of a hairy predicament, it’s about an indecent man sunk in a thicket of scams and deliberately driving himself more into riskier and riskier endeavors.
This is very much a portrait of how the type of downtown hustler lives, the hustler who plays with stacks of ten large and above on a daily basis, and here’s a guy who is willing to pawn his celebrity customer’s prized ring so he can gamble with their money on a “sure thing.” Uncut Gems is like 1974’s “The Gambler” refiltered through the neorealism of the Dardenne Brothers and recharged with the style of early Quentin Tarantino while on a super high dosage of Ritalin.
Howard’s worst trait is his presumptuousness, but if there is something he earnestly wants from another person he can turn on a dime and buy that person’s confidence — particularly a scene where he wills a basketball player to play the best to his given ability; the gambling scenes in effect have zero predictability in Uncut Gems, since we don’t know if a particular player is going to play on full blast on Howard’s behalf or strike out in spite.
When we get to the last act, Sandler is in a must-win situation while his street smart adversaries are for a short time in a chamber held up. And damn if, vicariously through Sandler’s frantic yet little boy giddiness, we don’t clench our fists in our mouths as we wait on a deliverance or failure of a bet to follow through. Jolted by Sandler’s ecstatic acting, it is irrefutably the most heart-racing, electrifying sequence to have been had at the movies this year and I knew right then that solidified it as my #1.
The Safdie Brothers (Josh and Benny) directed, who got Martin Scorsese to be their Executive Producer to go to bat for them. Uncut Gems was originally written in 2009 and shopped around by 2012 before many of their other projects would happen first (Adam Sandler and Jonah Hill turned them down that year). When Robert Pattinson took a liking to them at a party, the Safdie Brothers wrote “Good Time” specifically for Pattinson. Following that success, Sandler had new confidence in them, and the Safdie Brothers finally landed funding for Uncut Gems, a lived-in gritty and sure thing masterpiece and they’re both only in their mid-thirties. And Sandler’s marvelous acting in 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love?” Not a fluke. I disagree. I disagree, Gary. He’s way upped his game from that.
Alfred Hitchcock’s last film for the United Kingdom before he moved to Hollywood. The black & white <em>Jamaica Inn</em> is a terrific-looking movie with stormy seas off the coast of South England, with high contrast photography capturing the weathered faces on the rocky ship tumbling on roaring waves. It’s the 1820’s and pirates have been raiding all the shipwrecks which they do their best to tactically manufacture. Charles Laughton once again looks lordly in a film, but he’s hiding secrets from dame Maureen O’Hara who has arrived to town in search for her aunt. As good as the presentation appears, somehow the dialogue by four writers (adapting a Daphne du Maurier novel) sounds off as stodgy even if the slate of actors are drunken killers, roughnecks and swindlers. Also, some characters put themselves in unnecessary trouble just so mortal conflicts can be had. Regardless, enough of the movie is good enough at times to qualify on the lower rungs as second tier Hitch.
Disconcerting intro (false flashback that Hitchcock called his worst storytelling mistake) to the point of being confusing and off-putting, takes time and work for the viewer to figure out what it’s trying to do. Once initiated, <em>Stage Fright</em> is the flattest personality of just about any Hitchcock film. When it does introduce a protagonist, Jane Wyman antsy to the point of jerky. If Wyman doesn’t become a sleuth, she would have a zero personality or the personality equivalent of a mouse. Marlene Dietrich far more zest than anybody else as a haughty glamourpuss actress, and fits the part based on past stereotyping—per case, she might have killed her husband. Richard Todd, is the liar and adulterer. A garble of a plot.
<em>Stage Fright</em> actress Dietrich recalled later working on the picture: <em>“I did one film for Alfred Hitchcock. Jane Wyman was in it. I heard she’d only wanted to do it if she were billed above me, and she got her wish. Hitchcock didn’t think much of her. She looks too much like a victim to play a heroine. God knows she couldn’t play a woman of mystery, that was my part. Miss Wyman looks like a mystery nobody has bothered to solve.”</em>
<blockquote><em>“Your wife. My father. Criss-cross.”</em></blockquote>
<em>Strangers on a Train</em> one of Alfred Hitchcock’s pictures that can be marked as a quality seal of excellence. No movies stars this time. Just character actors perfect for squeezing the juice out of this material. Farley Granger a tennis pro who has been smited by his wife, but is awfully a stiff plays-by-the-rules-gentleman (he doesn’t know how to be rude). Robert Walker, a rich mamma’s boy with a sinister proposal and perverse enough to do unthninkable things.
Walker crashes in on Granger’s life and hastily—without permission(!)—commits murder. One side of the criss-cross.
Much impetus is probably made because Walker’s Bruno is attracted to Granger’s Guy. As for Guy, he has some blueblood manners and thicket of ethics to him so he just doesn’t know how to swat this intruder away for good. Bruno keeps invading the life of this civil sportsman, ingratiating him and wanting to influence him, as well as ensnare him with his scheming. And part of the drama is watching Guy grow some backbone and come up with some retaliation.
Third act continues to heat up. As far as my film history goes, Hitchcock becomes the first director to film a tennis match in a compelling way. Guy needs to win the match so he can chase after Bruno in time, and the exciting rendezvous takes place on a malfunctioning merry-go-round. No other director at the time could have created such visual sensation of a fight situation on a carousel like Hitch does.
The film was based on the reputable Patricia Highsmith novel and the adapt is so good you wish Hitchcock and tried adapting more of her work like the Ripley novels. Not just good. Deliriously breathtaking. My fifth favorite Hitch.
One of the most nuts things I’ve ever heard in my life is hearing fans rabidly declare that this 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film is better than the 1998 remake “A Perfect Murder.” Chirpy beginning, by the way, so much you’re practically expecting a story that will include champagne and roses. Taking place on one set, Ray Milland is the cool-as-a-cucumber husband who wants his unfaithful wife Grace Kelly murdered. Milland is very much a cuck since Kelly’s lover Robert Cummings is often present at their flat, pretending to be just a friend. Milland has an excruciatingly long dialogue with sucker Anthony Dawson to fill-in as the murderer; Dawson easily blackmailed when he could have just walked out on purring Milland who takes forever to suggest a plan. The attempted murder is well-staged by Hitchcock, that bit is a pleasurable gasp as Kelly turns the tables on her attacker. Milland is underway to plant and move evidence around in a way that should very bloody well implicate himself, but no. We have John Williams as the Chief Inspector who comes in and gets things all wrong; on top of it, this Inspector is constantly concerned about the latchkey for flat entry and never about psychological motivation, thus, has Kelly charged with the crime. Uh huh. It is not self-defense the authorities say. Ridiculously, Kelly is all very passive about her demise and doesn’t get much assist from her fey husband Milland (who should be faking to defend his wife better, I mean, isn’t that suspicious?). And by Act III, the Inspector is very much intrusive and Milland oddly chummy with him (you’d think he would be upset with the inept Inspector for getting his wife charged, at least faking to defend the well-being of his wife better—hmm, I’ve said this sort of thing twice already). Kelly looking like a glamorous wrongly accused person is the gift to us here, but there is a certain point where the general ludicrousness, lack of psychological depth, lack of convincing sexual politics of <em>Dial M for Murder</em> just hurts my head. Andrew Davis, a terrific director in the 1990’s, corrected most of these holes with the far more exciting “A Perfect Murder.” Rabid fans often are gaslighted to think such movies as <em>Dial M for Murder</em> was not the third-tier Hitchcock that this is.
<em>Rear Window</em>, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s signature pleasures, features wheelchair bound James Stewart along with fashionista Grace Kelly as his hangers-on girlfriend and of course, the concept of voyeurism. How immaculately precise is every one of Hitchcock’s camera set-ups, his long lens, his medium shots, his close-ups? It’s superlative enough to say that once in awhile movies themselves see better than what we people see out of our own eyes in everyday life.
At his multi-unit tenement Stewart uses his photojournalist camera and binoculars to spy on his neighbors (to self-amuse). He gets particular jollies when monitoring the lives of a wallflower with no boyfriend whom he monikers Miss Lonelyhearts and a ballet dancer endlessly practicing whom he monikers Miss Torso. But then a suspicious neighbor is perhaps (or perhaps not) hiding something in a garden plot, and Stewart puts pieces together that might add up to murder.
Or maybe he just needs his head examined, but he sure aggravates the tempers of Kelly, friend Thelma Ritter and detective Wendell Corey. And the voyeurism and assortment of visual clues are the method of this wonderfully adept mystery, a film that slowly lets us build evidence ourselves of the who, how, and why’s of not just a murder suspect (Raymond Chandler) but the vulnerabilities and secret compulsions of people living across from us.
Also above and beyond are the banters between Stewart and Kelly; he’s a grouser and an on-the-road shutterbug and he loves her so much he wants her to be free without himself as boyfriend baggage, she wants to convince that he needs her. The script, by John Michael Hayes (“To Catch a Thief,” “The Children’s Hour”), is very sophisticated in how an opposites attract couple argue rigorously in why that the type of relationship needs to bend. Except Stewart doesn’t want Kelly to bend, he wants her to be free amongs the elite 5th avenue high fashion culture of society. Kelly practically allows herself to be sucked into the voyeurism plot just to make it look like she’s succumbing to Stewart’s interest.
Stewart always had that gentlemanly machismo crossed with crabbiness. But the godsend is You Know Who. Kelly is the most radiant and kindest women there has ever been, and every word that comes off her tongue is caressing silk.
What makes a man fall in love with a woman he doesn’t know? For Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), it is falling under the spell of spying a woman (Kim Novak) who is elegant. But she has peculiar nuances. She has compelling neuroses. She is a woman, for some reason in the air, is mysteriously damned and needs to be saved. Hence, what a man wants out of a beauty and is driven to want to be responsible for.
Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is a dork out of place in his own contemporary time. He also has physical and mental malignancies (back problems, acrophobia). He has long been a man too worn out to be bothered by any alluring adventure. But Madeleine is suddenly that alluring adventure that has long eluded him, and he is intoxicated by the details about her. Scottie has been paid to follow her by husband Gavin (Tom Helmore), who claims that his wife has impulses, which seem like they are some kind of schizoid possession. Madeleine has been spellbound by the legend of Carlotta Valdes, a Spanish beauty whom was a ruined mistress, hence, committed suicide. For Scottie, such details are heavenly neuroses he wants in a woman.
In this immortal Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece <em>Vertigo</em>, Scottie has an obsession of coveting the perfect woman, of creating the perfect ecstasies, and will pursue this even if it means controlling and molding a woman with his selfish ideas until it is his perfection.
When Madeleine disappears after Scottie makes a fatal mistake, he tries to smother Madeleine’s duplicate, her doppelganger. The best shot? Hitchcock, using smoke and perfume-inspired light filters, comes up with one of the most crazy, whirling-dizzy kisses ever put on film.
Set in San Francisco, Hitchcock lavishes over the beautiful cityscape (it’s a dreamy San Francisco I barely recognize in modern times), and respects as well to the pristine architecture of the time. For long stretches as Scottie follows Madeleine, it becomes one of cinema’s greatest examples of pure cinema, that mesmerizing method of telling stories entirely through images and background music/sound effects—a method that Hitchcock expertly pulls off multiple times through elongated sequences—and what visual splendors he does with fog!
Haunting and spine-chilling are among its during and after effects, and although you may not feel those qualities right away, you may feel those in your dreams. For me, the finale – at the bell tower – has always given me physiological effects every time I have ever seen it. Those words uttered from the shadows always had a spook factor that chilled me, too, and I don’t think another director in the world could have evoked that strangely aghast throw-me-backwards feeling. Composer Bernard Herrmann (“Citizen Kane,” “Taxi Driver”) came up with a shattering and unforgettable music score, too.
Top One Hundred Films All Time
I have always liked Brian DePalma’s <em>Obsession</em>. Yet there had always been an intangible feeling that it does not emotionally connect like it should, per memory. This time, I think I felt detached at first because the performers are rigidly straight-laced to begin with. The emotional connection, if any, that comes with it has to do with the feelings DePalma’s connect angles and fuzzy lighting that he invokes. I am not immediately moved by Cliff Robertson’s performance, but the astringent visual telling of a kidnapping and ransom gone wrong by DePalma starts to get to me.
Robertson’s rich and decorous character Michael Courtland loses everything because he rigorously trusted the police to retrieve his wife and daughter. Geneviève Bujold was the wife Elizabeth whom he had failed. Many years later, he goes to Italy and inside a Church sees his wife! It is not really her! It is a doppelganger, of sorts, and Michael enacts a romance with this Church restoration artist whom he instantly loves because – like “Vertigo” (1958) which DePalma is playing bombastic homage to – wants to use this new woman to recreate his wife. More allusions to the 1958 classic is how DePalma got Bernard Herrmann to do the luscious and extravagant music score.
Professional work means nothing to Michael anymore, which irks partner John
Lithgow whom is playing a swanky New Orleans real estate hotshot. Michael will
return to the States with this new woman, whisk her into marriage, and live
happily ever after. Like a redo. But some freakish plotting: Michael’s new love
is kidnapped like his wife before him, and he has a chance to not mess up like
the first time.
The script is by Paul Schrader, and this is not some simple-minded writing job by him. In fact, with ideas of trusts and partnerships, and ideas of corporate incompetence, and land rights takeovers, and incestuous bait… with so many elements it actually is too convoluted to understand everybody’s exact motivation. Broad strokes, yes, it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the wildest of twists in the third act when we learn of a dual identity and the implications that arises. I mean… Wild! Ludicrous! Preposterous! It is also a sign that DePalma was having a ball with over-the-top melodrama, so over-the-top he wants to smack you silly. In truth, <em>Obsession</em> was a lot more fun than Hitchcock’s last five or six movies. I also started emotionally connecting to the major players by the end, the characters by then become, uh, rounded.
We meet two acquaintances of agitated nature (Jon Finch, Barry Foster), where one of them turns out to be a rapist and necktie strangler in working class London; the other will be framed for the murders. The late 60’s were looking tepid for the master, but <em>Frenzy</em> is just envelope-pushing enough that you wish Alfred Hitchcock had more energy to continue with this kind of debased, perverted thriller in the 70’s (he only had one more left in him, “Family Plot”). Delicious and demented passages, I mean that as a compliment. I only wish the movie didn’t have second act problems with gabby commentary and wormy digressions. The ending would be a far-fetched howler if it wasn’t handled by anybody besides Hitch; the final shot, an amusing collide of all the key players.
Alfred Hitchcock’s last foray, a semi-thriller with peculiar comedy—you sense he wanted to mix things up and have a hearty laugh. We get a convoluted story with two sets of characters. One, Barbara Harris is a fake psychic trying to match a client with a missing heir, she has a boyfriend in Bruce Dern who is a cab-driver and self-proclaimed detective. Two, William Devane and Karen Black are kidnappers and thieves whom get sloppier with their criminal activity as the movie progresses. Naturally, two storylines converge.
You couldn’t ask for a kookier pairing than Harris and Dern. They have lovers spats in this, they argue childishly, and Harris flips out and yanks Dern while he’s struggling to steer the car after the brakes have been pulled out—it’s an exciting mountain road sequence which is Hitch’s comic-thrills highlight. Devane and Black conduct some terrible acts in broad daylight, such as kidnap a bishop during mass. But they are too paranoid about this kooky couple “investigating” them, when it’s really for other search and reward matters. Leads to a potentially creepy and macabre climax that once again is played for laughs. <em>Family Plot</em> is about the dumb mishaps that happen during crime and bad detective work.
Right off the bat, <em>Mississippi Mermaid</em> comes off as a visually florid and ambitious work by Francois Truffaut. Jean-Paul Belmondo is the owner of a tobacco plantation on an island off the Indian Ocean (the French side) who selects a mail order bride. Catherine Deneuve arrives and looks nothing like the original picture sent, but he marries her anyway. Deneuve is on the demure and undemanding side and so the only troublesome worry is her frigidness, alas, Belmondo trusts her. Big mistake. Deneuve turns out to be a huge liability as a wife, and soon Belmondo is chasing her place to place. He wants revenge against this woman who has done him wrong, but he can’t follow through with it because he keeps finding her desirable. As a result, every time there is truce there is consequence and Deneuve keeps dragging down Belmondo. Isn’t Deneuve just the greatest tease, by the way? Only Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” and “The Man With Two Brains” is dirtier in her destruction.
I got the joke at some point, but Truffaut keeps elongating the predicament as if the movie needed to be some kind of bounteous odyssey. Still, the last shot is strongly illustrative and poetic as to what Deneuve has done and will continue doing to Belmondo.
<em>Raising Cain</em> begins awkward and never quite ceases not to be awkward in some respect (DePalma in the script intended the B-story to be the A-story, and the A-story to be the B-story, until he started editing it). Decided A-story: John Lithgow, depicting oodles of duality, is a child psychologist but a kidnapper and killer, too, and his schizophrenia is frightening. The movie doesn’t take long before Lithgow’s Carter Nix does something evil.
Brian DePalma is in experimentation mode on many levels throughout, and that itself is compelling. He uses dreams within a dream techniques, alas, we are never on sure footing if something has happened, or a projected memory of something that happened, or a delusional take of what happened. Married to Lithgow is Lolita Davidovich and while it makes sense that she craves adultery with Steven Bauer, it never quite makes sense why she fell in love with Lithgow in the first place. Their formation feels antiseptic and frigid.
At one point, a major “Psycho” homage with a car not quite submerging into a moat as intended. The twist is, the character is still alive. <em>Raising Cain</em> at its most ridiculous when a character survives after what looked like a perishing. It’s hard to take the movie seriously after that.
Unbelievable sexual connections, outlandish evil plotting that never fully is visually imagined, ludicrous timetables on when things take place. Against my better judgment, I still like DePalma’s film even though it has so many issues with it that are self-defeating. I like how DePalma takes split narrative choices and experiments with the non-linear for his thriller, and he always comes up with a peculiar shot. Maybe not great shots, but peculiar ones that are off the beaten path.
DePalma sets up a showboating tracking shot featuring a criminal psychologist and two cops that is a head-turner—and it’s bizarre he’s infatuated doing this shot with <em>supporting characters</em> of all things, not his leads.
Is the movie flawed? Oh yes, as you can tell, it is in so many, many ways. But it is not boring. It does things that are distinctive of DePalma but replete with Hitchcock homages, and is totally odd and weird. It is the kind of eccentric thriller that is not something you can find any given day.
135 Minutes. Rated R.
DRAMA / ADULT ORIENTATION / MASTERPIECE VIEWING
Film Cousins: “Mean Streets” (1973); “The Gambler” (1974); “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976); “Good Time” (2017).
