If you liked Adam Sandler’s role in “Uncut Gems” and want to see him in a similar role again, you may not have to wait too long.
During his press tour for “Hustle” on Netflix, the actor confirmed that he would work on another project involving Josh and Benny Safdie. The two brothers directed him in “Uncut Gems” and he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
Sandler told Vanity Fair that the plan was to start filming in late winter, and he also revealed that he expects this movie to also be as “intense” as “Uncut Gems” (which is not surprising if you’ve seen “Good Time” or other films by the Safdie Brothers).
While there are not many other known details about the project, we learned a bit more this afternoon (via Deadline):
“Netflix has now officially boarded the untitled feature, which is currently in development at the streamer. Sandler is attached to star with the Safdies writing, directing and producing.
Netflix would not confirm any other details, but sources say the hope is to shoot the project in the second quarter of 2023, which would likely make it Sandler’s next project. One insider close to the project said that start date is TBD as the siblings are still putting finishing touches on the script.
The streamer would also not confirm plot details, though several sources say it is likely set in the world of high-end card collecting.”
Although still unconfirmed, this is definitely a very exciting development!
But it’s now given us another, er, gem, thanks to co-star Julia Fox.
Some background: Fox was on a podcast — Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy — earlier this month and was asked about dating Kanye West, and when she was asked about being West’s muse, she replied, “I was Josh Safdie’s muse when he wrote Uncut Gems.”
Only she didn’t pronounce it “gems.” It was something like, “Uncut JAAYEEEUMMS.”
And TikTok is having a field day with it with so many memes:
LeBron James and his SpringHill Entertainment company are creating a movie about a basketball scout who will be played by Adam Sandler.
LeBron James must have really loved the critically acclaimed basketball-themed movie “Uncut Gems,” starring Adam Silver and former Boston Celtics star Kevin Garnett because now LeBron is behind a basketball-themed production involving Sandler of his own.
Collider’s Jeff Sneider reported on Monday that Sandler will play a professional basketball scout that has suddenly found himself out of the league in the movie “Hustle,” executive produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter. Here’s the plot, according to Sneider.
The story follows an American basketball scout (Sandler) who is unjustly fired after discovering a once-in-a-lifetime player abroad. The scout decides to bring the player to America to prove that they both have what it takes to make it in the NBA.
Having Sandler play an NBA scout sounds like a great role, for Sandler is a huge basketball fan himself and can definitely play a character who spends a great deal of his time on the road. Also, given LeBron’s past basketball productions, such as “Survivor’s Remorse,” I expect that it should be a pretty accurate depiction of NBA life.
One of the more intriguing parts of the movie is where the special foreign player will be from, as Sneider reports that the original script featured a Chinese streetball phenom that comes to the basketball hub of Los Angeles. Given the current state of affairs between the NBA and China, that may seem unbelievable, but “Survivor’s Remorse” spoke very openly about the role of China in the world of basketball (We are doing a podcast about this show, by the way!) and I suspect that the current state of things won’t change that, at least in more artistic forms. However, it will be interesting if this aspect of the script does indeed change.
But at least he still has his sense of humor about missing out on a shot at an Academy Award.
The actor and comedian tweeted not long after the nominations were announced and gave the world a perfectly solid good news/bad news scenario: he lost out on a nomination, but the man known for having more casual sartorial choices no longer has to wear suits to premieres and to the Oscar ceremony. Also: shoutout to The Waterboy star Kathy Bates for her 2020 nomination for Richard Jewell!
Bad news: Sandman gets no love from the Academy. Good news: Sandman can stop wearing suits. Congrats to all my friends who got nominated, especially Mama. pic.twitter.com/o1Ep3E7GRB
As for what’s next for Sandler? Back in December, per Entertainment Weekly, he told Howard Stern, “If I don’t get (an Oscar nomination), I’m going to (expletive) come back and do one again that is so bad on purpose just to make you all pay. That’s how I get them.”
I’m not going to pretend to have seen all of the movies that garnered Oscar nominations on Monday.
But I have seen Uncut Gems. And I can say this with relative certainty: Adam Sandler got robbed.
Oh sure, the Leading Actor category is stuffed this year. Leonardo DiCaprio (Once Upon a Time … inHollywood), Adam Driver (Marriage Story) and Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) all seemed like shoo-ins. I’ve heard some buzz about legendary director Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory and The Two Popes, which produced nominees Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce, respectively.
But let’s take a minute and think about Sandler’s performance.
I’ve never seen Sandler play a character like this — Howard Ratner, the scheming, hustling diamond district jewelry dealer whose string-pulling and gambling all over New York City drives him further and further into trouble with criminals and his family — one who’s inherently unlikable … and makes us root for him.
Gone is the family man who wants to bring joy to the screen and entertain us. His Ratner is always smiling, his eyes hidden many times by his transition lenses like a poker pro, as he finds the next get-rich-and-settle-my-debts-at-the-same-time scheme. In this case, it’s with his co-star, future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett playing himself, finding exactly the right way to convince Garnett to blow away the competition just so Ratner can win some big-money bets.
The Sandler we’ve known for decades — even through some of his more serious roles in flicks like Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me — is gone. And that’s a huge reason he deserves the nomination even if he probably wouldn’t have won the award (I think this is Phoenix’s race to lose).
Was it because the movie was so sports-centric that it turned off voters? Was it TOO gritty? Was it because when you first think of Sandler, you think of Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, Robbie Hart, Bobby Boucher and Longfellow Deeds? If any of those are the reasons, that’s ridiculous.
Here are others who agree:
I’m just gonna stop campaigning for people to get Oscars. I’m obviously a curse. Adam Sandler is SO GOOD in Uncut Gems. #Oscars Hey Academy… pic.twitter.com/4zMmi1oWOM
i’ve been awake for all of two minutes, i’m so sick i can barely move, and i see that adam sandler is not nominated for best actor pic.twitter.com/jeLDdbEzKY
Rajon Rondo is a member of Kevin Garnett’s Boston Celtics teams but he’s definitely a Los Angeles Lakers now and a fan of LeBron James.
Rajon Rondo is caught between a rhetorical battle being waged by his former Boston Celtics teammate Kevin Garnett against LeBron James from their battles together from earlier in the decade.
Garnett didn’t want to entertain discussions during a recent episode of the Bill Simmons podcast about LeBron’s heroic Game 6 win at Boston in 2012 and instead focused on how the Celtics “broke” LeBron when he was with the Cavaliers in 2010. Garnett’s comments have been making the rounds and bringing back all of those old battles to light.
Rondo was the starting point guard for the Celtics teams that won the 2008 Championship and went to the 2010 NBA Finals, but he’s a Laker now. In addition to that, he and LeBron have talked about sharing a high-level basketball IQ. So when he was asked about LeBron, Rondo said that he “loves” being his teammate.
I thought it was important to clarify whether Rondo does, in fact, like LeBron. He said, "I love LeBron. He’s one of my favorite teammates i’ve ever played for. He’s a very unselfish person."
Now that Garnett is out of the league, he has more time to dwell on the opportunities that the Celtics missed on. Garnett is one of the few people that know what it feels like to beat LeBron James in a playoff series in the 2010s, so it’s understandable that he wouldn’t be peachy about it all these years later. Rondo knows that too but as his career has evolved, he may help LeBron cement his legacy even more.
During an appearance on the Bill Simmons podcast, Kevin Garnett said the 2010 Celtics “broke” then Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James.
Just in case you were wondering, the Boston Celtics from the late 2000s and early 2010s are still salty about only getting one championship during a run when they believed they were the best team of the era.
The subject of those Celtics teams has come up more recently due to Adam Sandler’s new movie “Uncut Gems,” which stars the defensive and emotional leader of those Celtics teams, Kevin Garnett. Garnett joined Sandler in an interview with Bill Simmons on the Bill Simmons podcast, where they talked about the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals when LeBron finally got over the hump and beat the Celtics.
Garnett of course deflected talking about the 2012 Finals and instead went for one of the glory moments of his run in Boston, defeating LeBron in the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals that sent him on his way to Miami later that summer.
“We broke LeBron. So get your a** out of here with that.”
OK, so remember that, alright? Stop bringing it up. So they was talking (expletive) to him, the media. And the league knew that they had an agenda in which we wasn’t a part of the agenda. And that’s how they ended up winning that series. Yeah, I said it…. Man listen, let me tell something to you. The C’s, we didn’t give a (expletive) about LeBron. We didn’t fear LeBron, and we didn’t think that he could beat all five of us. And that’s how it felt. He was trying to consolidate because he didn’t want the pressure on him. You understand?”
Things are still sensitive for Garnett and they probably always will be, given the way that he talked about it. James, of course, overcame a 3-2 series deficit in the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals by putting together one of the best performances in playoff history by scoring 45 points in Boston to force a Game 7.
James and his Heat team would eventually win Game 7 before going on to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games in the 2012 NBA Finals, earning LeBron his first NBA title. LeBron’s career narrative can never be told without Boston and Garnett’s attitude, to this day, is a big reason why.
NEW YORK — If you’re looking for a nice, comfortable, feel-good movie to watch this holiday season, Uncut Gems is not it.
It’s the unflinching tale of Howard Ratner (played to nebbishy, weasely perfection by Adam Sandler), a New York diamond district jewelry dealer who has made a mess of his life — his marriage is about to end, his life is threatened, he’s in debt to everyone and constantly being chased and shaken down — partially due to a sports gambling habit that has him scrambling to pay back what he owes.
But there’s a lingering question that stuck with me after watching the film written and directed by Benny and Josh Safdie: why did they need to cast Kevin Garnett in the role and base the events around the 2012 Eastern Conference semifinals between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers?
It was a query I didn’t get to ask during an early December roundtable at a midtown Manhattan hotel attended by Sandler, Garnett and the Safdies. But you don’t need them to tell you why. Just watch the film.
The Safdies’ style is gritty, made to feel more like a documentary. In Uncut Gems, the camera constantly shakes. The sound is a near-constant, with characters talking over each other. Although Sandler’s Ratner is fictional, he’s meant to feel as real as possible.
“We had nights where I met a lot of guys who gambled and whose lives got ruined because of gambling and got to know their stories,” Sandler said earlier this month at the aforementioned roundtable. “We were very informed about the jewelry world and gambling world and looked at a lot of footage, documentaries on people, men who lost their families and everything and went to jail.”
That tells you a lot about the feel the Safdies were going for. Instead of casting an actor as a basketball player who comes into Ratner’s shop and discovers an uncut opal from Ethiopia that he thinks gives him strength to play well during the series, they cast Garnett to play himself. Perhaps that attempt to be as real as possible also helped his performance.
“It took me back,” Garnett said. “I felt like I was actually in the past. I felt actually able to relate to the exchange between Adam and myself, I felt like I’m here talking to Jacob (editor’s note: I assume he’s talking about Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo here) about how he can ‘knock some of these zeroes down.'”
There are also two scenes — and I’ll try really hard not to spoil too much — surrounding two of those contests in the seven-game series in which the stress the audience feels throughout the film gets ratcheted up fifty-fold. Will the 36-year-old Garnett deliver for the Celtics and, in turn, help Ratner win some crucial bets? And will that, in turn redeem a mostly nonredeemable character who we’re rooting for?
Singer The Weeknd appears in the film too, with seemingly the same goal in mind: making a fictional story seem all too real and pushing the stakes over the top. And speaking with the Safdies, you can tell that’s what excites them.
Josh Safdie explained that they needed to find a series of games in which Garnett would succeed with the opal and struggle without it. Garnett’s 2012 semifinals was perfect — he had two games where he looked human and the rest where he was his usual self. That was thrilling to the filmmakers.
“The reality dictated the bet, and the story,” Josh Safdie said. “It was kind of incredible to fit this fictional world around that real event.”
NEW YORK — Kevin Garnett’s Hall of Fame-level intensity is still so much a part of him, even though he’s in the middle of telling a story from his playing days and not staring down a defender on an NBA court.
He’s recounting a practice he had with former Boston Celtics head coach Doc Rivers in which the now-Los Angeles Clippers bench boss turned Garnett into a decoy who was asked to act like he was going to get the ball out of a timeout. Garnett wasn’t doing it exactly the way his persnickety coach wanted it and the practice of that play seemed endless.
Garnett imitates Rivers screaming at him, banging a table at which sits his Uncut Gems co-star Adam Sandler, the film’s co-directors Benny and Josh Safdie, and a mix of local and national reporters who have come to interview them at a midtown Manhattan hotel.
And, as always, he owns the room.
“I WANT YOU TO CLAP MORE THAN THAT!” he shouts, not quite nailing Rivers’ hoarse baritone, not that it matters.
It’s both that story and the way Garnett tells it that explains why he shines in the film, the gritty, realistic-but-fictional tale of jeweler Howard Ratner (Sandler), who spends the movie in way over his head because of his sports betting habit. The ex-NBA star plays himself in 2012, when he discovers a fictional uncut opal from Ethiopia provided to him by Ratner is actually the good-luck charm giving him the power to beat the Philadelphia 76ers in the playoffs. But Ratner needs it back to pay off his debts, which causes some friction between the two.
Benny Safdie actually worked with Rivers to get a voiceover for the film for a fictional locker room scene. He said he asked the now-Clippers bench boss if he knew Garnett was a talented actor.
“Of course I did,” Safdie remembers hearing. “I had a play designed that rested on his acting abilities. Coming out of the huddle he was supposed to act really cocky.”
That’s when Garnett the storyteller took over, becoming a one-man show.
The funny thing is, Garnett wasn’t the Safdies first choice for the role.
In 2010, Benny Safdie recalled, former Knick Amar’e Stoudemire was their preferred choice, partially because the movie starts with an Ethiopian Jewish tribe finding the opal, and they could see how that would connect with the man who converted to Judaism.
But the Safdies’ agents suggested they shoot for an even bigger name: Kobe Bryant. When they were informed the Los Angeles Lakers legend was more interested in directing, they moved on to Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid.
“Him being an African player from Cameroon,” Safdie says, “the ideas of reclamation were powerful and then we couldn’t shoot in the season.”
Initially, the lifelong diehard New York Knicks fans — and that might be an understatement, Benny said he once called out franchise legend John Starks on the street — hated the idea of casting a player they hated.
But once they met Garnett, they realized he was perfect.
“It was the moment I realized my Knicks fandom is actually a sickness,” Benny says. “It eclipsed my film intelligence so I actually wasn’t able to realize that he’s an incredible performer and goes out every night in front of 20,000 people and gets the audience to hate him. That’s what drives him.”
“The second we talked with him,” he adds, “he was the one guy we didn’t want to get off the phone with, and then we met up with him. He’s an incredible storyteller.”
It also helped that Garnett fit the narrative the Safdies were looking for — Josh explains they figured out they could base the entire plot of the movie around Garnett’s ups and downs in the 2012 Eastern Semifinals, giving the movie a high level of intensity that it might not have if it was about a fictional NBA player.
And is it ever intense. Garnett is at the center of some of the less heart-pounding scenes, but it’s hard to take your eyes off of him as he negotiates with Sandler and shows his desperation when he tries to hang on to the opal jewel at the center of the film’s title. In one memorable scene, you can see the wheels turning in Ratner’s head as he realizes he can let Garnett have the opal, but that he can then use that to his advantage at a sportsbook.
Garnett felt comfortable in his role, pointing out that his daily work before he went to set was the same as what he put in before NBA games watching film.
“Acting is preparation, just like anything else,” he says. “I didn’t want to fail them. They took a risk on me being in there, playing this part … at least you can come in and be professional.”
“Someone taught me (when I did) television: ‘Know where you’re going when you’re coming out of the driveway,'” he adds.
Benny Safdie praises Garnett for his ability to memorize lines, stay with scenes and improvise. And Sandler, who’s getting some Oscar buzz for his dark turn as Ratner, gave him the highest praise of all.
“You were incredible,” he says to his co-star. “He was so focused and on every moment.”
