The battle to, in effect, win back free speech in movies took a long time - but that doesn’t mean the question of morality ended with a ratings system. And for a valid reason: in the early 1930s, the Legion of Decency used religious dogma to protest Hollywood’s depiction of, among other things, violence, miscegenation and “white slavery.” In response, studios implemented the Hays Code - a self-imposed censorship that severely restricted what could be shown in American movies the replacement of the Code with the letter-ratings we know today occurred in the 1960s. I think it’s a bad movie.ĭespite its prevalence in the early twentieth century, the subject of morality hasn’t really been a focus of recent conversations about movies. I happen to think that Uncut Gems is extremely well-made - but I also agree with my brother. Because “badness” isn’t a word associated solely with quality: it relates to morality, too. But I think the question can have another connotation - unintended, perhaps, but loaded with meaning. When we talk about movies being “bad,” we usually mean that they weren’t made well or that we found them unappealing. It was a simple remark, but it struck me as wonderfully pertinent. When it had ended, and we were walking to our car, my brother turned to me and asked, “That was bad, right?” But my parents and brother, along with the audience we saw it with, turned out to be troopers: only two people in the whole theater left before the movie was over. I hardly looked forward to Uncut Gems as a source of wholesome fun, let alone a viable family outing. I was seeing the new one purely as an intellectual exercise. I appreciated that movie, but it was not my cup of tea myopic and violent antihero neo-noirs aren’t usually where I get my kicks. I knew the Safdies’ work: I’d seen Good Time (2017) - the brothers’ stressful, sly parable on fraternal devotion and lost innocence - just a few months before. Two weeks ago, I saw Uncut Gems, the new movie directed by brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, with my whole family.
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