I have seen things in Heaven and in Hell and much in-between. I have not, however, ever viewed a movie of the damned, a celluloid nightmare offending and insulting the God of Film so thoroughly that this God has called upon everyone involved in the film to be condemned to a timeless void, where there is no escaping reruns of "The View" are pervasive and endless. Watching this movie is not purgatory. No, it is something else, something worse, an empty place where all contributing factors involved making it add up to something resembling, but far worse than, Nihilism. They will not be able to make another as soulless movie act like it, a movie believing in nothing, less than nothing that without regret or remorse happily purports to be purposeful and chalked full of meaning, so numbingly faceless trying to imitate authentic art that the reel itself instinctively recoils, as one would from a frothing, leaping rat, poisonous jumping spider or pestilence rapidly infecting the land. After watching, we see a distinct parallel process, a living hell on earth, of something produced that is nothing, creating a horrible betrayal, the insult to the injury paying to sign up for suffering. A part of us withers away and dies, trying to unsee, like the fetid aftermath of murderous uprising, the dead splattered on the street and the holes from the bullets leaking their life away. How does one intentionally and purposefully irritate and agitate? By the willfully betrayal and abandonment of inauthenticity, whatever form it may take. In the era of silent films, there was no Hell. The stifled actors, held captive by time and technology, still had the freedom of movement and passion, even as the early frames did their best to disavow social awareness with the intent of inducing a corrective emotional experience. Adam Sandler trying his best to imitate Al Pacino at his worst does not appall, it is cheered, silencing the corpse writing, direction and producing, obscuring the lord of the flies underlying it, begetting confusion atop confusion. But somehow the audience and the critics, perhaps caught up in an otherworldly spell, have convinced themselves they do not feel horrible after watching, assuming their perplexing admonishment is evidence of a masterpiece, in denial and rationalizing, giving a thumbs up, as if Sandler performance transcends Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction. That crazy making mixed messaging of arbitrary purposelessness has happened because this is a movie of the damned, and all movies of the damned, full of fire and devoid of light and characterized by confusion, deliver the devil living there with a direct line to manipulate audiences away from properly condemning evil, the truth eaten by a horde of ghastly locusts, happily accepting that timeless nothingness is meaningful and objectively undistorted, sending the small helpless collective audience brain bursting, like a fish gasping for air crushed underneath the fisherman's boot, assuming Sandler's performance must be accepted with impunity.

The torture does not end here. Uncut Gems is further darkened by its dank, detestable smell, a rat-sewer stench stemming from the thousands of hideous movies before it, therefore enabling it. Consider the foul odor of celluloid hell, like a rotting worm-infested body, wasting away in a coffin under a grave in liquifying abandon. Do this, and you will better understand how "Uncut Gems" chokes on the ashes of Mean Streets and every other movie like it, and how its eye-clawing stench is amplified by it's bad faith intention, tricking us into believing something profound is happening when the opposite is true, that a putrescent film of carcass and death, reeking putrescence, is not beyond comprehension. No, it is hell. Knowing this, and you will properly understand. And yet, the film, in and of itself as awful as it is, is not the absolute supreme torture the viewer is subjected to. The real pain is Adam Sandler asking you to place your unscarred hand into a fire and leave it there to simmer and burn. Sometimes, such brimstone pain is required to produce a meaningful piece of art. Not so with Gemstones, a porous, pus infected scam burning with aborted rage and banal commonplace of regurgitated themes. And this celluloid devil, if forced to confess, would admit to its purposeful damnation, seeing their involvement costing them their soul because of a lie, another deepening layer of Hell, concocted to avoid deserved guilt otherwise surely nesting in the very marrow of boundless nothingness, like the furious boiling of organs and evisceration of blood, this is what Hell delivers, an anti-aliveness, a rancidity of cinema, evaporating suspenseful disbelief and subjugating and sucking the heart of the every eager moviegoer into possession, screaming from the innocence of eyes wide-open, screaming to be validated, wanting nothing more to lose themselves in the magic and mystery of the theater and experiencing the opposite.