Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close es un filme interesante. Es una de esas películas que vienen a lo largo del año y dividen al publico. Es una película llena de buenas intenciones y tremendas actuaciones, pero que al mismo tiempo, al final me dejo un poco molesto. Creo que había potencial en el tema central de la historia. Por ende, te va a encantar o la vas a odiar.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close cuenta la historia de un chico de nueve años llamado Oskar Shell (Thomas Horn), quien lleva una maravillosa relación con su padre (Tom Hanks), la cual incluye encontrar juntos pequeñas cosas en la ciudad de Nueva York. Estos tesoros, aunque insignificantes para cualquier otra persona, para ellos es algo bien especial. Todo parece ir bien para el pequeño Oskar, pero un día, su padre es víctima de un atentado terrorista el 11 de septiembre del 2001. Aproximadamente dos años después del “peor día”, Oskar encuentra entre las cosas de su padre, dentro de un jarrón azul, un sobre con una llave y el nombre Black escrito. Posteriormente, Oskar inicia una busqueda por toda la ciudad de Nueva York, conociendo gente interesante y diversa, con el fin de encontrar a esa persona de apellido Black, y lograr encontrar lo que la llave abre. El pequeño piensa que esta es la ultima expedición que su difunto padre le dejo.

El guión de la película, a cargo de Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, Munich), esta basado en la novela de Jonathan Safran Foer del 2005. Su director, Stephen Daldry es mejor conocido por su filme Billy Elliot del 2000.

Lo mas que me gusto de la película lo fue las actuaciones fuertes del elenco entero. Tom Hanks, en su pequeña actuación, logra presentar la dinámica peculiar que tenia con su hijo de manera increíble. Sandra Bullock, interpretando a la madre de Oskar, tiene uno de los papeles mas difíciles del filme y lo logra con una sencillez y realidad espectacular; es una madre que perdió al amor de su vida y al padre de su hijo, con casi ningún tiempo de llorar lo transcurrido. Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright y Max von Sydow son realmente lo mas brillante de la película; sus actuaciones resaltan grandemente. Honestamente, cuando aparece el personaje de Max von Sydow a mitad de la película, me interese nuevamente por la misión del pequeño Oskar.

Lo que no me gusto de Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close es el hecho de que el guion y director tratan de manipularte a sentir algo en cuestion de sentimientos sin en verdad, la pelicula merecerlo. Es como si trataran demasiado de que el publico salga llorando del filme. Sí, no cabe duda de que hay partes que merecen esta atencion de tu parte; pero el usar el ataque del 11 de septiembre como la base para causar esto durante toda la película es un poquito irritante. Otra cosa que me molesto fue la actuación exagerada en la mayoría de la película del pequeño Thomas Horn como Oskar. Hubo momentos que su gritería y actitud me sacaban de la trama. También me preguntaba, ¿que hace un niño que no es muy social, con aparentemente un desorden leve, con varios miedos peculiares, caminando por todo Nueva York solo y conociendo gentre extraña? Esto no me hacia sentido. Al final dan un tipo de explicación a esta misma pregunta, la cual fue muy tarde y algo tonta para mi gusto.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close es una película decente, con mucho corazón, pero al mismo tiempo, perdida y sin rumbo.  El filme tenia una idea extraordinaria, una que merecía que se tocara, pero la verdad es que el director en momentos parecía que no sabia para donde iba. Varias veces durante el filme me decía, “esta película no tiene rumbo; el director esta perdido y all over the place”. También la encontré demasiado larga para mis gustos. Las actuaciones son de alta calidad, en especial Wright y Max von Sydow. El pequeño Thomas Horn tiene mucho talento, pero su actuación puede convertirse un poco tediosa en varias ocasiones. De la manera en que representan los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre, son con buen gusto y en cierto sentido, original.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close se lleva ★★★

Directed by Stephen Daldry, Oskar, who lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, is convinced that his dad left a final message for him somewhere in the city. Upon finding a mysterious key in his father’s closet, Oskar sets out in search of the lock it fits. Feeling disconnected from his grieving mother and driven by a tirelessly active mind, Oskar has a journey of discovery that takes him beyond his loss and leads him to a better understanding of the world.

Video made for a Buzzed Trucks competition, some rad summer skating, edited/filmed by Mike Girard.

The best video ever made and that ever will be made.

Old video, new ones to come.

Edit made from a skate trip this summer and some footage from after Ham Jam 2.

The Ultimate Gift is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. You probably haven’t heard of it. Good for you. I don’t want to imply that it’s well-made, because it’s not, but there are certainly worse-made movies out there. Little Man, Date Movie, Space Mutiny, etc. But The Ultimate Gift is a special brand of awful because it takes a little girl’s cancer and uses it as nothing more than a plot point with which to forward the main character’s journey of self-discovery. Once the main character has supposedly become a better person, the little girl dies and no one really cares. Not sure about you, but to me, that is offensive. Now imagine a movie which does the same, only instead of using a cancer-stricken child, it uses a national tragedy the scope of which is still too large for many Americans to comprehend. Thanks to director Stephen Daldry, screenwriter Eric Roth, and a passel of others, you don’t have to imagine it. They’ve made it. And it’s called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

This film is far from the first to concern itself with 9/11, but it is by far the most tasteless. United 93 was a great movie about 9/11 because Paul Greengrass sugarcoated nothing and treated you, the viewer, as an adult capable of dealing with serious issues. Even Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Hollywood gloss aside, was largely removed from his usual visual pyrotechnics and trickery. Stephen Daldry, whose last film, The Reader, employed the Holocaust as a backdrop, has no such qualms about taste or restraint. The film’s opening moments show a clear blue sky, with Tom Hanks’ feet and hands and head slowly flapping into frame as he leaps from the Twin Towers, set to Alexandre Desplat’s tranquil piano music. This is not a moment of horror, but one of peace and supposed beauty. If that’s not enough for you, never fear; later on, we get to see Hanks hurtling straight toward the camera in the tackiest money shot I can remember.

Hanks plays the father of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a young boy who is trying to process his dad’s death in the wake of 9/11. That is inherently sad. It doesn’t need any decoration or ornamentation to be sad; it just is. That’s far too simple for Daldry, Roth & Co., though. They approach the subject with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer to the face. So, instead of a little boy grieving his dead father, this is what we get: Oskar finds a key in a vase in a closet and assumes that it is one final quest left from his father, who often played games with him and gave him puzzles to solve. The key is in an envelope marked “Black,” so Oskar decides to visit everyone listed in the phone book with the last name Black, sure that it will lead him to the lock. Oh, Oskar also has undiagnosed Asperger’s and wanders New York City–often alone–shaking a tambourine. I ask you, how is any adult supposed to take that story seriously? This would be a children’s film if it wasn’t about the worst American tragedy of the 21st century.

Thomas Horn, a 2010 Jeopardy! Kids Week champ, is not a born actor. It’s not entirely his fault: no child, and very few adults, would be capable of playing this role successfully. Still, in a year that gave us numerous wonderful child performances (Joel Courtney in Super 8 and Sarina Farhadi in A Separation, to name just a couple), Horn’s is an unmitigated disaster. I don’t know anyone with Asperger’s, so perhaps I’m not the best judge, but Oskar seems loaded with so many quirky eccentricities that he quickly becomes a work of fantasy. And Horn approaches the material with absolutely no nuance, blaring and bleating every single one of those quirks. Like a really severe, prepubescent Woody Allen, Oskar has a long list of things that make him “panicky,” and one of the movie’s worst sequences occurs when Oskar–who also narrates the picture–starts rattling them off. An excerpt: “Speeding things! Loud things! Things with lights! THINGS WITH WINGS!” Daldry, that stranger to subtlety in all its forms, helpfully shows us close-ups and quick cuts of all those things. I understand that a child who lost his father in a great tragedy is going to be riddled with insecurities and fears and traumas, but this is not a realistic portrait of that child.

Also, Oskar’s an asshole. He is mean to everyone he comes across. It’s like that episode of Community where Abed–another character who probably has Asperger’s–realizes the girls like him when he’s mean to the other girls and can’t stop. John Goodman has the great misfortune of popping up as the doorman at the kid’s building, and is ruthlessly mocked at every turn. More significantly, Max von Sydow accompanies Oskar on his journey, playing a mute man known only as the Renter. Lest being mute seem too simple and realistic a character trait, von Sydow has the words “YES” and “NO” printed on his hands, like Robert Mitchum’s knuckles bearing the words “LOVE” and “HATE” in The Night of the Hunter, only dumb. Von Sydow, who starred in 13 films for Ingmar Bergman, and who has worked with such esteemed filmmakers as William Friedkin, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese, is here reduced to holding up a paper that says, “I’M TIRED I GO TO BED.” So anyway, back to the point, Oskar is also a total dick to the Renter, who does nothing but help, be reasonable, and hold up his “YES” and “NO” hands. Again, I don’t know anyone with Asperger’s, and again, a kid losing his dad is going to lash out. Still, the way the character is directed, written, and performed, he seems an obnoxious monster.

Sandra Bullock also appears as Oskar’s mother, in a thankless role designed to make you remember that she won an Oscar for The Blind Side and now has free reign to star in other such schamltzy Oscar bait. Which, by the way, congratulations to everyone involved for the film’s surprise nomination for Best Picture. That’s sort of the cherry on top of its 9/11 exploitation sundae. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close crams in nearly every major thing Academy voters love to reward: tragedy, disability, major historical events, big stars looking sad, and a happy ending neatly tied up in a bow. I won’t reveal exactly how the film ends, but boy, let me tell you, I’ve seen conspiracy thrillers with more plausible conclusions. The superhuman feats it requires of one character are so unrealistic it’s like the movie is intentionally pulling back the curtain on itself to reveal the whole thing as one big joke. Like the cancer girl in The Ultimate Gift, once Oskar has completed his journey, 9/11 is done away with, and–BRIEF SPOILER ALERT, I guess–the Twin Towers are immortalized as a handmade pop-up book. When Bullock pulls a little ribbon inside the book, it reveals falling stick figures.

There was another movie last year, which might still be playing near you, also about a boy with a key he hoped would unlock a final message from his dead father. That movie is called Hugo, it is directed by Martin Scorsese, it is also nominated for Best Picture, and it achieves all the poignancy which Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, for all its self-important preening, never comes within a hair’s breadth of. Go watch Hugo. You can experience all of the same emotions this film wanted you to feel, without the nasty aftertaste.

Dir. Stephen Daldry
(2011, PG-13, 129 min)

I read Jonathan Safran Foer‘s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close early last year, so this is one of the rare cases when I can watch a film and say, “The book was better.” I won’t say that, though, because actually the movie is better. Safran Foer is a writer of unmistakable skill, but also self-indulgence: pseudo-existentialism, purple prose, extravagant character histories. The novel was adapted into a screenplay by Eric Roth (Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), who streamlines the story, reducing it to its most workable elements, and mostly excises a parallel storyline that I think the book would have been better off without. The result is a more conventional narrative, but also a more compelling one. Less is more.

Thomas Horn makes his acting debut as Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old New York City boy whose father died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He’s autistic, or on the borderline; he explains at one point that he was tested for Asperger’s but that the results weren’t conclusive. His condition comes through more clearly in film than it did on the page; the visual medium is better able to convey the sensory overload of a city like New York – hence the title – but although I have no personal experience with autism, it seemed to me that the film sometimes tries to have its cake and eat it to. The boy is just autistic enough to be precociously intelligent, but functional enough to have a curiously unsupervised adventure through the five boroughs. He speaks with maturity beyond his age and doesn’t seem to have difficulty communicating, even though he tells us briefly that he has trouble talking to people; well, he’s more outgoing than I am, and I’m pretty sure I’m not autistic.

Sandra Bullock, as Linda Schell

Though the lead character is somewhat problematic, the rest of the cast is spot-on, especially Sandra Bullock, whose relatively brief supporting turn as Oskar’s mother turns out to be the heart of the film; she is excellent here, as she was in Crash, Infamous, 28 Days, and even While You Were Sleeping. Why on Earth did the Academy honor her for The Blind Side and not one of her infinitely better performances? Viola Davis also has a small role in this film, as a woman Oskar seeks out for information about his father. She fleshes out so complete a character in her brief time – she can express a life’s experience with a look – that I’m baffled as to why she is so often squandered on roles as psychiatrists and social workers, whose only purpose is to listen to less interesting characters talk. Max von Sydow doesn’t say anything at all as a mute tenant who lives with his grandmother across the street; his role is greatly reduced from the novel, and he is dealt with rather abruptly in this screenplay, though von Sydow gives him depth and feeling.

The film is structured around 9/11 – “the Worst Day,” as Oskar calls it – circling the event until we get to the heart of his distress. The way it uses flashbacks and editing to explore a traumatic event reminded me of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is a great film where this is merely a good one, but Extremely Loud is nevertheless gracefully assembled for strong effect. It has been accused of being manipulative, but I don’t think so, certainly no more than other sentimental films from the last year that mostly avoided such criticisms. I think a tougher, more direct approach to the protagonist could only have helped – to approach Oskar’s likely autism as more than a set of behavioral quirks – but Daldry is respectful with the subject matter and does not exploit it. Some films shamelessly tug on the heartstrings like a dog on a choke chain. For the most part, this one earns our feelings.

Film #10: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a film with sensitive subject matter. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell (newcomer Thomas Horn) lives in New York City and very possibly has Asperger Syndrome. It’s not debilitating or anything, but he does have some trouble in social situations and he has a strong proclivity for logic and order. It’s hard for him when something happens that doesn’t make sense. And when his dad (Tom Hanks), the only one who seems to really “get” him, is killed in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, Oskar has a hard time coming to terms with it. A year after “the worst day”, Oskar finds a key hidden inside a vase in his father’s closet. Convinced that this is the start of an elaborate game set up by his dad, and hoping that by solving it things will make more sense, Oskar sets out to contact 417 people with the surname “Black” scattered around New York City.

I had a difficult time enjoying myself for the first part of this film. Although I found the story – a kid with some personal issues but intelligent as all hell setting out on a quixotic mission to find meaning in the face of tragedy – pretty neat, it had to take some pretty preposterous turns to get there. I was rolling my eyes at the way he fought himself into Viola Davis’ house, the first ‘Black’ he encounters, and at the answering machine tape swap that was important to the story but seemed entirely unlikely. Worst of all, the tone was dreary for far too long. I understand that when you have a movie with a critical moment hinged upon 9/11, it’s not going to be the cheeriest of films, but there was an oppressive angst to the entire first act. For the longest time, Sandra Bullock (as Oskar’s mom) got to play only a single note: Distressed mother. And there’s a ton of weight on Thomas Horn’s shoulder, onscreen for every scene, with narration to boot. I worried early on, when he started listing the things that made him nervous ever since “the worst day”, culminating in his broken voice shrieking each word. It was all very unpleasant, to say the least.

But then something amazing happens, something I rarely see in movies that start off bad: It pulled itself together. I’m going to give a lot of credit to Max Von Sydow, nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for a role that seriously breathes life into the film. Though his mysterious role is easy to decode early on, it doesn’t make his silent ‘Renter’ character, with “yes” written on one hand and “no” on the other, any less fascinating. I previously read Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and it seems like he has a knack for writing interesting old men with troubled pasts. It’s good that they found such a seasoned and talented actor for the part. The Renter brings back the playful wit absent from the film since Hanks’ departure, and gives Horn a steady force to bounce his acting off of. The scene when Oskar breaks down and tells the Renter what he’s been doing is one of the high points of the film, and totally redeems Horn for the aforementioned yelly list scene.

From that point on, the movie is an enjoyable watch. Horn’s mission culminates in another excellent scene, this time with Jeffrey Wright, where the two characters, despite their generational gaps, share in their despair over the way their fathers left them. It’s a quiet and somber scene, and though it may not be the end to his search that Oskar was hoping for, it’s definitely an end to the movie that makes it all worth it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at first seems like it’s going to be the sappy and pretentious Oscar-bait you may be fearing, but after Max Von Sydow’s entrance, the film is able to find a perfect mixture of emotion and fun, and wraps itself up beautifully.

Final rating: 7/10

–James A. Janisse

Stray Observations:

• I also appreciate the part of the film that was post-Jeffrey Wright, with Sandra Bullock’s character getting some redemption. It may have taken a little away from Oskar’s quest for me, but it put much more into her character.
• There were a couple of really cool shots of grandeur showing the city of New York. The first was on the bridge right after Horn squawked out the list of things that upset him, another was when he was first setting out on his journey through the city.
• Props to Alexandre Desplat for yet another fine score. The music was perfect, hitting every note it needed to, from playful to melancholy.
• Oh yeah, John Goodman was in there. Good times watching him cuss at little kids. Good times.
• It always pisses me off when well-known adult actors get top billing instead of newcomer child actors, even when the latter is onscreen a thousand times more than the former.

Every year around January/February I realize I haven’t seen most of the Oscar-nominated films, and I make a scramble to see them all so the awards show can be more satisfying. I’ve got a little over three weeks to catch 6-15 movies (depending on how many categories I want to be prepared for). We’ll see what happens.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly the its performances. The movie stars newcomer, Thomas Horn, who amazingly outshines both Bullock and Hanks with his eloquence and raw emotion. Based on his dynamic acting, you would think Horn has been acting for years, while in reality, Daldry handpicked him off an episode of Kids’ Week Jeopardy! where he earned $30,000. For a first performance, it’s an amazing feat to carry an entire movie, and Horn did more than just that here. He brings the viewer on emotional roller coaster; at moments you hate him, you pity him, you love him, all while feeling privileged to view this young boy’s coming of age. The story brings forth a unique character in Oskar Schell, and Thomas Horn completely fit the bill.

The film’s other great performance is by Oscar nominee, Max von Syndow, who plays the Boarder. Like the character of Oskar Schell, the Boarder is also extremely unique. von Syndow has no speaking lines throughout the entire movie, only using body language, a notebook and his hands, with the words “yes” and “no” on each palm, to communicate. While the role seems incredibly challenging, von Syndow makes it both believable and effortless, and has earned and Academy Award nomination for his performance.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close also maintains the standard of quality Stephen Daldry has been known for. In his second collaboration with cinematographer, Chris Menges (The Reader), the film does New York City incredible justice, complete with vivid colors and stunning shots. Daldry is also aided by the incredible Alexandre Desplat, (The King’s Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox) who wrote beautiful piano pieces for the movie. The combination of these elements makes for a delightful and engaging product.

The film’s main flaw is in its screenplay. While the unconventional nature of the story, as well as its misfit cast of characters comes off as charming, the dialogue at time seemed extremely contrived. At times it seemed like the film itself felt that it was special, and though it was a worth the watch, it still does not seem worthy of a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. If screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) would have made the script a bit less dependent on Oskar Schell’s narration, and a bit more visually based, the script may have been improved, but unfortunately this seemed to be the film’s biggest flaw.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is emotionally charged and undoubtedly worth a viewing for its look, its performance and its score, but the script may leave some with something to be desired, even while the story seems to lend itself to success.

7/10

Review by Jamie Rogers

I’m not sure I’d put the film in the ranks of my favorite films of the year, like The Descendants and The Artist.  But Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is better than what most critics said (at least in my opinion).

The story revolves around an 11-year old boy named Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who had a tremendously good relationship with his father Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks), a jeweler who loves science and his family.  Thomas gives his son treasure hunts where he explores the city and discovers mysteries.

But Thomas goes to a meeting in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and leaves 6 messages for his wife Linda (Sandra Bullock) and Oskar.  These messages are emotionally attached to Oskar, who puts them on an answering machine in a cabinet where he keeps all of his remembrances of his dad.

Thomas soon finds a key in his dad’s old closet, and decides it must be a clue that his father left him.  He finds out it belongs to someone by the name of Black, and he sets out to find the keeper.  He is joined by an old man who rents Oskar’s grandmother’s side rooms (Max von Sydow, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for this role).  He cannot speak, and expresses his thouts and answers to Oskar through written messages or a “Yes” or “No” written on his hand.

The movie does feature great acting from an all-star cast, plus it has a script from Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), direction from Stephen Daldry (The Reader, Billy Elliot), and its produced by one of the most talented guys in the business Scott Rudin.  The main criticism the film has received isn’t all these factors, but the main element behind it: 9/11.  The film pushes 9/11 hard through its characters (Oskar refers to it as “the worst day”), and tries to be a pain-relief.

Does the film succeed in doing this?  You can go either way.  But Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is not a bad film, and might even be a great one.  You can debate whether it should have been nominated for Best Picture or not, but I feel the film succeeds in its action.  And that’s enough what the film wants.

On the heels of a much-undeserved Best Picture nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I began to wonder how it could’ve appealed to so many Academy voters. On paper, Stephen Daldry’s film is total Oscar bait, but in execution it feels more genuinely hurtful than exploitative, melodramatic and weepy.

Much of that has to do with “Extremely Loud’s” extremely unlikeable lead character, the 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Oskar is portrayed brilliantly by the first time actor Thomas Horn, who carries the film and has a strong assertion over this character’s mannerisms, but Oskar’s irritating characterization, either stemming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular novel of the same name, or from Eric Roth’s (“Forrest Gump,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) screenplay, does the movie wrong.

Oskar sets out on a quest following the death of his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) during the 9/11 attacks, but practically no occasion could excuse Oskar’s pedantic and frankly rude behavior. He finds a key in his father’s closet with the label “Black” on an envelope, and believing it to be a final message from his father, visits every person in New York named Black.

He visits all sorts of people throughout New York, and catalogs them in a notebook complete with photos and personal details that no little boy should know. When he visits Abby Black (Viola Davis), a woman struggling with her marriage, he quizzes her on facts about elephants and tells her a postcard of an elephant crying is blatantly Photoshopped. Meanwhile, she’s sobbing on the stairs.

It’s like this with any person he speaks to, even to his dad, who seems to be the only person to like and understand his quirks. He’s an incessant chatterbox of facts and figures who behaves more oddly than the Rain Man, and Daldry and Roth treat him like a quirky kid who for no reason carries around a tambourine and doesn’t take public transportation.

More accurately, Oskar is a plot device. The meaningless wave of numbers he recites over the deaths of all those lost in 9/11 and all those affected by it provide less clarity about New York and serve only to hurt more. There’s no reason for him to know any of it, nor should he have the photographic memory that serves only to provide a cloying tapestry of New York’s many citizens.

There’s a scene where Oskar is seen violently pinching his own body until he scars. It made me realize that a movie like “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” aims to exact pain on you. It does little to provide sadness or comfort and insists on attacking you with more hurtful facts about how Thomas’s missing body at Ground Zero has likely become fused with “dog feces,” as young Oskar puts it.

It’s a real sour feeling, one that only feels phonier when the movie starts getting cute. The legendary Max von Sydow plays The Renter, a character who for his own loosely developed reasons does not speak. He must carry with him an obscene amount of paper, as he encourages Oskar’s reckless behavior on the streets of New York. In fact, The Renter puts him through puzzling hell.

Thus it’s amazing to me that Academy voters not only like this film but also believe it to be the best film of the year. The film is however terrifically acted and well made. “Extremely Loud” is not a dark film, but its loaded with grays and blues in the color pallet. Rightly so, Oskar’s bright orange winter coat sticks out like a sore thumb. And there are enough even phony touching moments that I can see why a fan of the novel or someone close to the 9/11 tragedy could be won over by it.

And yet I can see just as many reasons why some critics have hated it. “Extremely Loud” is a frustrating and often exploitative film that is too full of semantics and quirks for its own good.

2 stars

Is Oscar gay?

I think so. ‘Cause sorry, ladies — the Academy sure loves boys.

(Plus, he’s so shiny!)

This year’s most surprising Best Picture nominee was Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Not a total shocker, mind you — it stars previous winners Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, and is directed by Academy-friendly Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader), so it has the pedigree, at least. But Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close seemed like an also-ran since it generated mostly negative reviews, popped up on several year-end “Worst” lists, has especially been decried in New York City as offensive, and failed to make much of an impact at the box office despite its star power.

So what gives?

Well, it’s an uplifting story about a tragic event that, in real life, is just incredibly depressing, and it stars a cute little kid. Okay? Let’s look at the other Best Picture nominees: War Horse? A boy and his horse. Hugo? A boy and his automaton. The Tree Of Life? A boy and his entire childhood and how it relates to the creation of the universe. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close fits right in — it’s about a boy and his national tragedy.Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is about Oskar, a precocious (to put it mildly) child who loses his father in the September 11 terrorist attacks. His father, who was fond of constructing elaborate (but cute!) lies that send a nine-year-old wandering around Central Park alone, striking up conversations with the homeless, leaves a message on the family answering machine just before the towers fall. One year later, Oskar goes poking around in his dad’s closet, finds a hidden key, and because the envelope says “Black” on it, decides to find every single person with the last name Black in New York City and ask them if they knew his father, and what this key might unlock. Oh, and he walks… everywhere… because he’s afraid of trains, and carries a tambourine everywhere he goes. Hundreds of people named Black decide to go along with this, and his mother is apparently fine letting this child wander out to the depths of Brooklyn and Queens and such alone in post-9/11 New York. Eventually, Oskar bullies an old mute man (Max Von Sydow) into coming along with him, and wouldn’t you know it, his parents were killed in a war atrocity, too! That’s… convenient. Anyway, I won’t spoil the “ending,” but suffice to say it finds a way to make all of the above ten times more implausible than it already was. (The Academy seems to have not noticed that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is the exact same movie as Hugo, only infinitely worse — a plucky rascal on an unlikely mission to unravel the mystery of a cryptic clue left behind by his dead father, touching the life of a miserably sad old man along the way.)

My jaw dropped constantly while watching Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and not in a good way. I could hardly believe this was a mainstream Hollywood movie that so many talented, successful people were involved in. What were they thinking? It’s not necessarily “too soon” for Hollywood to tackle 9/11. Paul Greengrass did it brilliantly six years ago with United 93, a movie that dealt with this event in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones. Oscar Stone’s World Trade Center was a misstep, but for reasons having little to do with September 11. Even 2011′s mixed bag A Little Help proved you can have some fun at the expense of 9/11 as long as people act appropriately outraged by the end of the movie. Were Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close merely about a boy whose father died, say, in a car accident, it would fail very conventionally and probably be swiftly forgotten. But because it tackles September 11, it crumbles under the weight of its own ambition.Why is this movie about 9/11, anyway? Aside from Oskar, the characters seem to move on from it immediately, more concerned with their own unrelated griefs. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close does not even attempt to recreate the mood of post 9/11 America the way, say, Take Shelter does, in its own sly way. There’s no sense of collective fear or paranoia or even mourning. Instead, Daldry seems content to use the imagery of 9/11 — bodies hurtling out of the sky, people staring out of office building at the burning towers — to do his job for him, then sidesteps actually dealing with the tragedy. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close has absolutely nothing of note to say about 9/11. It attempts to provide catharsis without doing any of the work; it’s all beginning and ending, with the middle skimmed over in montages of Oskar wordlessly meeting with the various Blacks. The casting of these “colorful” characters, most of whom get one line at best, is painful in contrast to the beautiful movie stars who populate the rest of the movie. You can almost hear the casting directors going through the headshots — “Well, we’ve already got a black lady, a large group of Chinese people, some blue-collar Italians, and a fat Pacific Islander… hey, how about someone transgender?” These poor day players smile like they’re in a car insurance commercial; they’re too unique and diverse and average to actually speak in the movie, but by playing Alexander Desplat’s pushy score over images of them laughing or crying, Daldry reassures that everything is okay — because people of all walks of life are perfectly fine about 9/11. Now let’s get back to seeing how those gorgeous movie stars are coping.

Most of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close‘s problems, however, have nothing to do with the fact that it borrows a recent terrorist attack to add import to an otherwise flat, wholly unremarkable story. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button) seems ill-equipped to tell this story from the point-of-view of a child, resulting in a predictably non-linear structure that doesn’t work because the flashbacks dealing with 9/11 are exponentially more interesting than the story going forward. And Daldry makes no attempt to frame this story as if it’s actually coming to us from nine-year-old Oskar’s perspective, so that we might actually buy all the many contrivances. When Oskar is afraid, Daldry doesn’t make us feel afraid — he just shows Oskar hiding under a bed. When Oskar is angry, he doesn’t make us feel angry — he depicts Oskar having a meltdown. But we’re always on the outside, looking at Oskar, rather than experiencing this story through him. Daldry seems completely clueless as to how to use the camera to get us to identify with this child; apart from a new flourishes, it’s generic, by-the-numbers direction that isn’t specific to this character or this story. I can imagine this all worked in Foer’s book reasonably well, because books can get away with so much more than movies can. Prose can put us in the mind of a nine-year-old boy and let us see the world from his perspective, but this movie attempts to present the world “as is,” realistically — and fails astoundingly. Almost nothing about this movie is plausible, which does not mesh well with an all-too-real event like 9/11, still so fresh in our minds.
Though some of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close‘s most thought-provoking bits (there are a few) are obviously taken from the book, on the whole, both narration and dialogue consist of a lot of thudding exposition attempting to make sense of Oskar’s motivations (which make no sense regardless). His constant referral to September 11 as “the Worst Day” is cringe-inducing when spoken aloud. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is also fond of delivering information in monologues shouted at the top of Oskar’s lungs; the second time, he is literally standing in the street shouting to no one, explaining why he loves his father. The first is even more awkward (and unintentionally hilarious) — it’s Oskar literally shouting the entire plot of the movie at Max Von Sydow moments after they meet, accompanied by contrived hand gestures — after which the mute old man merely holds up a piece of paper reading: “I’m tired. I go to bed.” (My thoughts exactly.)

Yep. Oskar is truly one of the most irritating screen characters I can remember ever seeing in a movie. To paraphrase the title, he’s extremely loud and incredibly annoying. Should I give him a pass just because it’s mentioned that he might have Asperger’s? Well, I’m not going to. He’s a brat with no rhyme or reason to his behavior. Oskar screams at just about everyone, barges into strangers’ homes demanding help with his insane mission, and lies frequently, perhaps pathologically. In the worst of many temper tantrums, he starts destroying a stranger’s business as everyone just watches with an, “Aw, poor kid” look on their faces. Why anyone helps him at all is beyond me. He’s rude and kind of creepy. Oskar supposedly afraid of things like loud noises, crossing bridges, and riding the subway, but he has no issue with wandering around the five boroughs of New York alone, going into the homes of strangers, including one very frightening cross-dresser. (His parents did one thing right, at least, and clearly never showed him Silence Of The Lambs.)As written, her is a walking contradiction and a conundrum, and I’m sorry to say that Thomas Horn’s performance doesn’t do the script many favors. Some have praised his performance — he even won a Critic’s Choice Award for “Best Young Actor,” beating out Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, Asa Butterfirled’s Hugo, and The Descendants‘ Shailene Woodley. (Jesus.) I don’t know why, though. Horn seems to have studied at the Elizabeth Berekely School Of (Over-)Acting, for Oskar is most reminiscent of Showgirls‘ Nomi. Like her, Oskar throws unmotivated hissy fits and, for no reason, constantly seems angry; yes, he’s grappling with the death of his father, but the way he’s doing it is so annoying. We’re meant to feel sorry for him and sympathize, but why should we?

There are some moments in which Horn is quite good, and I hate to pick on such a young actor. Much of his dialogue is impossible for any child (or adult) performer to utter convincingly. But boy, oh boy. When Oskar needs to convey that he doesn’t want to hear something, Horn clamps his hands over his ears. When he’s afraid, he cowers under the bed. When he’s upset, he starts throwing or breaking things. Maybe it’s the script, or the direction, or a bad performance. Most likely, a trifecta of all three. One moment, he’s lashing out at someone for no reason, the next he’s as precocious as can be, like a quirky child genius who wandered into The Reader from the set of a nearby Wes Anderson movie, complete with tambourine. It’s The Royal Tenenbaums meets United 93!

Hey, Stephen Daldry — you want to know what two things don’t go together? “Quirky” and “historic tragedy.”This year’s Oscar nominee Viola Davis pops up randomly as one of the Blacks (pun is not my fault), the only one given significant screen time. I’d mention that she and a character played by Jeffrey Wright suffer from that old, offensive trope that kind, flawless black people in such movies exist solely to help white people solve their problems for no reason other than that they’re kind, flawless, black, and have got nothing better to do — except I think Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is an equal-opportunity offender. (But considering her other 2011 role in The Help, Davis really needs to talk to her agent about getting her a part that isn’t all about helping out some pushy Caucasian.)

And let me talk about Jeffrey Wright for a second, if I can, while still being vague enough about the ending to avoid spoilers. Why does this film’s climactic moment (set, apparently, inside an aquarium?) center around a character we’ve never met before? Do we need two surrogate father figures in this movie? Do both surrogate father figures also need to have lost their fathers? And seriously — are we meant to believe that this meticulous little boy who remaps all of New York in a complex, coded system could have avoided a three-year- endeavor to interview hundreds of people if he had just unfolded the piece of paper that started all this to begin with? Why, for the love of God, did he not read the whole paper? For a movie so concerned with all these Blacks, we actually spend very little time with them, and the most effective storyline (involving Von Sydow) is irrelevant to the main plot. It’s as if Roth didn’t buy this whole storyline, either, and tried to undermine it by distracting us with other characters’ subplots.But it’s John Goodman who has the most pointless role. A lot of fun in another Best Picture nominee, The Artist, he’s useless here,  given the thankless task of staring at the breaking news of the terrorist attacks on TV. The line he’s given? “This is terrible.” (That’s about the most profound thought this movie has about 9/11.) The moment is a little meta-though — because as John Goodman was staring at a TV set in mock-horror muttering, “This is terrible,” I was watching Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close doing the exact same thing. (James Gandolfini, credited in the trailer, was actually cut entirely out of the movie. Lucky bastard.)

There are scattered strong moments in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, such as scenes featuring Oskar with “The Renter” played by Von Sydow, who received a somewhat surprising Oscar nod that edged out Drive favorite Albert Brooks. But to be fair, Von Sydow, at least, is the best character here. Bullock is as good as she can be as an absentee mother figure, even if the “twist” at the end doesn’t make up for the fact that she’s essentially laying around doing nothing while her son is hanging out alone with hundreds of strangers and self-mutilating. Hanks is fine, I guess, but he’s stuck playing one of those impossible “perfect father” types that only exist in movies. (How many dads do you know that spent all their time hiding little clues throughout New York City for their sons to find, telling them that the city used to have six boroughs but one disappeared mysteriously, and, son, why don’t you go waste hours wandering around Central Park looking for it?) To me, this kind of parenting is actually just irritating, but maybe a certain kind of youngster would find it appealing.But for everything that’s right about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, there is much more that goes so, so wrong. The plot is rife with problems large and small, mostly of the logic variety, plaguing nearly every scene. For example: if the story is told entirely from Oskar’s point of view, why do we get a random scene from Sandra Bullock’s perpective in the middle of the movie as she receives a call from her soon-to-be-deceased husband? It’s actually one of the strongest scenes in the movie, and it’s clear that Daldry included it because you need “That Big 9/11 Scene” to deal with the tragedy head-on, but it doesn’t belong here. Oskar’s not in it, and this is his story. He’s narrating it. You can’t just cut to an event he wasn’t involved in and doesn’t know about. Overall, the movie’s use of September 11 as a dramatic element is only marginally offensive; it’s essentially the same gambit played by Life Is Beautiful — “let’s turn the deaths of scores of innocent people into a game! whee!” — but with a lot less distance and time for healing. The recurring CGI effects of Tom Hanks plummeting to his death in slow-motion are, I’d argue, in poor taste, but beyond that, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close misses making much of an impact altogether — better, I suppose, than making an unfavorable, off-putting, exploitative one. (See Gus Van Sant’s Columbine revamp Elephant.)

I’m being a bit glib, I know, because I’m sure Roth and Daldry & co. were aiming for more than actually came across on-screen, but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close does not succeed at getting us to care what fucking lock in New York City this fucking random key opens. Of all the thousands of New York lives this tragedy touched, this has got to be the very least interesting problem a movie could deal with. (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close shares this problem with Hugo, actually — in that the central “mystery” the film spends so much screen time on is the least interesting angle about it.) We touch on a national tragedy in which thousands of people are killed, and the big happy ending is that the protagonist overcomes his fear of sitting on a fucking swing? Ohhh, Academy. You’ve got to be kidding.

The fact that this movie is nominated for Best Picture doesn’t just blow my mind — it crashes two planes into it.And speaking of Wes Anderson (I swear, I mentioned him up there somewhere), the Quirkmeister’s been absent from cinemas in 2011 in name only. But there are a few filmmakers who have attempted to carry his twee torch until his illustrious return with Moonrise Kingdom.

One such filmmaker is Richard Ayoade, a British comedian making his debut feature. If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close seems to borrow, Ayoade’s Submarine flat-out steals them. It’s unclear to what degree Submarine is trying to be an homage to Anderson and to what degree it is trying to be its own movie, but it seems impossible that the many similarities are entirely coincidental. The story concerns precocious 15-year-old Oliver Tate, who is, like all boys in movies at this age, peculiarly obsessed with a girl he goes to school with. The girl in question is Jordana Bevan, who always wears the same red coat — she’s pretty enough, I guess, but Oliver’s preoccupation with her feels particularly random. Which is probably the point. Unlike in most coming-of-age tales, though, Oliver actually does get the girl quite early in the movie, and the story becomes about how his new relationship suffers once Oliver begins to suspect that his parents’ marriage is falling apart. He suspects his mother (Sally Hawkins) of cheating on his dad (Noah Taylor) with her oddball ex-boyfriend (Paddy Considine).

Submarine is based on a book by Joe Dunthorne, but still, the pacing feels off. Oliver and Jordana get together so soon that our interest in them as a couple peters out even before they start having problems. And the parents come into the story rather late in the game. As told through Oliver’s point of view with plenty of clever voice-over narration (take note, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, on subjective storytelling), the first half hour or so is pretty marvelous, with plenty of filmmaking flourishes to keep us engaged. But after awhile, we grow tired of this rather shallow, self-centered protagonist, since most of the people around him seem to have more depth and humanity. We’re watching an emotional story through the eyes of someone who is not very emotional, so the Wes Anderson-ness of it all starts to feel gimmicky, and the rather thin storyline can’t sustain the movie’s running time. Submarine worked its modest charms on me for awhile, but long before it was over, I grew tired of it. Still, there are pleasures to be had, particularly in the first act, and the cast is game. And as the world discovered in 2009′s delightful Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s brand of whimsy lends itself best to animated stories in which being cute and precocious is acceptable, rather than off-putting. Perhaps this year’s closest approximation to that is Gore Verbinski’s Rango, the story of a pet gecko who gets lost in the desert and stumbles upon a small town populated by some truly bizarre creatures who are concerned about their town’s water supply. Though he’s actually quite the coward, the gecko decides to “camouflage” himself as a badass. The filmmaking has a distinct Western flavor and also takes a page from Chinatown in its villain character — and the Mariachi band of owls who narrate the story are, pardon the pun, a hoot.

It may seem unfair to spend so long dressing down a disaster like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and then spend virtually no time at all praising a much better one like Rango, but with an animated film like this, it’s best to watch it for yourself and allow it to charm you. Nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar (and the frontrunner to win, thanks to a Spielberg snub), Rango features a talented roster of voices including Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, and Abigail Bresli, and some of the most captivatingly ugly creature design you’re likely to see in a movie for quite some time. The animation is superb, and beautiful in its own weird way. It might be the crispest and most textured computer-animated feature of all time. There’s so much detail, it’s astounding. And the film contains a haunting moment featuring our gecko hero walking across a street at night (to say more would ruin it).

Funny how a movie like Rango can evoke more genuine emotion than a film that deals with a colossal national tragedy, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I’ll gladly take my quirk and contrivance with bright colors, anthropomorphic creatures, and no mention of 9/11, thank you.

*

Rango:A lot more entertaining than a Geico commercial.

Submarine: Surface-level fun.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: A train wreck of a movie. (Or should I say plane crash?)

I probably should see the film before I be the judge of whether it should be nominated or not, but the movie wasn’t very well reviewed (it got a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes). Most critics complained it was too sentimental about it’s subject.

I explained back in September it’s hard making a movie off 9/11.  Remember Reign Over Me or World Trade Center?  Probably not.

It’s sad, really, because the movie is filled with such talented people.  The film stars two Academy Award winners and great actors, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock.  It has a script written by Eric Roth, who wrote Forrest Gump.  Steven Daldry direects the film, and he has also made The Reader and Billy Elliot.  And Scott Rudin, perhaps the best producer in Hollywood, produced the film.

I feel disappointed about this because I’ve been anxiously waiting Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for months.  I’ll try to see it over the weekend to be the judge of whether it should have been nominated for Best Picture.

Two positive things stand out for me in the film. Young Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell is an interesting and talented newcomer, and someone I enjoyed watching on screen for most of two hours. Approximately 70 years his senior, Max von Sydow is captivating as the speechless “Renter” from Oskar’s grandmother’s apartment. The two are quite an entertaining pairing on their road-trip through NYC.

 The basic story is that Oskar’s father (Tom Hanks) is one of the victims of the WTC attacks. Through flashbacks we see that he was a world-class father to Oskar, who may very well be inflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. Either way, Oskar is intelligent way beyond his years and possesses quite a curious and analytical mind. When his father dies, Oskar is convinced he can make sense of things by finding the lock that fits a key he found in his father’s closet. He assumes it’s another puzzle his father laid out for him with the only clue being “Black” written on the envelope.

While it is interesting to see how Oskar organizes his mission of contacting the 472 Black’s noted in the NYC phone book, it seems mostly a writing trick to get this unusual youngster mingling with “normal” citizens. When he teams with von Sydow, the energy level picks up, but we can still feel the wheels turning on the machinery to create tear-inducing moments. These moments are EVERYWHERE and include Oskar being oblivious to his hurtful ways with his mom (Sandra Bullock).

 The support work is excellent and includes John Goodman, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright. Young Mr. Horn is best known for his winning Jeopardy during “Kid’s Week”, so he is obviously real-life smart as well as on screen talented. This story is just too preposterous to take seriously. How many parents would let their 11 year old wander the streets of NYC? What reaction would this kid receive as he confronts strangers while jingling his tambourine so as to calm his nerves? Just too much melodramatic storybook stretching to make this a story worth telling in regards to the September 11 events. However, if you are need of a few good cries, this one tees it up for you.

SEE THIS MOVIE IF: you want to see an exciting newcomer in Thomas Horn OR it’s just been too long since you had a good cry (or 3 or 4)

SKIP THIS MOVIE IF: you prefer movie/story manipulations not be quite so obvious

watch the trailer:

W.E.
Madonna (!!!) directs Andrea Riseborough as Wallis Simpson in a farcically sympathetic portrayal of the American who eventually became King Edward VIII’s wife. Edward is Master & Commander star James D’Arcy, who’s probably immensely relieved to have escaped from the ghetto of movies like Rise: Blood Hunter, but for us another trot around the bloody Abdication Crisis is a truly appalling vista. Edward VIII wanted all the wealth and privilege of being a King without the responsibility, and failed to challenge the absurdity of being forbidden to marry a divorced woman when the Church of England only existed because Henry VIII wanted to divorce a woman and remarry. Screw him…

Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close
Stephen Daldry tries to win yet more bloody Oscar nominations with an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about a boy searching for the secrets left behind by the father he lost on 9/11. Daldry directs, Tom Hanks plays the father and Sandra Bullock the mother, the screenplay is by Forrest Gump and Benjamin Button scribe Eric Roth, it’s about a weighty subject, and is released within the three month attention span the Academy’s members have long since proven they possess – what’s not to hate about such a naked attempt not to make a good film but to make the sort of film that wins Oscars?

Battleship
Somewhere in Hollywood a studio executive called Delaney is about to crash his sports-car as he drives past a huge billboard poster for this movie. Delaney will stagger out of the wreckage, lurch into the traffic to stare at the promise of an incredibly fake-looking CGI alien invasion limited to the radius of an inexplicable force-field in the ocean being foiled by US Navy ships led by an equally inexplicable Liam Neeson, slumming it alongside Rihanna and shouting orders to Too Tall Skarsgaard while rattling thru an inane arc about responsibility with Taylor Kitsch, and Delaney will incoherently rave “Holy God Jesus! I thought I’d killed this movie in development!!”

Total Recall
Director Len Wiseman proved with Die Hard 4.0 that he has talent, but that does not mean remaking Total Recall is a good idea. 22 years after Arnie’s original our hero is now Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale (of course) is the dame, and there will be no mucking about on Mars because that’s not in the original story. But justifying your over-hasty remake by your fidelity to the source text is deeply suspect. Philip K Dick’s short story is clever, hilarious, and wonderful, but it’s a short story. It would barely sustain an episode of The Outer Limits. Wiseman’s foray may actually justify itself by being less ludicrously violent…

The Avengers
Joss Whedon co-writes and directs Marvel’s huge gamble to tie together the fate of all their various franchise characters in one huge blockbuster. I’ve voiced my doubts about this enterprise repeatedly and at some length. Whedon has experience writing the X-Men characters to superb effect, and he will draw great performances from his cast, probably insert a large number of good lines and hilarious moments, and may even pull off the truly great action sequence that has thus far eluded nearly all the in-house Marvel movies, but, this appears in Fears because of its lack of commercial and interior logic, and the artistic pitfalls of its choice of villains.

Snow White and the Huntsman
Kristen Stewart was once a very capable young actress. Then she became a global star almost overnight, and a horrible stiltedness overtook her. The question is now that the end of Twilight is nigh, can she manage to overcome the brittleness it inspired? Well, if she can she probably won’t start the acting comeback with this overblown nonsensical ‘version’ which sees Snow White as Warrior Princess teaming up with Thor Chris Hemsworth to take down Charlize Theron’s evil Queen with the help of a coterie of British actors of a certain age as the dwarves. Warwick Davis won’t be happy about that because Ricky Gervais will.

Men in Black 3
Will Smith seems to make a Men in Black film whenever he’s panicked about his career. I didn’t think Hancock and Seven Pounds not being well received constituted that big a crisis but apparently he did, and so here we are – once again with Smith travelling thru time in 3-D to fight aliens who are pursuing Josh Brolin aka Tommy Lee Jones in the 1960s. Four capable writers have fiddled with this script, and Barry Sonenfeld hasn’t directed a hit in a long time, so this one comes with ‘Approach with Caution’ stickers plastered all over it despite Jemaine Clement and Bill Hader’s presence in the cast.

The Dark Knight Rises
If this film isn’t a disaster I’ll be very pleasantly surprised. Anne Hathaway as Catwoman seems vindicated as a casting choice from the trailer, and there are pleasing hints from the chants being translated for Bruce Wayne as ‘Rise’ that perhaps Ras Al’Ghul’s methods really are supernatural, but, the Bat-wing seen hovering above the Bat-mobile at the end of the trailer looks like something out of Rocobop (by which I mean 1987 special effects in a 2012 movie), and the destruction of the football pitch by Bane is embarrassingly fake-looking. Perhaps Nolan has crammed in so damn much to this final instalment that he couldn’t find time to pull it off more practically, but such obnoxiously obvious CGI is the polar opposite of the legion of compositing shots he used in The Dark Knight. Would it really have been so hard to film the football player running in the stadium in Pittsburgh, then build a replica grass pitch set and blow it up in Hollywood, and composite the two together so that it looked real because what you were seeing was real – just from two different places at two different times cunningly yoked together by digital trickery. I think this is a film that no one will like, but that some people might admire; because Batman dies at the end. Bane can’t kill Batman and get away with it, audiences would rebel. But, I’m convinced that Nolan’s watched Sherlock and the end of the movie will see Batman sacrifice himself in order to rid Gotham of the intolerable evil of Bane. Batman and Bane will topple off Gotham’s Reichenbach Falls locked in eternal combat. But I think along the way to this unforgettable and traumatic finale the sense of fun that must be part of what keeps Bruce Wayne being Batman will be entirely absent, the level of grotesquery from the brutal villain will be unbearable, and everyone will start muttering about how it ruins the first two movies.

The Bourne Legacy
The Bourne franchise is really starting to really resemble the world of Robert Ludlum now, in the sense that the great man has passed on and yet still work emerges bearing his name. Jeremy Renner plays an agent who is not Jason Bourne, but has a tenuous enough link to Bourne’s world to justify the attention grabbing title. Renner is a fine actor, and it’s nice to see him headline a big summer blockbuster, but this has pointless cash-in written all over it. Tony Gilroy, writer on all previous three films, now directs this one as well in the knowledge that Damon will only return for Greengrass directing…

Django Unchained
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz star in Quentin Tarantino’s movie about escaped slaves, underground railroaders, and bounty-hunters battling for freedom and money. Sounds good! So why is a Leonesque adventure in a nonsensical 19th Century in the Fears side of the ledger rather than the Hopes? Because just once I’d like Tarantino to make a film where you didn’t have to wince at the prospect of the unspeakable violence that was undoubtedly about to come your way along with the great dialogue, cut-up structure, and bravura directing. Is it too much to ask that he rein in his sadism for a PG-13 story one of these days?

Lincoln
Spielberg had been making this movie for a decade with Liam Neeson before he finally actually started making it and abruptly went with Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th POTUS. No longer based on 2008’s immensely long book of the moment Team of Rivals, this is now a details biopic of a working President, as Lincoln in his final months tries to legislatively copper-fasten the victory against slavery. Day-Lewis will powerhouse his way thru proceedings, leading a strong cast including the peerless Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but what worries is Tony Kushner’s script. Munich obsessively shied away from discussion of the causes and conduct of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Can Kushner really do ‘details’?

300: The Battle of Artemisia
Zack Snyder has co-written with his original 300 compadres this sequel for another director to helm while he’s busy trying to make Superman soar again at the box-office. The fact that all of the 300 Spartan warriors died in the first movie bar the narrator, who went on to lead the hilarious charge in the next battle that closed the original film, doesn’t stop Snyder & Co making a sequel – about different characters, at a different battle, before Thermopylae. Apparently sequel has some new and strange meaning that Snyder will instruct us in thru an epic, unintentionally hilarious, battle between freedom-loving Americans Athenians and tyrannical Persians.

The Great Gatsby
I venerate F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, but that is why I can’t think Baz Lurhmann’s film of it can be anything but a disaster. Leonardo DiCaprio is a good choice to play the enigmatic titular old sport, as is Joel Edgerton as his nemesis, but the blanker-than-thou Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway may narrate us all into a coma, and Carey Mulligan for all her strengths will struggle with the eternally thankless role of Daisy. My great fear is Lurhmann’s inability to handle subtlety. Gatsby is all about Fitzgerald’s prose, which flows like sparkling champagne, not swooping thru raucous parties and zeroing in on high camp comedy scenes…

Breaking Dawn: Part II
The decision to split Breaking Dawn into two films would hopefully be unwise after the awfulness of the padded Part I, but the need to see how things end will defeat any desire to punish such commercial crassness. What now for the rapidly ageing Renesme and her creepily smitten werewolf protector Jacob? How will Bella adjust to being a very, very thirsty newborn vampire? Can Michael Sheen Fassbender this film to campy heights as the Volturi travel en masse to Forks to abduct her? Or will director Bill Condon’s bizarrely perfunctory approach produce another bloated, inert, embarrassing disaster and end the series on a very low note?

The Postman: I know you. You’re. . .famous.
Bridge City Mayor: I was once. . .sorta. . .kinda. Not anymore.

On paper, few films look as impressive and inspire so much expectation as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close did when it was announced. It was directed by Stephen Daldry, who had famously racked up Best Director nominations for all three of his past films (Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader); adapted from a popular book by a popular author that used the topic of 9/11 as an integral part of its plot by Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for adapting Forrest Gump; it was produced by Scott Rudin, one of the best producers nowadays, the man responsible for such films like last year’s The Social Network and True Grit as well as this year’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (all of three of which got an A+ from me); it had music by Alexandre Desplat, who’s brilliant; cinematography by two-time Oscar winner Chris Menges; editing by Oscar winner Claire Simpson; and a cast led by two of America’s most beloved actors, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, as well as supporting turns by celebrated actors like Max von Sydow, Viola Davis and John Goodman, and introducing a promising young actor in Thomas Horn to carry the film. Like I said, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seemed bulletproof.

Ultimately, however, it just wasn’t so great. Don’t get me wrong, the film is still certainly very good, it’s really well-made and superbly acted by all involved, but it also feels all too mushy, and uplifting in a kind of self-important way made to appeal to Oscar voters. So I was split, I loved certain parts of this film, but there were others that were just so overwrought that I couldn’t fully get on board with it. I got to the point in which I just couldn’t help but think that this film would have been so much better had it just been less manipulating, that it would have gotten to me so much more and much deeper levels had it not been so focussed on doing just that.

Thomas Horn is in charge of playing Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old who loses his father, played by Mr. Hanks, in the World Trade Center attacks. Oskar’s father always gave him little puzzles to solve, scavenger hunts to go on in order to get his son to really experience the world and his environments, to get past his fears. And now that he passed away Oskar is sure he’s left him one final message hidden somewhere in New York City, namely finding the lock that can be opened with a key he finds in his dad’s closet. So you see Oskar’s journey through the city, and his mission to find the lock becomes an opportunity to observe both the personal loss he himself had, as well as his grieving mother played by Ms. Bullock, as well as the broader impact such an event had on the city and everyone in it, as represented by a slew of supporting characters introduced as Oskar goes about the city.

There hasn’t been a definitive 9/11 movie yet, and I don’t quite think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is it. Oliver Stone tried with World Trade Center, Paul Greengrass made the outstanding United 93, but the wound is still too fresh, and audiences either aren’t drawn into them or can’t find them resonating with them, much like the Iraq war hadn’t had a great film about it until The Hurt Locker came along a couple years ago. Stephen Daldry, you get the sense, was aware of how hard it would be to make a 9/11 film; maybe that’s why he looked at it through Oskar’s eyes, eliminating the other perspectives and narrators shown in the book, and eliminating some other gimmicks the book had to instead rely on sentiment and inspirational stuff. But I don’t know, good as this film is I thought Mr. Daldry relied too much on the emotional payback and shied away from the more political messages he could’ve brought out to make this film better, a balance the he showed he could achieve really well in all three of his previous films.

Having two hugely likable stars like Mr. Hanks and Ms. Bullock I do believe helps, it makes accepting a film about such difficult themes easier when you have two faces you know and love guiding you through it; Mr. Hanks is funny, a source of warmth to us as an audience and to Oskar as a grieving son, who considered his father his best friend, and Ms. Bullock though certainly not as bright as usual because she has to play a mourning, not always likable mother, is still Sandy Bullock who won an Oscar just for being likable. But I don’t think the film still earns the right to really use the images it does, the smoke and papers coming through buildings, a body falling through the sky in slow-motion, the many faces filled with shock and horror running through the streets, not knowing what to make of this.

It’s still a good film though, I don’t think it approaches the greatness I along many wanted for it, but it’s a good film. As the film uses Oskar’s search for the lock to his father’s key to get us into the lives of people from all over the city having to cope with the catastrophe that just shook them all, especially effective is the exchange he has with Viola Davis’ Abby Black, the actress showing why she went toe-to-toe with Meryl Streep in Doubt a few years ago, and why she’s now seen as the biggest threat to Ms. Streep’s third Oscar this year for the work she did in The Help, she nails this role here. Also shining here is Max von Sydow, as an elderly man who lives in the same apartment as Oskar’s grandmother and accompanies him on his quest, with a past so troubled that he’s chosen to go mute, and yet expressing so much with just his face and expressions that go along with the words “yes” and “no” that he has tattooed on each palm; Mr. von Sydow is brilliant here.

I guess this film was always going to be quite divisive as far as the reactions it elicited from its audience. The subject alone would make it so, factor in the huge amounts of emotions and it becomes that much more polarizing; people thinking it goes to far with the saccharine, people thinking it doesn’t show enough heart, people being pissed off about it poking at a wound that hasn’t fully healed yet, others thinking it does so with too much caution. These are, after all, pretty damn big themes for a film to tackle head-on, even as it humanizes them by seeing them through the eyes of a little boy. And it will make you cry, or at least it made me cry, it’s just that I don’t know if it really earned those tears. Good as this film is, it’s not The Hurt Locker on the Iraq war; by which I mean, as good a 9/11 film as this may be, it’s not the definitive one, it won’t take away the taboo from the subject.

Grade: B+