Extremely Loun And Incredibly Close Review

[Westside Steve]

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Warner Bros/Paramount

PG 13 140 min

 

Friends it’s been years since I’ve hated an Academy Award nominee as bad as this.

It was Sofia Coppola’s LOST IN TRANSLATION and I’m not at all sure which of the two I liked least. Don’t get me wrong; these films aren’t bad after the fashion of say, BRONX WARRIORS 1990 or MESSAGE FROM SPACE but bad in the most embarrassingly self-important and pompous way you could imagine.

First I’m upset with myself for not thinking of the tag “Extremely long and incredibly boring” but I heard that from a couple of fellow audience members as we left the theater.

Here’s a summary. Thomas Horn is a precocious child named Oskar.

He has a special relationship with his quirky but (supposedly) loveable father (Tom Hanks) and almost none with mom (Sandra Bullock).

He and dad play brain games as the boy must decipher dad’s clues in a never ending search for the mysterious sixth borough of NYC.

One day dad has to attend a meeting at the World Trade Center and the date happens to be September 11. Devastated by the loss Oskar sets off on an epic quest to unlock whatever secret might lie with a key he’s found among his father’s effects. On the envelope is one word “black.”

For some reason he decides he must personally visit ever resident of the area with that same surname.

He’ll enlist the aid of an aged lodger in his grandmother’s home both of whom refugees from the Dresden firebombing. Though the old fellow is unable to speak they will learn to share a bond and a secret.

The quest is basically nonsense and made worse by Horn’s acting or at least the direction. Is he autistic? Savant? It’s hard to tell but he really is an annoying pain in the ass. In what passes for a cathartic ending everyone’s lives are supposed to have been touched by his search though what little there was seemed forced an insignificant to me.

And the reconciliation with his mother is as unbelievable as the relationship with his father.

I’m sure this pretention will be mistaken for brilliance by some. Not me.

D

WSS

 

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