Wednesday, February 8, 2012

EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

“EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE” (Thomas Horn, Max Von Sydow, Sandra Bullock & Tom Hanks)

Basic rule of thumb #1 in making a movie – Don’t expect a kid actor to be able to carry your film. ‘EL&IC’ does, and it fails miserably. Thomas Horn plays Oscar, a lad who was clearly closer to his father (Tom Hanks) than his mother (Sandra Bullock) and when dad dies on 9 / 11, Oscar goes from being an interesting child – a little quirky, but in an intelligent way – to being a drama queen.
Oscar screams at people for no reason, even while he’s trying to explain his situation; and Thomas, whom I don’t blame for coming across as a totally unbelievable character, is expected to carry this rather lengthy film from start to finish – he does the narrative and he is practically in every scene. That’s asking a lot of a kid actor and the director seemed oblivious as to when the boy was over acting to the point of irritation to the viewing audience. I stopped caring about Oscar’s plight when he told someone where he was during each and every one of his father’s phone calls home on the day he died. Oscar wasn’t home for five of the six calls and at one point he says, “I know I was in front of the church when my dad’s
4th call came because I counted the steps from my school to the church and a typical child my age takes ‘X’ amount of steps per minute...” blah, blah, blah... My eyes were rolling like pinballs at that one. From then on, I found Oscar to be the creation of a writer that didn’t know how to write for a child. He stopped being real to me and so I wasn’t affected by his predicament.
The predicament itself was intriguing; Oscar accidentally breaks a vase that was situated on a shelf in his father’s closet. Hidden inside the vase was a small envelope with the word ‘Black’ written on it. Inside the envelope was an unmarked key. Oscar then makes it his purpose in life to find what the key fits. He starts by visiting every person in New York named Black. Oscar’s adventures should have made this a movie worth watching. Unfortunately, most of the people Oscar meets are kind of boring. Well, they’re New Yorkers, what would one expect?
Oscar is also a little bit creepy as he likes to watch his neighbors thru binoculars. I found it to be unnerving that he mainly zoomed in on his grandmother. When an elderly gentleman (Max Von Sydow) rents a room in Granny’s apartment, Oscar is told to ‘leave him alone’. When The Renter’s identity is finally revealed, they think it’s a big dramatic moment, but my wife & I knew who he was before his first encounter with Oscar. The old man doesn’t speak – not that he can’t, he simply chooses not to. He was the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ written on the palms of his hands to answer any question requiring one of those answers.
One of the reasons I’m very disappointed in this years’ Oscars... perhaps I should use Academy Awards here – is, not only are my nominees are completely different from the Academy’s, but here’s a year where a silent, black and white film is nominated for Best Picture; an actor in that silent film is nominated for Best Actor; an actor that doesn’t say a word in his film is nominated for Best Supporting Actor and a silent movie is nominated for Best Screenplay . . . WTF?
But the main reason to stay with this film is to learn what the key fits and what’s inside – and that intriguing set up – the main crux of the movie – is blown off. Another odd thing Oscar does is hide the phone messages his dad sent on 9 / 11 from his mother. He plays all but the last one for The Renter – leaving us wondering what the hell was the final message? The only way to redeem this story is for that message to have some emotional impact – to make up for all the overly dramatic screaming and bad acting we’ve had to endure – I needed that message to be something heart wrenching... and it isn’t. It’s, like everything else in ‘EL & IC’; unemotional and rather pointless.
This movie is nominated for Best Picture. The even duller ‘Moneyball’ is nominated for Best Picture (As least ‘EL&IC’ had the possibility of ‘intrigue’) The barely entertaining ‘Hugo’ is nominated for Best Picture. A silent black & white movie that over 30% of audiences in the U.K. walked out on and demanded their money back is nominated for Best picture. A Woody Allen movie is nominated for Best Picture (Wasn’t he banned from this country for molesting his daughter? Oh, that’s right, he married his daughter so it’s not a crime) A film in which one of the stars said, “I’ve seen it twice and I still have no idea what it means.” is nominated for Best Picture – But the Best Picture of 2011 is NOT nominated. The Best Picture of 2011 didn’t receive a single nomination in any one of the 532 categories.
So despite the fact that I write a review of every movie I see and I’ve seen about
70 of them this year (Down a bit from previous years) I will not be watching the Academy Awards Ceremony this year – I have no rooting interest. I know ‘War Horse’ won’t win, so what’s the point? It’d be nice if ‘The Debt’ was nominated, seeing it was clearly the Best Picture of 2011 and we could have a neat little match race between it and ‘War Horse’, but in a down year for film – the Academy has decided to give an acting nomination to Jonah Hill... Seriously? Does anyone think Jonah Hill did a better job of acting in ‘Moneyball’ than Jesper Christenson did in ‘The Debt’ ?
Also, I did not see ‘Beginners’ (though I wanted to) so this is going to seem like a goofy prediction, but my one sure bet for Oscar night is Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor. He’s 82. He’s never won. Only been nominated once before. And he was also in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. He wins.
Let’s see, anything else bother me about ‘EL&IC”? Oh yes, the tambourine! As if Oscar’s screaming and hammed up phony emotional outbursts weren’t annoying enough – the kid shakes a tambourine throughout the entire movie. I am not exaggerating, I counted 37 scenes where I was hoping the ghost of John Belushi would show up in a toga and rip that stupid so-called musical instrument from Oscar’s hand and smash it to smithereens.

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