Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Sunday, December 25, 2011) (128)

So this is this movie based on Jon Foer's much-heralded book. It takes place in the days after September 11, 2001, when young boy Oskar Schell (Oskar with a K because his parents both read Gunter Grass in college) (Thomas Horn) is having difficulty dealing with the fact that his dad, Thomas (Thomas Hanks), was caught on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center and died a lot. Oskar has Aspbergers and is a fucking annoying and weird kid. For some weird reason he seems to be in no sort of therapy, either for his disorder or for the fact that he's a kid whose dad just died in a horrible tragedy. But that's cool... and totally the way Upper West Side Jews relate to the world. Totally.

So he starts snooping through his dad stuff and finds a key in an envelope that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides that this is some sort of posthumous game his dad has arranged for him, so he goes off on a long journey to find this Black person and figure out what the key means by visiting all the people with the name "Black" in New York City. Along the way he meets his long-lost grandfather who no longer speaks ... but we don't know why and never find out... and he meets a black couple in Fort Greene who are getting a divorce, but give a shit about Oskar for no particular reason.

There are so many layers of shit to dig through in this story, let alone the presentation on screen, that it's hard to know where to begin. Why does Oskar have to be on the Asperberger's spectrum? Why does Tom Hanks have a terrible New Yawk accent in some scenes and not in others? (Answer: looping.) Why does the grandfather not speak and why should I care about that? Why would a mother let her sorta special-needsy son walk around without her (even if she scouts the locations first)? (And how on earth does she have time to scout the locations for him?)

To say that Thomas Horn is annoying is like saying that Hitler wasn't fond of Jews. There really aren't words for whatever Horn is in this film. "Repulsive" comes to mind. It's impossible to align with the kid because his way of talking and looking at the world is so precious and otherhumanly that I could only be totally turned off by him. He's a totally concocted persona whose artifice is on display to all. And he carries around a fucking tambourine that somehow soothes his soul (like how watching Judge Wapner soothed Raymond Babbitt) so every time we see him walking around New York (which is about 80% of the film) he's ringing a goddamn tambo. Ugh!

I've said here before that movies about September, 11 are cheap because it's just simply too soon to have any perspective on. I had my own experience that day and I don't care about a fucking annoying kid's experience. What's more insipid here is that the fact that Thomas Schell died that day has nothing to do with the story. It's sentimental shorthand of the most vile variety. All that matters is that he dies - he could have simply chocked on a bagel and lox any other day in history. That would have been random and unfair. This is just manipulative garbage that tries to help understand what Oskar is feeling, but really just sets us spinning in a cycle of "I remember where I was on that day when..." - which really isn't story telling at all.

This is a movie about fathers and sons. Big fucking deal. Yet somehow it became a story about pain in the wake of September 11. It's all nonsense.

Stars: 1 of 4