Blu-Ray Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[Note: I received this disc from Warner Bros. as part of their Blu-Ray Elite program.]

Film

Any movie that opens with an artistic abstraction of a body falling to signify someone jumping from one of the Twin Towers can't hope for greatness, but the shamelessness of Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is breathtaking in its outrage. In fairness, it was always going to be this way. An adaptation of the hideous book by Jonathan Safran Foer, the worst, most self-satisfied writer in America today, EL&IC does not so much process the horror of September 11 and its bewildering aftermath through the eyes of a possibly autistic 9-year-old as use this blank protagonist to skirt any sincere approach to the tragedy.

Oskar (Thomas Horn, discovered being robotic and eerily smart on Jeopardy's Kids Week) roams around New York seeking some sense of closure for his father's (Tom Hanks) death in the terrorist attack, especially concerned with finding what his father's mysterious key unlocks. The lad, afraid of subways, runs around the city with a tambourine so that we have something to irritate us when the soundtrack isn't dominated by Horn's monotoned complaints about things that make him nervous. Unable to process emotion, he intrudes upon the turbulent lives of adults dealing with their own issues and presses them to answer his questions. For a movie supposedly about coping with 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts a disgusting inability to deal with the realities of life and the manner in which banal sorrows do not cease with the occurrence of large-scale travesties.

Source Code

My review for Duncan Jones' flawed but entertaining anti-sophomore slump Source Code is up now at Cinelogue. I'm still waiting for Jones to find his own voice or at least keep stewing his influences until they all turn into a homogeneous mix, but I cannot deny that he's rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with as a sci-fi director. Source Code may not show off its cast the way Moon proved a vehicle for superb character and personal man-crush Sam Rockwell, but Jake Gyllenhaal hasn't been this interesting since Brokeback Mountain and Michelle Monaghan makes an irresistible person out of a completely flat character (though not even she can make the romantic plot all that believable, I'm afraid). Undercooked as it may be, Source Code played with some interesting ideas within a captivating narrative, and I would not hesitate to recommend it. On a numerical scale, I'd rate it about a 3.5 or maybe even a light 4 out of 5.

Please check out my review at Cinelogue and let me know what you think.