I both hated and loved Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I loved it for its experimental typography, moments of humor and for the story of the grandparents and hated it for its sappiness, idealized characters, overly done gimmicks and the pointless ending. The movie takes the worst parts of the book and adds some more hollywoodish bad stuff to it, creating a concoction that can be hard to bear. If you’ve read the book you’ll probably get angry at the ridiculousness of the adaptation and if you haven’t, you’ll probably fall asleep after shedding a tear or two. Either way, you’ll probably have to pinch yourself hard to be able to stand the two hour long cinematic trauma orgy, like the main character repeatedly does in the movie. The only thing that kept me going was waiting for the moment when the old guy played by Max von Sydow would start talking and tell the kid in a Darth Vader-like voice with a German accent: “Oskar, I am your grandfather.” Yeah, that never happened.
