Title:Title: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Director: Stephen Daldry Starring: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures Genre(s): Drama Rated:       (For emotional thematic material, some disturbing images, and language)

CONSUMER ADVICE

Parents, there's no bad language as far as I can remember, no sex, and violence is limited to disturbing images. I think mature kids can handle this. Recommended for ages 8 and up.

Did director Stephen Daldry know anything about how grievance over a loved one works? I don't wish to sound mean when I start my review this way, but considering the subject matter of his latest film “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is incredibly offensive and contrived I think it's worth asking. I ask this knowing that no one film will ever sum up what people felt about 9/11. Much like no film can ever truly sum up the Vietnam War or the Holocaust, 9/11 is up to interpretation depending on who you are and how the event affected you personally. My experience with 9/11 was fairly anti-climactic. I was all the way in California while most of my family was in New York and New Jersey.

The closest I came to losing someone on 9/11 is when someone picked my uncle up and gave him a ride in his car…just before a chunk of building landed on the very spot he was standing. Otherwise though – outside of the general sadness of the day – 9/11 had very little long term effect on me. So maybe I don't know what it felt like to lose someone on 9/11, but I DO know what it feels like to lose someone in an unexpected tragedy! Trust me: This is not exactly how one mourns for a lost one. I guess Daldry could explain that our hero Oskar (Thomas Horn) is simply a unique child who views the world differently. After all, this is a kid who calculates that if people continue to die at the rate they do, there will be no place to bury them in twenty years (more or less).

It's no wondering his dad (Tom Hanks) invented games for Oskar to play that would force him to talk to people. The kid's social skills could use some brushing up on. When his dad dies in the World Trade Center on 9/11 he sort of just shuts down emotionally. He keeps a shrine of his dad in a secret hole in his room and walks around town with an instrument (to block out the noise…for some reason). The movie eventually gets to the point where Oskar finds a key in his father's coat pocket and is determined to find what it opens. Why? Because he believes this was a message sent to him by his dad. This is one of those movies where characters who are alive believe that their dead ones left something behind to find.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a comforting thought though. The dead are still dead, and nothing can bring them back regardless what you find. And this is a fact that seems to delude Oskar: That his dad is dead and he simply isn't dealing with it. He shouts at his mom (Sandra Bullock) about how he wished she had died instead of him. He intrudes on random people's lives asking them questions. The best relationship he makes on this is with an old man (Max von Sydow) who can't speak but has ‘yes' and ‘no' written on the palms of his hands as his key way to communicate. This man (known simply as The Renter) is probably the films only good character because he's the only one that feels authentic.

But again, I ask Mr. Daldry this: Does he have a clue about how grievance works? Even with a special kid, the last thing most kids want to do after their parents die is run around the city looking for secret messages their parents might have left behind. Oskar is also wildly unlikable. Outbursts I can understand, but since the movie waits a year before he starts this journey, his frequent outbursts simply suggest he should have been put in therapy months ago. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is manipulative and annoying. It pays little respect to the dead and doesn't have a story worth telling. Oh, and on the grievance thing, here was my react to that loss from tragedy: I simply cried a lot.