4) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Hey, remember that time Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars? I had forgotten about that, and how confounding it was. Because this movie is pretty bad, and most people who saw it agreed on this, or so I thought, before it got nominated for a freaking Oscar.
The majority of critics, given its “rotten” overall rating on Rotten Tomatoes and its “mixed” rating on Metacritic, seemed to have a similar experience of the movie that I did, so I feel somewhat validated. The story seems like it sort of had potential, and from what I hear about the book, it works well in print form. But on screen it’s either completely flat or completely ludicrous. The child is irritating and that could be ok, but he’s held in such high regard without much awareness of how insufferable he is (again, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing necessarily), that it becomes—I don’t know, overwhelming?—listening to him in scene after scene.
The Max von Sydow character is kind of interesting, as are many of the other supporting players, but this gets overshadowed by how preposterous their degree of accommodation for his personal quest is, and the partial explanation for this at the conclusion of the film is not at all satisfying. That was my take, at least. Some liked it, many others were even more vitriolic towards it, but somehow it gets to go down in history as an Academy Award nominee instead of a brilliant movie like Beginners. AMPAS, you crazy.
