Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

[NeonLX]

Our teevee is on for something like 3 minutes per week...but both times I've walked past the thing recently, it's been broadcasting an ad for a Tom Hanks movie called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Looks like it's gonna be a heart string-yanker based on the tragedy of 9/11.

Anyone else seen these ads?

[psynapz]

Yep, the first time I saw that trailer, before I knew what the movie title was, I said out loud to the wife "Oh, Tom Hanks, what the fuck are you shilling now?"

Turns out it's based on a book the wife just read for her book club. They always read the most depressing shit, which makes her sentiments on this ere Relentless Suspicion site that much more painfully ironic.

To keep the peace, I haven't ventured to ask whether the book incidentally hammers on the official CT via its obviously heart-wrenching narrative, or if it dared to be historically accurate enough to include all-over-the-map conflicting reports. Keeping the peace means not sharing that I know the answer to that question sight-unseen, because that makes me close-minded.

[JackRiddler]

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This campaign is getting extremely frequent & incredibly cloying play on the New York airwaves, even during the NFL playoffs, and it seems to be the most adverted movie (or product of any kind) of the week. You can gather that it's about a spectrum boy (sorry, here I must think of the Hollywood formula of exploiting "the most topical disability of the present year") who loses his father at WTC, which leaves us all very sad, shocked and empty. He discovers an artifact (his father's key to an unknown lock) that sets him off on a Quest For Meaning that (I'm extrapolating) the poor grey adults at first find puzzling or endeavor to discourage. But as evidenced by the "I See Dead People" exchanges built into the ad, our Junior Gump will have the support of his father's hallucinated ghost (Gandalf the White). The direct use of the burning towers in the spots indicates that 9/11 is now officially historicized. The images have lost the "controversy" or presumption of trauma to the victims that made them taboo for entertainment spots (though they were once permanent fixtures on the "news" loop), and someone may be thinking they need reinforcing. Either Tom Hanks or Sandra Bullock alone would normally be enough to make me run fast and dive for cover, but this is also "From the Producer of Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." A propaganda trifecta.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... .php?id=71

On why Forrest Gump is more vile as war propaganda than Rambo, page here:
viewtopic.php?t=33537&p=436584

To keep the peace, I haven't ventured to ask whether the book incidentally hammers on the official CT via its obviously heart-wrenching narrative, or if it dared to be historically accurate enough to include all-over-the-map conflicting reports.

Oh come on, do you have to ask?

Keeping the peace means not sharing that I know the answer to that question sight-unseen, because that makes me close-minded.

Of course not. Sanctifying the official story and putting it beyond civilized reproach by having the audience see it incidentally through the eyes of a harmed and beautiful child would be a really mean maneuver. This movie won't have much of a kiddie audience but the choice of protagonist does aim for the kind of smart and sensitive misfits who are likeliest to question the OCT among today's youth (or who are "vulnerable" to conspiracy thinking/pattern recognition/make-up-syndrome-name, in the psychocontrol jargon). The ad tells us the boy has questions that must be answered (presumably about his father's secret life and nothing to do with the events of September 11th), indicating a subtext of inoculation against heretical thoughts. (See, I can sound Hugh too.)

But before we send this corpse off to the crematorium, we will have to confirm or falsify our assumptions by recruiting a patriotic RI volunteer to accept two hours of exposure to Bullock-Hanks radiation. (In the theater? My god, man, we're not monsters, we value our human subjects! Once it's on DVD.) That way we can also see if there are explicit treatments of "conspiracy theorists" being mean to the questing burned-and-gifted-child, analogous to the SDS Hippie-Hitler abusing Forrest Gump's girlfriend. Which I very much doubt. This looks to be in an arthouse lower-key and would not dignify such ideas by mentioning them, etc. etc.

I shall conclude with the thought that not even the Ministry of Gump will top the conceptual chutzpah of William Gibson -- whose stories make schtick of intricately unlikely but rigorously materialist conspiratorial weaves -- in "Pattern Recognition." This 2005 novel manages to swallow the official story on our behalf, unexamined, in a plot that includes a CIA father! vaporized at WTC 7! who may not actually be dead! The protagonist, his questing daughter, has a gift and a topical disability: She's allergic to brands (the Luis Vuitton logo and the Michelin Man give her seizures) which enables her career as the world's most expensive cool-hunting consultant. Of course. Most of the book reads like a catalog of product placement. She'll never quite unwrap the mystery of who her father was or what he did (an answer would be counter to the laws of postmodern high-lit) but the journey is the destiny as she overcomes her psychic burns, accepts the loss, finds her inner light, etc. etc.



PS - Just found an old Michelin poster, eerily appropriate because it looks like "Bibendus" and his twin are in a command car near the embers of a No-Man's Land on the Western Front.





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[2012 Countdown]

I've seen them too. It catches your (our) attention right away, as it insinuates maybe they are questioning the official story, but then further in, we get a let down, and no, that is NOT what will be explored. On the contrary, it seems the official story is a given, a backdrop, a point of departure. Indoctrination. Bastards.

[DrVolin]

I might even see it in the theater. Yes, I am that dedicated.

[Nordic]

I would need not only a barf bag, but some kind of physical restraining device, perhaps a straitjacket, so I would't rip up the seats and throw them at the screen. If someone could provide those things I'd be happy to go and report back. Hell I'll even see it in 3D.

[Nordic]

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PS - Just found an old Michelin poster, eerily appropriate because it looks like "Bibendus" and his twin are in a command car near the embers of a No-Man's Land on the Western Front.





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Amazing. The Michelin man looks WASTED in that picture. Drunk and stoned.

Is the message "get as fucked up as you want, your tires will protect you!"?

[NeonLX]

I'd only go to the movie if someone else paid my ticket--and if I could get bound up like Nordic suggests. Sedatives might be indicated as well.

Love the different tread patterns of the tires on the rear axle of the car in the stoned Michelin Man ad...

[elfismiles]

EDIT:

LINK
viewtopic.php?p=442812#p442812

[sunny]

I allege Sandra Bullock is a dependable covert Nazi agent.

[Project Willow]

Amazing. The Michelin man looks WASTED in that picture. Drunk and stoned.

Looks like Winston Churchill and every other cigar smoking baby I've ever seen.

Thank you for the bit on Gibson JR. http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=33173

[JackRiddler]

Love the different tread patterns of the tires on the rear axle of the car in the stoned Michelin Man ad...

Oh, shite, I finally saw that. Wouldn't have seemed out of place at the time, I guess.

Who knows if drunk driving was even illegal yet.

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[MinM]

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They even went too far for NPR:

'Extremely Loud' And Incredibly Manipulative

Some critics are indignant over Stephen Daldry's film of Jonathan Safran Foer's book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They say the appropriation of Sept. 11 for such a sentimental work is exploitation.

It is a knotty issue. I think Foer wasn't writing about Sept. 11 so much as using it to explore themes he introduced in his Eastern Europe-set debut, Everything is Illuminated. That book had an American trying to come to terms with the legacy of his Jewish forefathers, to counter the elusiveness of memory; Extremely Loud also has a son hunting for clues. Eleven-year-old Oskar Schell struggles to find meaning after his dad dies in the World Trade Center.

In his lifetime, the father devised puzzles and scavenger hunts to force his fearful son into the world, and Oskar's convinced there's a message at the finish line of his dad's final challenge. Cryptic communication between other fathers and sons shows up throughout the book, along with accounts of other attacks, like the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima. Foer also prints blurry photos of a figure in midleap from the World Trade Center — they're items in young Oskar's Sept. 11 scrapbook.

In the film of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, screenwriter Eric Roth eliminates other characters' perspectives along with some of the boy's more cutesy tics, and finds a middle ground between jumpy postmodernism and formula uplift. The movie works you over. The first thing on-screen is a body — you can't see whose — falling in slow motion through the air, and it made me want to flee: It was too much horror, too fast.

The other wrenching device is a series of six answering-machine messages left by the father, played by Tom Hanks, after the planes hit, his calm assurances increasingly less convincing. For reasons only later apparent, young Oskar, played by Thomas Horn, replaced that machine with an identical model and lied to his mother, played by Sandra Bullock, about calls that came in before she got home. It's the last message he can't bear to share, and it's withheld from us, too — a kind of dramatic striptease — until the end. And yes, it's devastating.

Horn was discovered on Kids Week on Jeopardy!, and he's not really an actor — more of an intelligent reciter. Fortunately, Oskar is supposed to be a kid with no social graces. When he finds a key in a vase in his dad's closet in an envelope with the word "Black," he decides to visit every "Black" in the phone book — all five boroughs.

The parade of photogenic multiracial blacks does get tedious, but the cinematography by Chris Menges gives every neighborhood its own distinctive color and character. And the boy is accompanied in later visits by a mute, elderly man known as the Renter, a guest in the apartment of Oskar's German grandmother and played by Max von Sydow.

The inception of his muteness is chronicled in the book but not the film, and it could have seemed precious if von Sydow, now 82, didn't have such gravity. He's a tragic figure, yet there's a bit of Stan Laurel in his weary shrugs: He makes this man an irreducible mixture of father and child. The other actors — Hanks and Bullock and Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright — aren't as lucky: They have dialogue. But they're suitably somber, like guests at an important funeral.

The problem with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that once the filmmakers strip away the novel's postmodern pastiche and tack on an inspirational Hollywood ending, what's left — this story of a boy's search for a lost father — doesn't fully mesh with Sept. 11, and doesn't fully earn the right to use such terrible images from our recent past. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is extremely powerful and incredibly manipulative. When you dry your tears, you might feel, as I did, angry.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/06/144781074 ... nipulative

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2 ... _fa_02.mp3

[82_28]

Love the different tread patterns of the tires on the rear axle of the car in the stoned Michelin Man ad...

Oh, shite, I finally saw that. Wouldn't have seemed out of place at the time, I guess.

Who knows if drunk driving was even illegal yet.

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I emailed a dude that makes tires for antique automobiles earlier today about Neon's observation trying to get an answer. I read many old tire ads and stories about tire technology. Dude at vintage tire place has no idea and there is no clear answer from the other research I did. My best guess is they were showing off two different types of tread on different tire models of the same car. The differences in tread was a big deal back then and apparently was diligently inspected by every prospective buyer. There's a ton of news items of just about tread design.

Also, no, drunk driving wasn't per se illegal then. It could get you into trouble if you were a known troublemaker, but more often than not it was simply a police escort home or a "keep it safe Mr. Jefferson" type thing. There wasn't a differentiation between civil law and traffic law back then either. Given the technology and the traffic safety laws of today where would we come up with antics in stories such as this from 1900?



Granted, the Michelin ad is from probably between 1917 and 1925.

[DrVolin]

Looks like a winter tire and a summer rain tire.