I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a week ago, and while it certainly was not a bad movie, there was something bothering me, something I have been annoyed about in films for a while now. The movie had a lot of shots of September 11, really getting an emotional rise out of the audience by having the protagonist’s father dying in the towers. I understand that it is an adaptation from a book, but using 9/11 felt cheap. The whole audience lived through the event, it was very easy to exploit our emotions to make the movie seem more relevant or deep. You, the reader, probably would have been a lot happier without this picture of September 11. The memory still haunts all of us. It feels like a cop out to add it to films, because instead of making an actual emotional movie, they just cash in on our emotional feelings associated with September 11. Extremely Loud is not the first movie to do this, but seeing as how its been nominated for Best Picture it might be seen as the definitive
Malcolm Coates