Adapting the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, would be a very difficult movie to create. I know that they have already come out with the movie and I have not seen it. The book itself is told from the perspective of a little boy named Oskar. There isn’t very much dialogue going on between characters because it’s mostly Oskar’s thoughts. A director would have a very hard time with that and would need to make more dialogue to make it more understandable. The book is also very confusing and a difficult read. Foer makes the book very jumpy like Oskar, so you have to pay close attention to little details or you’re officially lost until the next chapter. A director would have to cut out a lot of less important details and figure out what keeps the story moving and what’s less important.
A scene that would need to be kept in the movie is on page sixty-eight. This is the part where the main character Oskar is listening to his dad’s messages that he’d left on the answering machine saying that he was okay. That was a defining point in Oskar because he only replays them to hear his dad’s voice again. He ended up switching the phones so that his mom wouldn’t have to hear them. I think it is a really important part of the book that helps to keep the story moving along.
Another scene that would need to be kept in the movie would be when Oskar goes to visit Mr. Black. The part that makes this scene so special is that Oskar turns Mr. Black’s hearing aid on after ten years of having it turned off. Mr. Black ends up realizing there is a point to hear and see the world. This is a place in the book where Oskar and Mr. Black take off on their New York adventure together. The whole movie wouldn’t make sense without it.
A last scene that would need to be kept in the movie would be after Oskar meets Mr. Black, he wants to know if he knew Thomas Schell. Oskar was searching for anyone who knew his dad. Mr. Black kept a file cabinet of names of people that he’d met in his life. The note card would say their name and how they met. Thomas Schell wasn’t in the stack which disappointed Oskar so Mr. Black decided to go out and help Oskar find the person with the last name Black that he needed. This part is another turning point in the story because Oskar is running out of options and lies as to get out of the house and solve the mysteries. It really showed how much Mr. Black cared for people, it made his character loveable.
A scene that would certainly be cut from the film would have to be when the dad of Oskar wrote him a letter talking about how he was supposed to marry a woman named Anna. This part was very slow and it really did nothing to contribute to the book so far. He didn’t end up marrying Anna so I have to say it was irrelevant to the book and what Oskar was trying to do.
Another scene that wasn’t moving the story forward would have to be when the Grandma wrote Oskar a letter about her mom and her husband. The mother part of that story didn’t make sense when she started writing about her husband. It just wouldn’t be portrayed easily in a movie and wouldn’t be a major scene.
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