Is this okay? I’m more sympathetic to schmaltz than most-subtlety is too often an excuse to privilege what you get over what others don’t-but the idea of a September 11th movie trying to comfort me, and by sending an omnibenevolent Tom Hanks to mug tenderly at the camera no less, makes me want to gag in his face. You may think you can snicker at this ELAIC trailer on your laptop, but take it in at the megaplex, trapped in the dark, cowering below the big screen, and it is the emotional equivalent of Ryan Gosling stomping your head in. But here’s what I now realize, especially as I watch this new trailer: Resistance is futile. So I’ve been particularly resistant to the ELAIC movie-directed by Stephen Daldry, the man behind Billy Elliot, The Reader, and The Hours, and due out this Christmas-ever since it was announced. (It’s about an adorable little boy, for God’s sake. Few books spend so many pages ingratiating themselves with the reader, and ELAIC does this in an extraordinarily clever, cute, and heartbreaking manner-effectively making literary doe eyes at the reader through the page. If you love Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, you can’t help but feel protective.
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