let’s look at all the mistakes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close made:

heronqueenblues:

• Casting Tom Hanks as the father, thereby forcing him more screen time than he should reasonably have as that character
• casting Sandra Bullock as the mother, thereby not allowing the audience to fully accept her role as if it were played by a relatively unknown character actor
• focusing on sentimentality and joy instead of loss and fear
• making the kid the lead character instead of just one thread tying everything together
• focusing on the 9/11 aspect
• making Oskar too nice and sympathetic and never really delving into the fact that he’s pretty self-centered and petty at times
• ditching basically Oskar’s entire relationship with his grandmother, and of course the grandmother/grandfather’s relationship (aka the most interesting part of the book)
• being made
• why would you make a movie out of that book
• it is not the kind of book suited to a movie in the first place
• i hate you