As the first film of my 25 / 25 challenge, I watched Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — a film that I had rented on iTunes and was about to expire, so the timing couldn’t have been better.  I had read this book a while ago and really enjoyed the protagonist’s voice in the novel — a voice that the filmmakers attempted to capture apparently by directing the boy to open his eyes extremely wide.  As usual in a novel-to-film interpretation, a lot was lost in translation, including the whole backstory about his grandmother & grandfather’s relationship, which I found an incredibly moving part of the book.  I also don’t remember the ending of the book very clearly, but I’m pretty sure the filmmakers took some creative license to Hollywood-ify the last few sequences into some sort of happy ending.  In the end, I’m glad that I watched it, but definitely not one of my favorite films.