Next Week: Jocks and Cheerleaders. Today: Extremely Loud

Dak Dumbutton's 50th High School Reunion Story, entitled "The Jock-Cheerleader-Brain Trust Ruling Axis" is finished. We will start posting it on Monday, one chapter per day for five days.

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Meanwhile, Plot and Duck found "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" on Direct TV last night. We have so many movie channels we can't even find them all. We'll have them until whatever super-package-come-on offer they gave us runs out. In the meantime, this Jonathan Safran Foer story, which was one of Plotnik's favorite books of all time, is perhaps even more powerful as a movie. What a tear-jerker. Tom Hanks is in it, but only peripherally. The movie belongs to the astonishing child actor Thomas Horn, as well as Max von Sydow and Sandra Bullock.

But if you read reviews of this film, which has supposedly received the worst reviews ever for a film nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, you'd think it was a self-serving, gratuitous and heartless piece of garbage. It is, in fact, life-affirming, brilliant and heartbreaking. What could so many reviewers have seen, or not seen, to give them such a visceral negative reaction? How could so many people miss the entire point of this wonderful movie?

The Great Plotnik is a reviewer himself, so he understands being on the outside looking in, but that is generally true only when the reviewer's particular button gets pushed. In Plotnik's case, that button would be movies or plays where children are killed. Dead kids, or the threat of it? That's it, crap movie. No exceptions.

But what is the button here for so many people?

Have you seen it? Which alternate universe is Plotnik in?