EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

The protagonist of director Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - based on Jonathan Safran Foer's famed 9/11/01-themed novel and adapted by screenwriter Eric Roth - is Oskar Schell, an 11-year-old Manhattanite who tells a new acquaintance that he was once tested for Asperger's syndrome, but that "the results weren't definitive." My first thought upon hearing that admission was that Oskar's folks really should've sought a second opinion, because with young actor Thomas Horn tearing through breathless reams of stream-of-consciousness dialogue, his condition seemed definitive as all-get-out. My second thought, which I only fully composed during the end credits, and which I apologize for in advance, was that watching Extremely Loud was like watching a movie while an 11-year-old with Asperger's yammers in your ear for 130 minutes.

THE IRON LADY

It's hardly a newsflash that over the past several years - well, forever, really - Meryl Streep has treated us to a run of extraordinary performances, and her Margaret Thatcher in the screen biography The Iron Lady is one of the most extraordinary of them all. Yet the vexing question regarding Streep's indelible work of late isn't "How does she keep doing it?" It's "How does she keep doing it with so little help from her directors?"

Not long after meeting through their participation in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, second flutist Ellen Huntington and principal harpist Lillian Lau decided to form their own two-person ensemble. Yet while they knew they had more than enough flute-and-harp repertoire to sustain a professional partnership, what they didn't have was a name.

Music

Samantha Fish

The Redstone Room

Friday, January 13, 8 p.m.

For one of my New Year's resolutions, I vowed to stop moaning in print about those who've earned nationwide acclaim and achieved considerable professional success despite being many, many years younger than me. Then, as one of my first What's Happenin' assignments for 2012, I was asked to write about 22-year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist Samantha Fish.

Well, I suppose three days was a pretty good run.