![]() Kite runner movie free#He spends his free time writing stories and flying kites with Hassan. We travel back to 1978 where Amir is a young boy in Afghanistan. The story begins in 2000 with the publication of Amir's first book, but his joy is soon halted by an unexpected phone call from his father's friend, Rahim. The Kite Runner focuses on Amir's friendship with one of his father's young servants, Hassan. ![]() The film is a pretty accurate conversion of the book, although some information is changed and excluded as you may expect. The story comes from Khaled Hosseini's best-selling book, with the screenplay by David Benioff who also worked with Forster on Stay. It tells the tale of Afghan refugee Amir, played by Scottish born Khalid Abdalla who featured in United 93. ![]() The Kite Runner is a story of friendship, taking a stand and the circularity of life. The seventh film from the gifted Marc Forster, director of Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction to name a few. Yet one film released this Christmas stands out as the star on top of the tree, The Kite Runner. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and The Perfect Holiday. If we consider the Hollywood films that have been placed under the Christmas tree this year we'll find such shoddy gifts and returnable items as Fred Claus, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Mr. Once more the Hollywood Scrooges have cashed in on Christmas and generally taken a big shit on Tiny Tim. All over Hollywood, producers and powerful studio executives gorge themselves after another year of profit. Nevertheless, it's not only the geese that are getting fat. Or to be more accurate in this day and age, they're probably getting bird flu. Khalid Abdalla portrays the grown-up Amir as a quiet, contemplative soul who’s forced to confront both the phantoms of his past and, at one point, a very immediate, physical menace.Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. Bold and loyal to the point of self-sacrifice, the character could easily have come across as an unrealistic ideal, but due to Mahmidzada he’s heart-achingly convincing. As his best-friend Hassan, a lower-class ‘Hazara’ Afghan, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada is guaranteed to get tears welling. As the young Amir, the son of one of monarchist-era Afghanistan’s wealthier businessmen, Zekeria Ebrahimi emanates an intelligence and sensitivity that belies his age, transforming what could be inexplicable actions into somehow understandable responses to horrific events. ![]() Whatever your ethical stance with regard to Forster’s choice to use real Afghan kids in the film (some of whose families fear them becoming pariahs in their less-than-tolerant homeland thanks to their involvement in the rape scene), there’s no denying the power of their turns. However, whichever genre he tackles - and Forster seems determined to match Peter Weir for genre-hoppery - he is, like Weir again, a master of finding the strong, warm pulse of humanity in any script through the performances he teases from his cast. Weirdly, this means that, in terms of Marc Forster movies, The Kite Runner has more in common with the pristine likes of Finding Neverland (even beyond the CG-assisted kite-flying scenes) or Stranger Than Fiction (with which it shares some tumbling fruit imagery) than it does with the scuzzy domestic gloom of Monster’s Ball. For the sake of neat parallels and clear dramatic echoes, what could be a big, sprawling story is boiled down to the interplay of just a handful of characters, all loose ends neatly tucked away. The story feels too contingent on coincidence, too tidy for something which presents such a complex, messed-up situation as the ethnic divisions in pre- and post-Soviet Afghanistan. Both the source and its adaptation are frustratingly heavy-handed at points. Perhaps ‘delicate’ is the wrong word, though. Not only that, but scripter David Benioff (25th Hour, Troy) has proven largely faithful to Hosseini’s work - although you’d expect a delicate handling of the material given that much was based on the author’s own experiences. Still, it’s not exactly what any right-minded person would call enjoyable, and given that much of the action occurs in Afghanistan, with a pivotal scene involving child rape, it’s surprising that it ever made it to the big screen. Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was one of those word-of-mouth print hits, just challenging enough, yet just populist enough, to win over reading groups on either side of the Atlantic. ![]()
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