The Kite Runner

"Matayog ang lipad ng saranggola ni Pepe
Matayog ang pangarap ng matandag bingi...

MNG Blouse

Zara Jeans

CMG Wedges

I never really understood that Celeste Legaspi’s 80’s song, but I memorized and sang it out loud anyway in my youth. The words conveyed playfulness and the non-sensical thoughts of a child. You know the nursery rhymes that we easily memorized in kindergarten? Chanting them again now (oh, I still know a pretty good number of them!), I realize that there are really no grand meanings to them. But we sang them anyway, because it was fun and rhythmical. And it made our world more colourful.

Sometimes I wish I could see the world through an innocent child’s eyes again.

Movie Review: The Kite Runner  (2007)

In the 70's in Afghanistan, a Pushtun boy Amir and a Hazara servant boy Hassan are raised together in the house of Amir's father. They live like brothers, playing and kiting on the streets of a once peaceful Kabul. After Amir wins a competition in kiting, Hassan runs to bring a kite to Amir, but he is beaten and raped by a brutal boy and his gang in an empty street. The young, coward Amir witnesses the assault but does not help the loyal Hassam. This event leads to a falling apart of their friendship, plus the internal war in their country tears them physically apart. The retribution comes when Amir becomes an adult, and he is forced to pay back the betrayal he has done to his friend Hassan.

The Review: Why is it that sometimes, those who are less fortunate and less educated can show unconditional and loyal friendship than those who are more blessed with material things? Those who are learned, more often than not, have cynical take on people, while the innocent will do anything for friendship.

This is one of my most favourite dramas of all time, never mind that a big part of the movie is subtitled. The loyalty of the servant boy Hassan to his master/childhood friend Amir is so pure and resilient that he is willing to sacrifice everything for the latter. In the end, Amir purges his guilt and tries to make up for the betrayal that he did to Hassan by paying back in a most remarkable way.

This is one of those rare moments when the movie version is better than the book. (So sue me!)

Trivia:

Due to Afghan mores concerning male rape, Paramount Vantage agreed to relocate the young actors out of the country to the United Arab Emirates and arrange visas, housing and schooling for the young actors and jobs for their guardians. Paramount Vantage accepts responsibility for the living expenses of Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, Ali Danish Bakhtyari and Sayed Jafar Masihullah Gharibzada until they reach adulthood, a cost some estimated at up to $500,000.

Author Khaled Hosseini describes the filming (in Kashgar, China) of the Kabul kite tournament scenes saying "There weren't actually any kites in the sky. We were just kind of looking up at these strings going up to these cables and hanging from the other side there were water bottles to give the string a sense of tension." To which director Marc Forster adds "Yes, because we had no wind." CG kites were added in post-production.

Director Mark Forster mentions at 07:30 in the DVD commentary that in the book the servant boy, Hassan, was a harelip (cleft upper lip), but that was left out of the film because it would have required two hours of makeup every day, it would have been difficult for the boy to act in the makeup, he didn't want to put the boy through it, and it wasn't essential to the script.

As expected, I cried in this movie.