With the respectful, if rather lukewarm reviews, and the film's tepid box office, this one fell under the radar for me despite all the advance publicity.
I've finally caught up with it on DVD and I must say it was worth the wait.
If the film has a major flaw, it's that the class system in Afghanistan is not explained as well as it might have been for Western audiences. A simple voice over at the beginning of the film would have helped enormously. Without it, you may not fully understand the relationship between the two boys until the end when it is made very clear.
The rape scene is not only crucial to the plot, it's the whole reason for the story, which is a metaphor for the rape of the country itself by first the Russians, then the Taliban, while the world stood by watching and did nothing. The irony of the West's involvement after 9/11 is not relevant as the story takes place in 1978 Kabul, 1988 San Francisco and the Pakistan and Afghanistan of 2000. The book itself was written prior to 9/11.
Wihout expecting them, I was quite surpsied to find filmic references to other movies, The Red Balloon, of course but not surprisingly, but also The Green Years (central child character is mean to his only friend), Home From the Hill (a major plot point), Midnight Express (the violence toward the end), Brokeback Mountain (the dinner table rebuke of the main character's father-in-law) and The Namesake (narrative style).
This is Marc Forster's most assured film. It has none of the histrionics of Monster's Ball. The kids are not one-dimensional as they are in Finding Neverland. The film is rated PG-13, not R, as was antiicpated. It is in fact a good film for older children.
The Kite Runner
Akash wrote:Oh and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone liked it, and since his awful taste is closer to that of the Academy, I expect the film to do very well at the Oscars. Of course, he only gave it 3 stars, which is weird for him. If this film couldn't get a rapturous response from even THIS lousy critic, it might have problems. We'll see. Ebert may still call it the film of the year, the best thing since "Crash", and send it on its merry Oscar way.
The review isn't worth posting here.
I read this review. Basically he says this movie can be seen and enjoyed but there's nothing special about it. That's pretty much what any 3 star review says anyways. But even if Travers does have bad taste, what about Atonement and No Country For Old Men - both of which received four stars? I guess you could say his bad taste is due to the fact he loves every film his eyes meet, but at least Golden Compass received 1 1/2 stars. Same thing goes for Ebert. I can't count how many films I've seen and found atrocious that received thumbs all around.
I don't know where I'm getting with this really... I'm just bored
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I'm not a fan of Forster, but I understand where you're coming from, Magilla. Though I shudder to make a statement like this around I here, I thought Monster's Ball showed promise. A great movie? Of course not -- the script is full of about four coincidences too many, and I'll never forgive Forster himself for that awful bird in the cage metaphor. But I found the story raw and powerful, and the cast -- including the much-maligned-these-days Berry -- excellent.
Stranger Than Fiction is a completely innocuous nothing. It practically evaporates on screen as you watch it, but it was perfectly watchable. Nothing remotely award-worthy but nothing heinous either.
Finding Neverland is a complete snooze. It's here where I realized Forster was probably just another bland Oscar-baiter. I see no reason to believe The Kite Runner won't follow in the same footsteps. I think the hatred comes from the fact that films like this chalk about WAY too many Oscar nods over much worthier contenders. As long as he keeps making films like this, this board will despise him.
Stranger Than Fiction is a completely innocuous nothing. It practically evaporates on screen as you watch it, but it was perfectly watchable. Nothing remotely award-worthy but nothing heinous either.
Finding Neverland is a complete snooze. It's here where I realized Forster was probably just another bland Oscar-baiter. I see no reason to believe The Kite Runner won't follow in the same footsteps. I think the hatred comes from the fact that films like this chalk about WAY too many Oscar nods over much worthier contenders. As long as he keeps making films like this, this board will despise him.
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I don't get all this vitiolic hatred for Marc Forster. I haven't seen enough of Brett Rattner's work to see a comparison, but he is lightyears better than Michael Bay, easily the worst director working today.
Monster's Ball was a decent little movie, with an excellent performance from Halle Berry, even if she didn't deserve the Oscar over Sissy Spacek. Finding Neverland was a diappointment, but both Kate Winslet and Julie Christie worked wonders with what little they were given. Stranger Than Fiction, though not a great comedy, was better than the likes of last year's The Devil Wears Prada, Prairie Home Companion and For Your Consideration.
Monster's Ball was a decent little movie, with an excellent performance from Halle Berry, even if she didn't deserve the Oscar over Sissy Spacek. Finding Neverland was a diappointment, but both Kate Winslet and Julie Christie worked wonders with what little they were given. Stranger Than Fiction, though not a great comedy, was better than the likes of last year's The Devil Wears Prada, Prairie Home Companion and For Your Consideration.
The Kite Runner would just seem to have "Oscar nominations" written all over it -- unless, of course, audiences prove as indifferent to it as they did to another Oscar bait movie based on a best-selling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. Too early to tell.
Edited By Damien on 1197413096
Edited By Damien on 1197413096
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Oh and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone liked it, and since his awful taste is closer to that of the Academy, I expect the film to do very well at the Oscars. Of course, he only gave it 3 stars, which is weird for him. If this film couldn't get a rapturous response from even THIS lousy critic, it might have problems. We'll see. Ebert may still call it the film of the year, the best thing since "Crash", and send it on its merry Oscar way.
The review isn't worth posting here.
The review isn't worth posting here.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement either by David Denby of The New Yorker. The film may indeed deserve it, but my god could Denby's review be any lazier? The link below also features his reviews for "There Will Be Blood" and "Juno."
The New Yorker
David Denby
hame is the driving emotion in “The Kite Runner,” Marc Forster’s sturdy movie based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-seller. As a child in Kabul, in the late nineteen-seventies, Amir, whose family was wealthy, grew up side by side with Hassan, the son of his father’s servant. Hassan was a devoted, even adoring, friend, but Amir, a physical coward, did not protect him against brutal violation in a Kabul alley. Having emigrated to Northern California, Amir (Khalid Abdalla) carries this and subsequent betrayals of Hassan inside his soul, but, in 2000, he’s given a chance at redemption—a possible rescue operation that requires him to go back to Afghanistan, now dominated by the Taliban. Shame is rarely an active emotion, and that may account, in part, for the movie’s slight stiffness and hesitancy; the dangers of staging a rape scene with children may have been inhibiting as well. One wants the actors to cut loose, but young Khalid Abdalla is forced to stand around looking stricken most of the time, and the director, a Swiss-German, worked with some of the actors through translators, which slowed the tempo and killed colloquial ease—the dialogue is well written, but there’s dead air around the lines. The best things in “The Kite Runner” are the portrait of Kabul’s flourishing upper-class life before the Soviets and then the Taliban took over, and the depiction of the bleak hypocrisies of the Taliban period—the disgusting cruelties performed in the name of righteousness, and the madness that makes it an offense to look at a woman’s face but acceptable to keep a young boy as a sex slave. The movie’s heart is certainly in the right place—it’s a quietly outraged work—but I wish there were more excitement in it from moment to moment
http://www.newyorker.com/arts....tPage=2
The New Yorker
David Denby
hame is the driving emotion in “The Kite Runner,” Marc Forster’s sturdy movie based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-seller. As a child in Kabul, in the late nineteen-seventies, Amir, whose family was wealthy, grew up side by side with Hassan, the son of his father’s servant. Hassan was a devoted, even adoring, friend, but Amir, a physical coward, did not protect him against brutal violation in a Kabul alley. Having emigrated to Northern California, Amir (Khalid Abdalla) carries this and subsequent betrayals of Hassan inside his soul, but, in 2000, he’s given a chance at redemption—a possible rescue operation that requires him to go back to Afghanistan, now dominated by the Taliban. Shame is rarely an active emotion, and that may account, in part, for the movie’s slight stiffness and hesitancy; the dangers of staging a rape scene with children may have been inhibiting as well. One wants the actors to cut loose, but young Khalid Abdalla is forced to stand around looking stricken most of the time, and the director, a Swiss-German, worked with some of the actors through translators, which slowed the tempo and killed colloquial ease—the dialogue is well written, but there’s dead air around the lines. The best things in “The Kite Runner” are the portrait of Kabul’s flourishing upper-class life before the Soviets and then the Taliban took over, and the depiction of the bleak hypocrisies of the Taliban period—the disgusting cruelties performed in the name of righteousness, and the madness that makes it an offense to look at a woman’s face but acceptable to keep a young boy as a sex slave. The movie’s heart is certainly in the right place—it’s a quietly outraged work—but I wish there were more excitement in it from moment to moment
http://www.newyorker.com/arts....tPage=2
Of course, Ed Gonzalez hates it. He gave it one star. And since I could barely stand the book, and I haven't liked any of Forster's films, I just know I'm going to hate this one. Funny though, the preposterous martyrdom scenes he describes -- like the one with the pomegranate -- are actually straight out of the silly novel. And I'd be shocked if the film captures the one moment of honesty in the novel -- the uncomfortable depiction of Amir's sexual appraisal and attraction to his own father while growing up.
The Kite Runner
by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: November 16, 2007
by this point, it is reasonable to discuss Marc Forster the auteur. Like Brett Ratner and Michael Bay, he makes consistently bad movies, all instantly recognizable as his own, but his at once trite and lofty award-stage aspirations mean that comparisons to the equally offensive Ron Howard are more apt. In the vile Monster's Ball, the German-born director used a sex scene between Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry as an occasion to absurdly reference I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, revealing the extent of his racial consideration by having Thornton dip a white plastic spoon into a bowl filled with chocolate ice cream. Eyes rolled, James Baldwin cringed in his grave, and an Oscar was won. That same laughable penchant for metaphor and infantile understanding of real life tragedy also colors The Kite Runner, which made me wonder if Paramount Vantage, in pushing the film's release date, should be worrying more about Forster's wellbeing than the safety of the director's young cast.
It was instructive to bring someone who swears by Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner to a screening of Forster's movie adaptation. After recalling how a critic had compared the film's kite-running sequences—positively, no less—to the Quidditch matches from the Harry Potter pictures, my friend suggested that I should still seek out Hosseini's beloved bestseller, though he understood if I never did given how Forster has shat on it, transforming a presumably brutal and nuanced account of class difference and innocence lost into Disney-style kitsch. Forster touches on but never lingers on the traditions and social realties of his characters, so rather than lavish attention on the generations-old customs that inform Afghan kite-making, he settles for a CGI-enhanced spectacle of kites chasing after each other in the skies above Kabul, set to a bloated Alberto Iglesias score and recalling Nemo's frantic escape from a shark in Finding Nemo. Shills may just call this one a "rollercoaster ride of excitement."
There is a difference between childlike filmmaking and filmmaking that authentically captures the innocence of childhood. It is the same difference that separates a filmmaker like Forster from Truffaut and Buñuel (even the giants of Iranian cinema, like Kiarostami and Panahi), both of whom understood how children truly live and suffer and how movies are consumed. Forster's head is still in Neverland, exaggerating the state of Kabul before and after the Russians arrive: Prior to the Soviet invasion, the city is conceived as an Epcot Center world showcase, then something not unlike a Romper Room version of Children of Men's apocalyptic wasteland—the trees gone, the Taliban on Beard Patrol, and bodies dangling in the streets. When Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) go to the movies to see The Magnificent Seven, the scene has less to do with their sense of childhood wonder or bourgeoning adult appetites (see 400 Blows and Bad Education for that level of sensitivity) as it does with Forster's desire to stress Amir's lack of masculine courage—a perceived character flaw from which all of the story's horrors stem.
This Hollywood whitewash barely acknowledges class difference in Afghanistan, dubiously identifying valor as a poor man's provenance. Over and over again, Forster reminds us that Amir is a coward and Hassan is a saint, maybe even some kind of mystic given his gift for spotting the location of clipped kites without ever looking at the sky; Hassan is a brave, hectoring little man who takes his rape by a Pashtun bully like a trooper and later admits to stealing a watch out of some wildly overstated and conceptualized sense of pride. When Amir, a wannabe writer, elaborates on a short story he wrote about a man who kills his wife so he could cry into a cup and have his tears turn into pearls, Hassan asks, "Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?" This begs another question: When Amir throws pomegranates at Hassan, is it because he feels responsible for his friend's rape or because he resents the way Hassan is always laying it on so thick? Rather than fight back, Hassan simply picks a piece of fruit from the ground and smashes it on his own face. For sure, righteousness has rarely been conveyed on screen with such shrillness.
Regardless of its previous unedited incarnation, Hassan's rape is so "tastefully" presented it doesn't register as an act of brutalization so much as a sweet nothing (producer Rebecca Yeldman calls it "non-gratuitous" and "impressionistic")—a shot of pants being pulled down, a belt being unbuckled, and Hassan's anal blood dotting the ground like maple syrup being drizzled over a stack of pancakes. The death of Bambi's mother was less discreet and more difficult to endure, and though the scene is almost as embarrassing to describe as it was to watch (Forster and his team could have learned a few things from Yilmaz Arlan's Fratricide), it's not nearly as punishing as the litany of homilies that make up much of the dialogue. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them in with your favorite colors." "There's something missing in that boy." "It's a dangerous thing to be born." And that's all said within a five minute stretch of film!
Forster is a master of hackneyed tone, so it isn't too farfetched to presume that he's reduced Hosseini's novel to its big moments and even bigger lines. Because much of the film takes place in 1978, the story feels rushed when the action shifts to San Francisco, where an older Amir (Khalid Abdalla) now lives with his Baba (Homayon Ershadi), dreaming of being a fiction writer while wooing a former Afghan general's daughter. This sloppy section of the film is played for old-country-versus-new-country bathos before the story flashes forward again, this time to 2000, when Amir, now a published writer, returns to his motherland—a Temple of Doom where the story's symbols (kites, pomegranates, and slingshots, oh my!) converge in the same ridiculously concentrated manner as they do throughout Stay. An old foe reemerges and Amir's duel with him is basically staged as a videogame's boss fight, with the spoils of battle neatly filling a marital void and conveniently allowing Amir to fulfill the prophecy of the film's transparent and profoundly condescending message: Stop Being a Pussy.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3297
Edited By Akash on 1197402687
The Kite Runner
by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: November 16, 2007
by this point, it is reasonable to discuss Marc Forster the auteur. Like Brett Ratner and Michael Bay, he makes consistently bad movies, all instantly recognizable as his own, but his at once trite and lofty award-stage aspirations mean that comparisons to the equally offensive Ron Howard are more apt. In the vile Monster's Ball, the German-born director used a sex scene between Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry as an occasion to absurdly reference I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, revealing the extent of his racial consideration by having Thornton dip a white plastic spoon into a bowl filled with chocolate ice cream. Eyes rolled, James Baldwin cringed in his grave, and an Oscar was won. That same laughable penchant for metaphor and infantile understanding of real life tragedy also colors The Kite Runner, which made me wonder if Paramount Vantage, in pushing the film's release date, should be worrying more about Forster's wellbeing than the safety of the director's young cast.
It was instructive to bring someone who swears by Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner to a screening of Forster's movie adaptation. After recalling how a critic had compared the film's kite-running sequences—positively, no less—to the Quidditch matches from the Harry Potter pictures, my friend suggested that I should still seek out Hosseini's beloved bestseller, though he understood if I never did given how Forster has shat on it, transforming a presumably brutal and nuanced account of class difference and innocence lost into Disney-style kitsch. Forster touches on but never lingers on the traditions and social realties of his characters, so rather than lavish attention on the generations-old customs that inform Afghan kite-making, he settles for a CGI-enhanced spectacle of kites chasing after each other in the skies above Kabul, set to a bloated Alberto Iglesias score and recalling Nemo's frantic escape from a shark in Finding Nemo. Shills may just call this one a "rollercoaster ride of excitement."
There is a difference between childlike filmmaking and filmmaking that authentically captures the innocence of childhood. It is the same difference that separates a filmmaker like Forster from Truffaut and Buñuel (even the giants of Iranian cinema, like Kiarostami and Panahi), both of whom understood how children truly live and suffer and how movies are consumed. Forster's head is still in Neverland, exaggerating the state of Kabul before and after the Russians arrive: Prior to the Soviet invasion, the city is conceived as an Epcot Center world showcase, then something not unlike a Romper Room version of Children of Men's apocalyptic wasteland—the trees gone, the Taliban on Beard Patrol, and bodies dangling in the streets. When Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) go to the movies to see The Magnificent Seven, the scene has less to do with their sense of childhood wonder or bourgeoning adult appetites (see 400 Blows and Bad Education for that level of sensitivity) as it does with Forster's desire to stress Amir's lack of masculine courage—a perceived character flaw from which all of the story's horrors stem.
This Hollywood whitewash barely acknowledges class difference in Afghanistan, dubiously identifying valor as a poor man's provenance. Over and over again, Forster reminds us that Amir is a coward and Hassan is a saint, maybe even some kind of mystic given his gift for spotting the location of clipped kites without ever looking at the sky; Hassan is a brave, hectoring little man who takes his rape by a Pashtun bully like a trooper and later admits to stealing a watch out of some wildly overstated and conceptualized sense of pride. When Amir, a wannabe writer, elaborates on a short story he wrote about a man who kills his wife so he could cry into a cup and have his tears turn into pearls, Hassan asks, "Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?" This begs another question: When Amir throws pomegranates at Hassan, is it because he feels responsible for his friend's rape or because he resents the way Hassan is always laying it on so thick? Rather than fight back, Hassan simply picks a piece of fruit from the ground and smashes it on his own face. For sure, righteousness has rarely been conveyed on screen with such shrillness.
Regardless of its previous unedited incarnation, Hassan's rape is so "tastefully" presented it doesn't register as an act of brutalization so much as a sweet nothing (producer Rebecca Yeldman calls it "non-gratuitous" and "impressionistic")—a shot of pants being pulled down, a belt being unbuckled, and Hassan's anal blood dotting the ground like maple syrup being drizzled over a stack of pancakes. The death of Bambi's mother was less discreet and more difficult to endure, and though the scene is almost as embarrassing to describe as it was to watch (Forster and his team could have learned a few things from Yilmaz Arlan's Fratricide), it's not nearly as punishing as the litany of homilies that make up much of the dialogue. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them in with your favorite colors." "There's something missing in that boy." "It's a dangerous thing to be born." And that's all said within a five minute stretch of film!
Forster is a master of hackneyed tone, so it isn't too farfetched to presume that he's reduced Hosseini's novel to its big moments and even bigger lines. Because much of the film takes place in 1978, the story feels rushed when the action shifts to San Francisco, where an older Amir (Khalid Abdalla) now lives with his Baba (Homayon Ershadi), dreaming of being a fiction writer while wooing a former Afghan general's daughter. This sloppy section of the film is played for old-country-versus-new-country bathos before the story flashes forward again, this time to 2000, when Amir, now a published writer, returns to his motherland—a Temple of Doom where the story's symbols (kites, pomegranates, and slingshots, oh my!) converge in the same ridiculously concentrated manner as they do throughout Stay. An old foe reemerges and Amir's duel with him is basically staged as a videogame's boss fight, with the spoils of battle neatly filling a marital void and conveniently allowing Amir to fulfill the prophecy of the film's transparent and profoundly condescending message: Stop Being a Pussy.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3297
Edited By Akash on 1197402687
While it is obviously too early to predict a winner, this is a very realistic - and intelligent - scenario. In the end it may not happen - but it could, it certainly could. With No Country for Old Men too edgy and Atonement too "cold", this could really be the winning alternative: an emotional movie, politically correct, "open minded" in a way the Academy can approve of, based on a best seller, and with poor, persecuted children in the leading roles. It could really turn out to be - politically - the right movie at the right moment (which is obviously what it wants desperately to be), and even profit from a certain guilty feeling that many Americans probably at this point have.Sabin wrote:I'm starting to think that 'The Kite Runner' could be the compromise choice for Best Picture. I have a feeling it's going to do better than 'Atonement' at the box office by a substantial margin, that the Oprah crowd will embrace it. Marc Forster is an industry fave with Bond on the way (BOND?!?!?), and reviews are promising enough if not ecstatic. Alberto Iglesias is one of the most talented composers around, so at the very least it will feel important even if it's not.
I saw 'A Beautiful Mind' on TV the other day and I was astonished at how badly it's aged. I never liked it much to begin with (how many dead kids floating upside down in your bathtub will it take before you take your fucking meds, you closet-homo arrogant dip-shit!) but from today's perspective, it's groundswell of support is rather strange. It was a product of hype and compromise. 'Black Hawk Down' didn't catch fire and started too late, 'Fellowship' was too franchise-y, 'Moulin Rouge!' was a big gay seizure, and 'Gosford Park' and 'In the Bedroom' were too art house-rooted.
I think 'The Kite Runner' could push its way past more interesting. It looks important but it's also safe. It's is one of the Board's top ten and it's almost locked in for the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe.
Of course we have to see a number of things - how successful it is at the box office, for example, and, well, the movie itself (I'll have to wait for some time before it opens in Italy I'm afraid). And there's always the possibility that Marc Foster - who definitely isn't a subtle director - has made a movie with Oscars too obviously in his mind, something the Academy sometimes understands and, as we have realized once for all last year, rejects. But maybe it's just a hope.
I'm starting to think that 'The Kite Runner' could be the compromise choice for Best Picture. I have a feeling it's going to do better than 'Atonement' at the box office by a substantial margin, that the Oprah crowd will embrace it. Marc Forster is an industry fave with Bond on the way (BOND?!?!?), and reviews are promising enough if not ecstatic. Alberto Iglesias is one of the most talented composers around, so at the very least it will feel important even if it's not.
I saw 'A Beautiful Mind' on TV the other day and I was astonished at how badly it's aged. I never liked it much to begin with (how many dead kids floating upside down in your bathtub will it take before you take your fucking meds, you closet-homo arrogant dip-shit!) but from today's perspective, it's groundswell of support is rather strange. It was a product of hype and compromise. 'Black Hawk Down' didn't catch fire and started too late, 'Fellowship' was too franchise-y, 'Moulin Rouge!' was a big gay seizure, and 'Gosford Park' and 'In the Bedroom' were too art house-rooted.
I think 'The Kite Runner' could push its way past more interesting. It looks important but it's also safe. It's is one of the Board's top ten and it's almost locked in for the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe.
I saw 'A Beautiful Mind' on TV the other day and I was astonished at how badly it's aged. I never liked it much to begin with (how many dead kids floating upside down in your bathtub will it take before you take your fucking meds, you closet-homo arrogant dip-shit!) but from today's perspective, it's groundswell of support is rather strange. It was a product of hype and compromise. 'Black Hawk Down' didn't catch fire and started too late, 'Fellowship' was too franchise-y, 'Moulin Rouge!' was a big gay seizure, and 'Gosford Park' and 'In the Bedroom' were too art house-rooted.
I think 'The Kite Runner' could push its way past more interesting. It looks important but it's also safe. It's is one of the Board's top ten and it's almost locked in for the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe.
"How's the despair?"
Since the Academy nominated Marc Forster's excruciating Finding Neverland, I have no reason to doubt that they'll also nominated this thing.
Edited By Damien on 1196985597
Edited By Damien on 1196985597
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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The Original BJ
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Oh, god, Penelope, I can't believe Jesse James got such poor notices. I knew the film didn't receive across the board raves, but I guess my high opinion of the film (as well as most of the raves around here) made me forget critics mostly shrugged. I've never been part of the "critics are meaningless" crowd, but sometimes they really miss the boat completely.
Roger Ebert is exactly the person we DON'T need behind The Kite Runner, particularly with his recent track record at getting his questionable faves rewarded by Oscar.
And, Tee, I wouldn't stump for the new generation that much either: this year they're all about Once. Thankfully the buzz behind that one has died...just in time for Juno, which looks like a charming enough little thing, but not exactly one to shake the earth.
Also, I think all Academy members should be forced to watch stuff like Turtles Can Fly -- authentic films about children in the Middle East. Perhaps then they'd recognize how totally phony The Kite Runner is (I haven't seen the film, but that trailer is obnoxious enough.)
Edited By The Original BJ on 1196982925
Roger Ebert is exactly the person we DON'T need behind The Kite Runner, particularly with his recent track record at getting his questionable faves rewarded by Oscar.
And, Tee, I wouldn't stump for the new generation that much either: this year they're all about Once. Thankfully the buzz behind that one has died...just in time for Juno, which looks like a charming enough little thing, but not exactly one to shake the earth.
Also, I think all Academy members should be forced to watch stuff like Turtles Can Fly -- authentic films about children in the Middle East. Perhaps then they'd recognize how totally phony The Kite Runner is (I haven't seen the film, but that trailer is obnoxious enough.)
Edited By The Original BJ on 1196982925
I've just read Roger Ebert's review of this movie. It (unintentionally) makes one fear the worst, of course, but at the same time it makes ME seriously think that it will be a Best Picture nominee - unless it plays this game too obviously, and even the oldest members of the Academy will see through it... but knowing them, I doubt.