Fun day out and Kite Runner
Jan. 27th, 2008 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineYou wanna talk about charity? We got your Sweet Charity right here! Over $19,000 raised to support those in the industry affected by the writers strike. Can I get a rousing chant of fans rule! here please?
Plus, now I get to makemarinarusalka knit for me. *whipcrack* knit, ho, knit! Seriously, we've discussed my goodie and it's going to be so soft and pretty. *excited*
In other news, Obama trounces Clinton in SC. I think trouncing is just about the only possible word for that. Yaay! (Yes, I said Obama trounces Clinton, not Obama trounces Hillary. I am on a little campaign right now because I am tired of all the other candidates being called by her last name but the woman just gets to be "Hillary." I know there's an element of Bill and name confusion, but it still rubs me the wrong way and I hope it changes.)
Plus, now I get to make
marinarusalka knit for me. *whipcrack* knit, ho, knit! Seriously, we've discussed my goodie and it's going to be so soft and pretty. *excited* In other news, Obama trounces Clinton in SC. I think trouncing is just about the only possible word for that. Yaay! (Yes, I said Obama trounces Clinton, not Obama trounces Hillary. I am on a little campaign right now because I am tired of all the other candidates being called by her last name but the woman just gets to be "Hillary." I know there's an element of Bill and name confusion, but it still rubs me the wrong way and I hope it changes.)
Yesterday was fun, though not in the way I anticipated. I had intended to go out to Universal Studios to fulfil my "do SOMETHING touristy in LA" resolution, but instead Robert invited me out to see some form of Oscar movie (he is apparently one of those people who tries to catch as many of them as possible. Embarasingly, the only movies made this year I've seen are 3:10 to Yuma, Golden Compass, Bourne Ultimatum, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Ratatouille. I think that list qualifies me as one of the unwashed masses. Anyway, we saw the Kite Runner.
Then we wandered about downtown Culver City (all three square blocks of it) and he showed me a lot of good places to eat and local interest and stuff. There are these houses that were built by Hollywood set designers back in the thirties and fourties and are registered as historic landmarks now- they're spectacular, dark fairy-tale black-forest things with climbing ivy and rough-cut stone, artfully misshapen and shadowed. It was really cool. He seems like one of those people who really loves where they live and likes playing tour guide, and people like that are way cool.
Plus, I ended up spilling my guts to him more than I have to... well, anyone I know IRL, really. About Dustin and my reservations there and such. He made me feel better, though I don't have anything sorted out beyond, well, I'm still growing as a person and doing new things and maybe I don't need to be dating around right now to keep doing that, and maybe in the future there will be things I can do other than actually breaking up. We'll see.
Then we wandered about downtown Culver City (all three square blocks of it) and he showed me a lot of good places to eat and local interest and stuff. There are these houses that were built by Hollywood set designers back in the thirties and fourties and are registered as historic landmarks now- they're spectacular, dark fairy-tale black-forest things with climbing ivy and rough-cut stone, artfully misshapen and shadowed. It was really cool. He seems like one of those people who really loves where they live and likes playing tour guide, and people like that are way cool.
Plus, I ended up spilling my guts to him more than I have to... well, anyone I know IRL, really. About Dustin and my reservations there and such. He made me feel better, though I don't have anything sorted out beyond, well, I'm still growing as a person and doing new things and maybe I don't need to be dating around right now to keep doing that, and maybe in the future there will be things I can do other than actually breaking up. We'll see.
The Kite Runner
This was a very hard movie to watch, and a very moving one. It does a good job with little cultural moments that aren't exoticising at all (the image of his fiancee's mother trailing behind them on their walk through an American suburb was charming and unobtrusive, for example). As a sort of requiem for a very specific cultural moment- the westernized urban elite of pre-soviet Afghanistan- it's extraordinary. I find this to be the real emotional heart of the movie for me, and that means that Amir's father steal the whole thing, as the man who sees his entire culture vanish with shocking suddenness, his whoule country turn against him, and has to spend the rest of his life as an exile. The childhood sections, about the complicated relationship between Amir and Hassan, Hassan's selfless devotion and loyalty and Amir's betrayal and grief and guilt, worked well for me. Amir is not a likeable character for the majority of the movie, but as a child he is utterly understandable in a painful way.
All that said? There are huge flaws in the underlying story. After that srong beginning- the childhood section and the complete destruction of Afghanistan- it all descends quickly into soap-opera melodrama and self-help-feel-good-redemption. Naturally, Amir and Hassan are related. Naturally, because Amir and his wife can't have children, there must be an Afghani child for him to save. The last third of the movie is driven by implausible coincidences there only for narrative neatness- of course it is easy to find Sohrab among all the orphans of Kabul, of course Sohrab is raped by the same man who raped Hassan, of course he uses his father's slingshot, of course Rahim Khan dies at just the most convenient moment, etc. Hassan's fate or Sohrab's fate alone would have been tragic and moving, but both of them together in the same movie just made it feel like cheap shocks. Amir gets to work through his childhood guilt and find Hollywood style redemption in a cheap and saccharine way.
Amir's father's story is the bitter tragedy of the end of a way of life in Afghanistan. Hassan and young Amir's story is social inequality and betrayal and guilt and a child's difficulty dealing with his own feelings of cowardice and inadequacy. Those two stories are wonderful.
Older Amir's story is unbelievable soap-opera redemption pablum, and Sohrab's story is just cheaply manipulative. How regretable, for this whole thing to be so uneven, when the good parts were so extraordinary.
This was a very hard movie to watch, and a very moving one. It does a good job with little cultural moments that aren't exoticising at all (the image of his fiancee's mother trailing behind them on their walk through an American suburb was charming and unobtrusive, for example). As a sort of requiem for a very specific cultural moment- the westernized urban elite of pre-soviet Afghanistan- it's extraordinary. I find this to be the real emotional heart of the movie for me, and that means that Amir's father steal the whole thing, as the man who sees his entire culture vanish with shocking suddenness, his whoule country turn against him, and has to spend the rest of his life as an exile. The childhood sections, about the complicated relationship between Amir and Hassan, Hassan's selfless devotion and loyalty and Amir's betrayal and grief and guilt, worked well for me. Amir is not a likeable character for the majority of the movie, but as a child he is utterly understandable in a painful way.
All that said? There are huge flaws in the underlying story. After that srong beginning- the childhood section and the complete destruction of Afghanistan- it all descends quickly into soap-opera melodrama and self-help-feel-good-redemption. Naturally, Amir and Hassan are related. Naturally, because Amir and his wife can't have children, there must be an Afghani child for him to save. The last third of the movie is driven by implausible coincidences there only for narrative neatness- of course it is easy to find Sohrab among all the orphans of Kabul, of course Sohrab is raped by the same man who raped Hassan, of course he uses his father's slingshot, of course Rahim Khan dies at just the most convenient moment, etc. Hassan's fate or Sohrab's fate alone would have been tragic and moving, but both of them together in the same movie just made it feel like cheap shocks. Amir gets to work through his childhood guilt and find Hollywood style redemption in a cheap and saccharine way.
Amir's father's story is the bitter tragedy of the end of a way of life in Afghanistan. Hassan and young Amir's story is social inequality and betrayal and guilt and a child's difficulty dealing with his own feelings of cowardice and inadequacy. Those two stories are wonderful.
Older Amir's story is unbelievable soap-opera redemption pablum, and Sohrab's story is just cheaply manipulative. How regretable, for this whole thing to be so uneven, when the good parts were so extraordinary.