Director: Marc Forster

Rating: 10/10

Marc Forster’s “The Kite Runner” has to be his best so far, and that’s in a company consisting “Monster’s Ball”, “Finding Neverland”, and “Stranger Than Fiction”. It is a movie set in Afghanistan, you know, the place where most Americans cannot point out on a map, and California. It is yet another movie based on a best seller. The actors, well, it actually doesn’t matter if I name them or not because most of us are not going to be familiar with them in the first place.

It started off with two boys, and the movie puts their friendship under close examination and followed it until adulthood of one of them amidst all the kite flying, the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan, and the Taliban along with what happened in the year 2000, which was one year before the… You know what I mean, and I love the fact that the movie never sunk into such a quagmire that would have been laden with political jargon. One of them eventually ended up in San Francisco while the other’s son needs help, serious help from the Taliban.

There are special effects in the movie with the kites, but they are not special effects just for the hell of them, but they give us the exhilarating feeling of freedom that serves as the contrast against all the oppression in the movie. You will probably not care about the special effects in the movie anyway because it is such a minor part of the film and did not serve to distract the movie from anything. Forster had demonstrated that that he is the kind of director capable of focusing on a single subject and he would not allow anything, especially the special effects, to distract the audience from the core of his films.

The movie is the main character’s process to stand up for something. Forster constructed a tightly wound story that took its time and slowly let the audience understand the crucial characteristics of the protagonist. I love the fact that he never rushed any part of the story, but still created a tense atmosphere fit for a thriller.

The actors are not much known in the movie, and there is a fair amount of dialogue spoken in Persian or its dialects. But I have a feeling that this is one of those universal movies in which everyone can find something familiar and touching. If you are not a fan of foreign films and reading subtitles, don’t worry about it, you’ll find yourself getting into the story within the first five minutes.