The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner is light, sweet, charming.Marc Forster direcetd this movie.
William Horberg is a producer.

The story is about wealthy Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) and the family servant's feisty son Hassan (the irresistible Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada).

The movie was shot in  Western China, also darkens plausibly with danger lurking around every corner.  Amir secretly witnesses of a rape scene which takes place in kabul market place.

 Amir becomes an adult (Khalid Abdalla), living as an aspiring writer in San Francisco with his ailing father (the formidable Homayoun Ershadi), the tone turns draggier — which is understandable and necessary, given that Amir remains wracked with shame for his childhood transgression, but that also means it loses its earlier energy. (Forster and Benioff do inject some much-needed humor as Amir meets and awkwardly courts the woman who will become his wife, played by Atossa Leoni.)

And once Amir returns to the ravaged, Taliban-controlled Kabul he no longer recognizes for the chance to right his wrong, moments that should have been more poignant are instead distracting for their convenience. Old foes show up at just the right time, and sequences that played out at the beginning are echoed at the end. It's a jarring contrast for a film that's so clearly aiming for emotional and political realism.

If nothing else, though, The Kite Runner does succeed in providing a vibrant window into a region of the world we might not have known and might have felt daunted to seek out. In this era of 24-hour cable news, celebrity gossip and blink-and-you-miss-them headlines, that's probably the greatest service the film could provide.