The Kite Runner; Sharkwater

The Kite Runner (Marc Forster, 2007) - B+

Sometimes you peg a movie as useless Oscar bait and then it comes back and kicks you in the nuts. Could have been really turgid stuff -- child rape, lifelong guilt, intergenerational conflict -- but Forster handles it with uncommon finesse. The movie is deliberate, almost calming, letting "big scenes" happen without needlessly underscoring them; it allows the characters humanity and nuance, letting good people make mistakes and giving them the freedom to redeem themselves. I panicked when, an hour into the film, Amir's father, theretofore painted as a moral giant, seemed about to become one of those movie dads who crushes his son's dreams -- "And what will you do for money?" dad asks when son says he wants to be a writer, not a doctor. "Work with me at the gas station?" But the movie quickly makes clear that this is just a (perfectly understandable) fit of drunken stubbornness, and that Amir's father wants the best for him, absolutely. And Hassan, who could have become a parody of a turn-the-other-cheek Christ figure, is a fully realized human being because Forster and Benioff are smart enough to take their time during the lengthy flashback set-up. Basically, The Kite Runner had me hook, line and sinker; watching my screener DVD at home I actually yelled "Fuck!" at a crucial late-film revelation. A bizarrely contrived climax keeps it out of the "A" range, but this might be the most conventionally entertaining of the season's big pedigreed films.

Sharkwater (Rob Stewart, 2007) - C-

Interesting for as long as it focuses on Paul Watson, the Greenpeace militant who uses his boat to police the oceans against illegal fishers and poachers, ramming and sinking their boats if he has to, and painting the insignias of vanquished enemy ships on his hull. We get to see a little bit of him in action when Stewart briefly joins his crew, and the details of what he does, culminating in an honest-to-goodness speedboat chase, are riveting. As an environmentalist documentary, though, Sharkwater kind of sucks, prone to fuzzy math ("The shark population is estimated to have declined by 90%" -- since when?), weird demagoguery ("No species on this planet has ever survived by ignoring the basic laws of ecology") and dangling participles ("While watching this film, 15,000 sharks have been killed"). Stewart is inarticulate and doesn't have much screen presence, and when he fancies himself a Michael Moore (e.g. getting himself kicked out of a restaurant that serves shark fins) he tends to lose all sense of proportion. Some of his directorial choices are questionable too: what we're supposed to get out of the idiot shark fin company hack who pops up every ten minutes to spout inanities, for example, is unclear. Some great underwater photography (not surprising, since that's Stewart's day job) but everything else is amateur hour.