I finished reading The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, last night. I'd been reading it sporadically for about a month, but last night it sucked me in and left me sleepless. To call it tragic is an understatement; it borders on being morose. When we read a story whose character has "sinned," we expect redemption or absolution to be a large part of the narrative. In this case, the quest for redemption is foiled again and again by outside forces and by the narrator's own humanity. By the end, I lost all hope of redemption, just like the narrator. It's remarkably written, especially for a debut novel. The prose is simple--even stark--when it needs to be and poetic when it should be. I've grown tired of figurative and flowery language (I'm guilty of it too), and Hosseini doesn't try to impress us with beautiful turns of phrase or images, yet somehow he still impresses. Read it.
A second depressing thing was Mysterious Skin, a film that I had checked out several times but never watched. I knew it would be odd, and I had not been able to force myself to watch it. Yesterday, I finally did. The only other time I've seen that much gay sex was when I popped in a friend's blank VHS and found out he was gay the hard way, no pun intended.
It's an engrossing film, really, about two boys growing up in the same Kansas town. One of the boys, Brian, is searching for the answer to why, when he was 8-years old, he blanked out for 5 hours and found himself in the basement closet with a bloody nose. He is convinced that he was abducted by aliens and subjected to tests, a belief he spends years trying to remember and prove. The other boy, Neil, is sexually exploited by his Little League coach the same summer, and that was the most difficult part to watch. The director did an excellent job of filming the molestation scenes; the coach--who remains nameless throughout--is so seductive that it's mesmerizing. Neil becomes a rather promiscuous and masochistic teenager who turns tricks in the small town and later in NYC.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Neil, and what a captivating performance (left: screen shot from the film). I'm excited about what work he will be doing in the future based on the amazing job he did in this. He really put himself out there for this one, and it paid off.I'm going to go ahead and ruin the story for you. It becomes painfully clear early on in the film that Neil and Brian have a connection, and we suspect long before the naive Brian does that he was molested by the coach as well and that Neil was there. In the final scene, they return to the house where he used to live and sit on the couch of the people who live there now, and Neil tells Brian everything that happened. Brian's nose begins to bleed, he cries, he screams, and Neil just holds him. It's a painful scene because Neil tells about how the coach used him as "bait" and to comfort Brian. If Neil played along, it made it that much easier for the coach to do things that I won't mention here (suffice to say, even I was uncomfortable). Painful doesn't begin to describe this, the second time I've used that phrase in this post. Told you it was about depressing things!
I won't recommend the film because I doubt many would be that interested in it. If you are, be warned that it is rough. The only nudity is male nudity from the rear, but it still manages to be sexually explicit.
With that, I'm going to go enjoy the cool, cloudy day. Cheers.
