Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I'm sorry, I had planned on keeping all of my posts this October about fun and light-hearted fare like flesh eating zombies, rotting corpses and hatchet wounds in honor of Halloween. Unfortunately, I can't ignore the news I read this morning.

Reported in the New York Times is this story about Mac Forster's new movie The Kite Runner, based on the 2003 best-selling novel written by Khaled Hosseini. It follows three decades of Afghan strife and focuses mainly on a friendship between two Afghan boys Amir and Hassan. The article reports of the controversy surrounding the movie a month before its release. Specifically regarding a pivotal scene where Hassan is raped by a Pashtun bully. Word has already spread in Afghanistan about the rape scene and now the two Afghan boys fear for their lives. Sources are going back and forth on whether the family was truly aware of the scene before it was shot. But seriously, does it even matter? In a country where the biggest form of media is the rumor mill, you have no chance of spinning this in favor of Paramount, the studio behind this production. And why should anyone try? This idea was stupid the second it was thought up. Couple this story with Richard Gere's recent incident inolving Shilpa Shetty and suddenly Hollywood is no longer the sympathetic voice of peace, it is public enemy number one.

Forster wanted to direct the movie because he felt he was “giving a voice and a face to people who’ve been voiceless and faceless for the last 30 years.” I have an idea, let's stop trying to help people in other areas of the world. Forster is originally from Germany and Switzerland but he has been living in the United States since the 1990's and it looks like he has successfully fallen right in line with our current administration. In other words, we are the superhero and everyone needs saving.

Megan Colligan, head of marketing at Paramount Vantage said "nothing will be done if it puts any kid at risk." If anyone truly cared, they would never have attempted to bring this novel to the big screen in the first place.