I like books and movies with happy endings. After I have committed myself to a character, and come to care about that character, I just hate it when the writer has to make it end wrong. I'm at that place in Kite Runner right now. I call it the "Dances with Wolves" problem. Mike was horrified, and rightly so, that in the movie, Dances with Wolves, they killed the wolf. Why? That wolf wasn't doing anyone any harm. It was a great character, an animal that brought more warmth to the movie than the love story ever did, and boom, he's gone. Mike either walked out of the movie, or wanted to very much, and now I don't enjoy that movie much either. My son taught me another lesson.
I refuse to watch movies about youngsters being mistreated, abused, or killed. It is just something that I do not need to see, and I censor what I see for my own well-being. If a child has to be hurt to tell a story, then someone else can try to figure out why.
I am reading The Kite Runner and knowing it is about Afganistan in recent times, I guess I should have expected some "badness". But, within one paragrah, someone I truly came to admire and love was killed by the Taliban. Now my day is ruined. Well, maybe not my whole day, but. I hate the Taliban and all they did to try to distroy that country, but this is a novel and I'm sad that my favorite character had to die.
We recently watched a movie called The Weeping Camel. It is part drama, part documentary. The main story in the movie is that a young mother camel refuses to nurse her baby, who is kept alive by a family of herders in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. It is a lovely movie. There is a happy ending. And I enjoyed getting to see a little more of the Gobi Desert than I ever will in real life. Time to see these things now, before MacDonalds moves in.
Maybe I'm just simple, maybe I'm naive, but I really like it when the cowboy rides off into the sunset with the girl of his dreams on the back of the saddle. Or the loser manages to win and shoot the winning goal and become the town hero like Rudy, a movie that always makes George and I cry at the end. Maybe the movies I like aren't very exciting to most people, but nothing bad has to happen to make me happy.
Have a great day.
