Oh my god, THAT’S why they make remakes

As I was cleaning the kitchen and planning a blog posting, I finally realized the justification for remaking movies. And so, I rushed down here (true story) and started typing.

Yes, money is a big motivator. The fans of the original can be counted on to show up to a remake, even if it’s terrible, so the lure of a pre-built audience is a tempting argument in favour of remakes. But when you go deeper down, there’s a more meaningful purpose.The remake re-contextualizes a piece of our modern culture into a frame of reference that can be understood by a new generational audience.

Back to the kitchen: as I was thinking about another post describing my cold war against the crazy parts of my brain, I wanted to talk about how I’m a creature of routine and habit, and disrupting that puts me into a tizzy (even if I don’t realize it). I planned on referencing the movie Rainman  “Definitely watch tv but lights out at 11PM. 10 minutes til Wapner”. And then I wondered if anyone reading this who was under the age of 30 would get the reference. You could argue that those people should watch the original instead of a remake, but the original has a specific existence in our timeline. It’s full of topical 80’s references that would have no real value today. A remake done properly would replace those dated references with markposts of our current age.

So there’s the cultural value in doing a remake. If someone comes along and does a decent remake of Rainman, then a whole new generation will add the memorable lines of dialogue to their language. Our collective societal memory is strengthened and added to by this process. And when we’re very lucky, a remake comes along that stays true to the characters but takes the art to a new level, like Batman Begins.

And for those few people out there who love my ongoing dissection of my own craziness, never fear. We’ll get around to that again. I’m still plenty nuts.

Language skills? Check.

I’m not worried about any elements of Max’s developmental progress. He’s not great at catch, sure, but that should turn around with some practice. And any shortfall in his basketball handling abilities is wildly overshadowed by his language skills. I will give  you an example. One of his new birthday books is ‘Scaredy Squirrel’ and as we went to read it today, he told me that he thought the ‘the part about antibacterial soap was hilarious’. Antibacterial?  Hilarious?? The number of words he recognized/read in the book was astounding. Combining his burgeoning reading skills and his new-found burst of imaginative play on his own puts him on track for happily reading on his own in the next few years.

I can hardly imagine what our evenings will be like when he can find a comfy chair and settle in with a big book while Ma and I read our own books. That will be something to see.

In other news, my mother has visited the grim specter of the future in the form of her lawyer, and there is going to be talk of wills and power of attorney and all the fun things that go along with it. This is another reminder that I’m getting older and I’m in a distinctly different phase of my life. I don’t know what this phase is, but the first few signs  have been hair loss and death talk. Off to a bad start, new phase.

 

There’s a hole in daddy’s haircut

Ah, male pattern baldness. The old man bring-down that makes it impossible to hide your decrepitude. Yes I know some guys go bald when they’re in their teens, and I feel bad for them. I am trying very hard to throw out my own self-pity and vanity over the sad state of coverage on the top of my scalp, but despite my efforts to rise above it, I keep looking in the mirror and sighing.

But why should I be so forlorn at the great hairline retreat? Fear of how I’ll look as a balding dude is the first part of it. All of my mental self-images are built around a guy with a full head of hair, so seeing the plain truth will be quite a shock. How am I currently compensating? barbershop avoidance. If I don’t go to the barber, I don’t have to find some way to say ‘make me look as good as you can with the little you have to work with on top’. My three options are to swallow my pride and go to the barber, pull out the clippers, admit total defeat and shave my head, or just let it grow. Tonight, I’m firmly in the ‘let it grow’ camp. I’ll be a long hair, balding, creepy hippie. I call this hair style “The Denial”. It’s not a comb over, it’s a comb back. Still lame, I know.

This is the most obvious indicator of my shift into a new social category. I was at the Knights Hockey game last night, and I realized that I belong more in the group of older guys with grey hair (or bald dudes) than the smug looking 20 something dudes. The good news is that both groups turned and watched two hot girls walk by, so we are all brothers of a sort.