Larchmere Festival Author Alley

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be in the Author Alley at the Larchmere Festival in Shaker Heights this Saturday, July 03, promoting Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan with nearly 50 other local authors, including my good friend John Booth! Author Alley will be at Loganberry Books on Larchmere Boulevard from noon until 4pm.

There is going to be a wide variety of books available. Come out, meet some local writers, find something you like, and feel good about supporting local authors!

How to Spend an Early Summer Evening

We went out to dinner with friends to our favorite local watering hole the other night, the Winking Lizard. We got home around 8:30, and after the kiddo walked the dog, he and I went out back and threw the football around until it was almost too dark to see. As we were walking around the side of the house to head in, we were distracted by the lightening bugs just starting to make their presence known.

My gut told me to herd the child inside and get him into his ready-for-bed routine and settled in with a book. But something stopped me. I guess it was the sense of wonder I could see gleaming in his eyes even in the dusk. I watched him chase a firefly across the backyard. Then he told me over his shoulder that he has never caught fireflies before. With that, it was over. There was no other option except to toss the football aside and head back into the yard to catch fireflies with him.

As it got darker and darker, it became increasingly harder to find them when they weren’t lit up, but we caught quite a few over the next half-hour or so across our and our neighbor’s yards. The lightening bugs would land on us and crawl all over our hands and arms, lighting up now and again to make our skin glow.

After a while, we invited Tracy out to join us. The three of us wandering around out there must have looked pretty odd to anyone who passed by, but it was one of the best evenings ever. Soon it was too dark to catch the fireflies at all, so I collected the football and the three of us headed inside. And while the kiddo curled up with a book in bed, Tracy and I were left to remember a little bit of what it was like to be eight years old on your summer break, if only for a night.

The Karate Kid 2.0

Had a fun “guys” day with the kiddo Saturday. After a week of business travel away, it was great to have some one-on-one time together. He caught up on his Summer Bridge workbook pages while I mowed the lawn, then we headed over to the Metroparks for a three-mile walk. Afterwards, we came home and he helped me clean the interior of my car, then it was time for showers, lunch, and The Karate Kid.

The kiddo has been so excited about this movie for a good month now! I have a fond place in my ’80s heart for the original film, so there was no way I wasn’t going to indulge him in seeing this remake. I debated watching the original movie with him (it’s available on Netflix instant streaming) in the weeks before we saw the new film, but I decided to take a page out of my buddy John’s book and his Star Wars wisdom to recognize that “every generation has a legend.” And John’s absolutely right. Who was I to burst my son’s bubble of excitement over this retelling of the underdog tale? Did he need to know this was a remake of a movie that I probably think a little too highly of because of my own nostalgia and the fact I saw it through a young teenager’s eyes? No.

And where the protagonist of the original film is of driving age, the main character of the remake is 12 – a far closer and relatable age for my kiddo. So he went into the theater armed only with what he knew from the trailers and with zero knowledge of the original’s existence. And we both had a great time! The movie clocked in at two hours and 20 minutes, but hit all the right notes and never felt drawn out or padded. For those of us who remember the Reagan Era, there were nods to the original that were reverential without ever feeling like they were ripping anything off.

The arcs for both Jaden Smith’s Dre Parker and Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han were affecting and resonant. Smith carried the movie like a pro, indicative of his pedigree. Chan was beautifully understated, surprising me by plumbing some emotional depths I didn’t know he could pull off.

One thing I really admired about the movie is that, despite taking place in China, it never dumbed down the language barrier. Instead of going the route of something like The Hunt for Red October (a movie I love) where suddenly the foreign language is abandoned for English with the corresponding accent, the characters who spoke Chinese did just that with subtitles throughout the entire film. A bold choice for a movie aimed at adolescents.

I thoroughly enjoyed this remake of The Karate Kid. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those movies that leaves an impression on my kiddo and this generation like the original did on me and mine. And that’s a good thing, because there’s always room for well-told underdog stories to inspire us.