Skyfall, Blue Bloods, and Romeo and Juliet

It’s Friday night and I know where my sister-in-law is…watching “Skyfall” and bonding with James.  While I’m waiting, and even staying up late (for me) in the Eastern Time Zone, to watch “Blue Bloods”.  Craig vs. Selleck.  Fantasy vs. reality (or as close as TV’s likely to get.)

But how did Romeo and Juliet get into this testosterone throw down?   Here’s the connection.

Way back when Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” came out, I was in high school, tears leaking out of my eyes as my friends and I watched in the one theater in the town where we went to school.   Of course there was also the updated version, “West Side Story.”  Good thing it was a musical because the story itself really doesn’t have much to sing about when you really stop to think about it.   When I did stop to think about it some years later, stripped of all the pathos, the tragedy is that two young adults ended up dying because first they disobeyed their parents and then compounded that by the fake death stuff, as well as all the killing in between start and finish.  I know, I’m being way too realistic; they are, after all,  just movies (or plays.)  But you know I’m right.

This where James Bond and Frank Reagan come in.  I’ve watched the Bond movies for years, enjoying the action and the various Bonds (and going through discussions of whom was the best), without being completely enamored of them.   Then one day, when thinking about it, I realized that if I really met James Bond, I wouldn’t like him, no matter how good-looking, suave and debonair he might be.  I’d think he was an arrogant womanizer.  Oh, wait– he is.  🙂

However, if I met Frank Reagan, he’d be my kind of guy.  He’s a family man with values I can identify with, head of a family none of whom are perfect but who all love each other and work hard at making their relationships work.  He goes to church, works hard and has principals.  Add to all that, he’s aged just as well as Sean Connery and there you have it.

In a welter of “reality” television (have any of you ever been on an island where you do weird things and vote other people off?) and series filled with people evidently willing to do anything and everything and say anything so long as it’s vulgar, ( not even going to describe any of these), I’m happy when one of the few times I have the TV on and am up past my usual bedtime is Friday night, watching “Blue Bloods” and being part of a family I’d really like to meet.  I’ll see “Skyfall” but I’ll continue to wish I could meet the Reagans.