DREAMS OF A BOOMER WANNABE

Susie and I were born in the depths of the Great Depression, a bit less than a generation before the advent of the post-World War II Baby Boomers, but we have ridden along with the Boomers, senior associates, as it were, through the doldrums of the Eisenhower years, the excitement of the Sixties, the trauma of Watergate, the despair of the Reagan revanchement and Bush fiasco, and all the horribles of these past years.  The one certainty in an uncertain world is that every year we all get one year older.

Advertisers and movie makers, allured by the buying power and sheer size of the Boomer generation, have crafted their commodities to suit.  As the Boomers have aged, Hollywood has trotted along with them, making Beach Blanket Bingo when the Boomers were teenagers and Die Hard as they approached middle age.

Now the Boomers, staring their own personal sixties in the face, crave amusements appropriate to impending Senior Citizen status, and so, yesterday afternoon, Susie and I took in RED 2, the sequel to the 2010 action comedy, RED.  RED stands for "Retired Extremely Dangerous," which is as perfect a three-word encapsulation of an aging Boomer's fantasies as one could possibly devise.

RED 2 stars Bruce Willis [58], John Malkovich [60], Helen Mirren [67], and Anthony Hopkins [75].  The love interest is two young hotties, Mary-Louise Parker [48] and Catherine Zeta-Jones [43.]  Each one is an old friend whom we recall fondly from their [and our] salad days.  The action is flamboyant and suitably implausible -- but then, even when Bruce Willis was young, we knew he was not really doing all those impossible things in Die Hard.  Hopkins has never been more delightful, and Mirren is the sexiest sixty-seven year old I have ever seen.

Like the Bourne and OO7 franchises, the RED films feature a good deal of tourist footage of world-class cities -- New York, London, Paris, Moscow.  The Paris segment was an especial treat for Susie and me because much of it was filmed in our quartier.  When Willis and Zeta-Jones sit down at a sidewalk cafe for a drink and chat, we both immediately recognized it as a familiar bistro on rue La Montagne Ste. Geneviève just down the street from the Place du Panthéon, three blocks from our apartment. 

Do you suppose some evening I will actually run into Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bruce Willis and John Malkovich and Helen Mirren and Anthony Parker and Mary-Louise Parker?  One can dream.