Waste of Money.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It seems to me that director Apted's brilliant 'Up' film series appeals deeply because they're the first in-depth film biographies of ordinary people. After all, each of us has seen innumerable film biographies of the rich, the famous, and the notorious (as well, in recent years, we've seen phony "reality" programs about supposedly "ordinary" people posed into artificial situations). It's purely fascinating to see, to follow every seven years, your contemporaries, to feel a curious kinship with some and a distance from others of them, and to compare your own life's fortunes and the choices you've made in it with theirs.It's not difficult to appreciate the resentment or dissatisfaction of some of the 'Up' series' participants with their having been chosen in the first place, and with being asked to participate serially every seven years, in the films. Yet I suggest that the participants might ponder this: before the advent of film, especially of home video, diary-keeping was widespread - especially among the educated and upper classes, and diary-keeping demands a lot more daily thought and toil from a diarist than being filmed every seven years requires from the 'Up' series' participants. The only advantage that viewers of the 'Up' series have over reading the journals of deceased diarists is in the immediacy, unique to motion pictures, of the Up films: these are, in their cinematic way, quite like diaries only more timely than diaries in that the 'Up' series' participants are living contemporaneously with the sharing of their motion picture diary with a vast public. It's doubtful that today's busy individuals would take the time to daily compose diary entries, and so in the 'Up' series the film medium enters, it substitutes for and improves in some ways upon, the ancient art of diary-keeping. Granted that diarists carefully chose - edited on the fly, if you will - the words of their writings, but so too have the 'Up' series' participants always had a measure of editorial control over what director Apted will or will not include in each of the series' installments.Have any of the participants grasped that all of them will be watched, studied, analyzed, enjoyed, and vicariously bonded with by viewers for decades, centuries, and perhaps even for millennia? - that they're the first ordinary people to have the significant events and their own experience of their lives recorded for posterity? This series, whether Apted or its participants, and whether we viewers or film critics have yet grasped this fact, is not yet the anthropological gold mine it will in the near and distant future surely become: in viewing these films we're not archaeologists looking for clues to be construed - or misconstrued! - from cave paintings, potsherds, art works, and common artifacts, we're seeing actual ordinary people of our time speaking and acting (i.e., behaving) in their actual lives. Do any of the participants perhaps find it a bit eerie to know in advance that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years on utter strangers (as well as their own ever-reproducing descendents) will be viewing, hearing, studying their twentieth to twenty-first century lives?All that said, the 'Up' films, as they've evolved to be to date, spur me to moot the notion, based on the knowledge that 'Up' series' participants' relatives and co-workers, friends and acquaintances, children and grandchildren have all been affected by the films, that a much larger film series of monumental proportions - gaining in size and scope as the original participants' children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren reproduce - could, theoretically, be produced and filmed. Such would be a vast opus, requiring increasingly many more film crews, interviewers to film ever-burgeoning numbers of participants. It could spawn among viewers factions of fans who might like and support one branch of the growing families and dislike and detract its other branches, and thus perhaps teach us much about the whole of the human condition - about the development among disparate groups of respect, disrespect, suspicion, envy, competition, enmity, etc. Such a vast series would amount to the Story Of Our Species, begun albeit, much later than the latter-in-our-species-evolution debut of motion picture technology allowed for having begun the series with Adam and Eve. No, it was impracticable then - with Adam and Eve - as it is now...but then as camcorders and webcams have only just come on the scene, there will one day exist gazillions of miles - or digits! - of footage of the lives of ordinary people: and who would ever, say, even ten years from now, endeavor to try to sort through all of these film records to try to discern, let alone to try to tell, the story of our species members?! - especially since camcorders have inspired legions of amateur filmmakers who are already producing gazillions of miles and digits of amateur motion picture fiction. (One can get really carried away with imagining endless extrapolation from the 'Up' series, can't one? I just did!)It can only be dimly anticipated how future viewers of the 'Up' series - viewers who will see it long after Apted, the series' participants, and its contemporary viewers will have long been dead - will relate to the 'Up' films, and especially how they will relate, or not, to their participants (no doubt it will be easier, because of the immediacy of motion pictures, for future viewers to relate to the 'Up' participants than it is for us early third millennium people to relate to, say, pre-Norman Conquest Britons, or to the people who constructed Stonehenge). But it would be lovely to know how those future viewers will feel about the 'Up' films - perhaps lovelier than it would be for me to know how I'll feel about it if I should live long enough to enjoy '56-Up'!

Everyone in the world should have the treasured opportunity to watch these brave souls grow up before our eyes. I recommend all the films beginning in 1963. Certainly the class system is exposed as the monster it is, but I do find increased options for the children of the "less born to privilege", 49 year old subjects.I love the reticence and modesty of the subjects in this film. They seem to grasp the massive cultural contribution they are making but prefer not to think about it. I applaud the subjects for saying that they want to drop out but I do hope they ultimately don't. In this day of fake reality TV, it is wondrous to see the power of the Real McCoy of documentary film/TV. I am close enough in age to the 49 ups. Through them I have a brilliant record of the world I grew up in and that of my English family. Bravo for an historic act of courage and generosity by all concerned.

This is the film documentary of the lives of a dozen English children filmed at 7 years intervals starting at age 7. They are from a wide variety of backgrounds. A few turn out with predictable lives, most do not.On the plus side, this is the story of people who grow up, deal with life's challenges, and grow into maturity. Some of them are relaxed and open with the documentary, such as the African/English fellow (sorry -- I'm bad with names). Many of them are profoundly concerned with the welfare of others, and became teachers, or philanthropists.On the dark side, most of these people are clearly annoyed with the project -- tho they have participated in it for years. Also, one must assume the best on the part of the director of these films, for the devil is in the editing. How balanced is it really? And there is also one more point which detracts somewhat from the appeal of this movie: it's about the English, the most guarded, self-efacing and embarrassed people on the face of the earth. The physicist tells a joke about the extrovert engineer who looks at the feet of the *other* person when he's talking, and one wife talks about how her husband was always apologizing to her for nothing, but that just about sums up the English social milieu, typically an uptight people who are embarrassed with life.Maybe this is why I found the fellow with mental illness to be so refreshing, poignant and profound. He had come to terms with life -- as they all had -- but he was able to conceptualize it and share it.Watching a film like this inevitably inspires one to compare oneself with the people on screen, or more accurately inspires one to look at one's life a little more closely and how one has handled the ups and downs of life on this planet. In that sense, it's surely a good film.Unless one is a thoroughly incorrigible voyeur, some parts of this film will be boring and irrelevant, but overall a good experience.

"49 Up" (2005), co-produced and directed by Michael Apted, is the seventh episode of a unique venture in film-making. Apted began filming a group of children at age seven, and has followed and filmed their lives every seven years since then.For us, as spectators, following the progress of the lives of these children has been fascinating. However, the children themselves, who are now well into middle age, don't appear to be very happy with themselves or with the project.I have two questions about this. In the first place, why are these people so angry at Michael Apted? (We never see Apted, but the individuals confront him, and we hear his answers to their comments.) Naturally, it's hard to know what Apted puts into his films, and what he leaves out. However, as far as I can tell, he's fair and objective in what he shows us. The characters in the movies certainly don't like the films, and most of them don't like Apted. One person, while conceding that being in the film helped him raise money for his favorite charity, refers to the process as the poison pill that he swallows every seven years. The United Kingdom has a population of about 60 million people. That means that these people had roughly a two in a million chance to be chosen for the project. No one else in England--even the Queen--is scrutinized in quite this way. Why aren't they happy to leave a record of their lives?The second question is, If they hate the project so much, why do they continue to participate? (I don't know if they are paid--that's never been made clear.) In any event, they certainly don't have any legal, moral, or ethical obligation to allow Apted to film them. They could just tell him that they're finished with the project. Why don't they? (Some have, but most return every seven years.)I had a thought about this after seeing 49 Up. This time, I found the film pretty depressing. Naturally, some people were happier than others, but no one appeared to be really satisfied with his or her life. Could it be that something about being filmed every seven years has altered the trajectory of the lives of these people? Maybe they think they would have been happier if they had never heard about Apted's project. Maybe they're wrong, but maybe they're right.