Apt(ed) P(up)il

When plays on words get out of control, you have my post subject for this morning: A way of honoring recently deceased British director Michael Apted that includes a pun related to his name and an invocation of his most famous project, joined together by a reference to a Stephen King novella that was later turned into a movie starring Sir Ian McKellen.

Probably not the best way to start an in memoriam piece, but you're reading these words so I guess it means I didn't change it.

But there's another, more serious meaning intended by calling Apted, who died Thursday at age 79, an "apt pupil." 

Michael Apted did not launch the Up series, which started with the film Seven Up! and continued onward until 63 Up, the last film released in Apted's lifetime, in 2019. Whether any more will be released may be a matter of whether Apted had his own person serving the role of apt pupil that he once served.

If you need a little more explanation of what I'm talking about -- though I hope you don't -- the documentary film series started out as a television series in 1964, as the initial installment aired on British television and was only 40 minutes long. It took a look at a cross-section of British seven-year-old children, intending to follow their progress every seven years throughout their lives, to see how factors like social class and intelligence affected their lives and the choices they made. Who knows if creator Paul Almond had any idea what this would become, but in 1964 his driving inspiration was the quote "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

There were girls involved as well of course, and the reason we saw them become women, as well as their male counterparts fulfill their part of the deal, was not Paul Almond, but Michael Apted. Almond was not even around for the second movie, Seven Plus Seven in 1971, which at 53 minutes gradually started approaching the feature length that would characterize all subsequent entries, with all films from 28 Up onward exceeding two hours. Almond went on to pursue narrative feature filmmaking, while his researcher, Apted -- his pupil, if you will -- carried the torch for the series and made it his life's most recognizable accomplishment.

My wife and I watched the Up series in 2011. Maybe our interest was boosted by the fact that we had our own newborn who was in his first year of life, or maybe we just thought it was time to tackle this landmark achievement. The series had gotten as far as 49 Up by that point, and I'm sorry to say that we have never resumed to watch the two subsequently released entries.

But I've always had a special fondness for this series, getting to know its characters and their tendencies, and the profound sociological experiment that has grown out of what they signed up for -- what their parents signed up for, actually -- before any of them had any idea how it might affect their lives.

Which means I've always had a fondness for Apted as well. He also had a busy career directing narrative features, including one of the worst James Bond movies (The World Is Not Enough) and a couple acclaimed film I still haven't seen (Gorillas in the Mist and The Coal Miner's Daughter). His other credits include Nell, which I liked, and bizarrely, the third movie in the Chronicles of Narnia series, which I also have not seen. 

But for me, Apted's narrative features always felt like outliers from the project that defined his career, and seems like what he was put on this earth to do. I didn't have any sense of him personally, but for the way he deftly steered that series -- not always without controversy -- he earns my eternal kudos.

We didn't follow him from age seven, but Michael Apted did "give us the man," every last bit of it until he literally had no more to give. I hope someone will continue his life's work now that he's gone. 

Rest in peace. 

Up and over and out. For now.

On April 17, 2009, I announced on this blog that my wife and I were set to undertake the Up series. You know, Michael Apted's documentary series that catches up every seven years with a cross-section of Britons, starting at age seven and continuing onward throughout their lives. It started in 1963 with Seven Up! and has continued unabated through 2005's 49 Up. Apted and most if not all of his subjects are still alive, so 56 Up should be due out next year.

At the time, I expected we'd go through all seven existing movies rather quickly. You know, by the end of the year or something.

But on Monday night -- two years, three months and 28 days later -- we finally finished. Or maybe I should say "caught Up." In any case, watching 49 Up is what we finally did on Monday.

So I thought I'd give a quick run-through of my thoughts on the series. Forgive me if some of the details of the installments run together -- that's kind of the nature of the project.

Seven Up! (1963, Paul Almond). Watched: April 20, 2009

The first Up movie is not really a movie per se -- it's a half-hour TV special on a British TV program called World in Action. And Apted was only an assistant on this project, which was the brainchild of a gentleman named Paul Almond. When I reviewed this "movie" for the website where I freelance, I described it in the following terms: "Since few of those who've seen it caught the original broadcast, watching Seven Up! is kind of like discovering the early songs of a band that became popular after their fourth album: The penetrating emotional complexity of the later works may not yet be present, but the raw early stuff has its own immediacy, especially as a preview of things to come." At the time it was made, no one knew it would become an enterprise still going a half-century later. Since almost everything that's interesting in this film is seen in flashbacks in later movies -- often, numerous times -- you have to see it mostly just to check it off your list. Besides, why would you want to start anywhere else?

7 Plus Seven (1970, Michael Apted). Watched: April 20, 2009

The same night we watched Seven Up!, we also watched its sequel, since they run only 90 minutes combined and came together as a package from Netflix. With the kids at age 14, there still isn't so much life experience that the program needed to reach feature length, and I believe this was only shown on television as well. I enjoyed watching them being slightly older and still being sort of cute in their naivete, but I felt like the really good stuff wasn't coming until later.

21 Up (1977, Michael Apted). Watched: July 25, 2009

It took us another three months to get to the next film in the series, the first one that can really be properly described as a "film" in terms of its length, clocking in at 100 minutes. Apted has a lot more life story to cover for these guys now -- university, in some cases marriage and children -- but he hasn't yet figured out the best structure in which to present their stories. 21 Up is all over the place, literally, as it dips in and out of the lives of all the characters, based kind of on the topic being discussed. That's more or less the format of the first two films, but by 21 Up it starts to feel scattershot and kind of stressful. This was my least favorite film in the series to date.

28 Up (1984, Michael Apted). Watched: October 10, 2009

Even with the weaknesses my wife and I both perceived there to be in 21 Up, we got back on the horse less than three months later and watched 28 Up. Ah. What a relief. Through one simple structural change that would become his new narrative template, Apted made the movies instantly more digestible. That change was to catch up entirely with one person before moving on to the next. Not only is this approach cleaner and more segmented, but it also serves as kind of a progress bar along the bottom of the screen. If you know you've visited with six of the 12 subjects (two of three upper-class boys had discontinued participation in the series, one temporarily and one permanently), you know you're about halfway through the movie. Convenient. The improved structure makes up for the daunting running time: 28 Up runs 136 minutes, as 2+ hours becomes the standard running time for movies in this series. 28 Up is also interesting because it starts to include some of the real dramas of life -- divorces, death of parents -- as well as portraying one character (Neil) who seems to be in the depths of a potential mental illness that has left him homeless. Fascinating stuff.

35 Up (1992, Michael Apted). Watched: June 30, 2010

Perhaps this longer running time daunted us more than we thought, because it was another eight-and-a-half months before we got on with 35 Up. I should say, this delay also coincided with the anticipated outage in my ability to review the films. Having reviewed each of the first four films in the series, I was going to miss the next two because they had either already been reviewed or already been promised to other writers. However, having 49 Up hanging out there in the future, assigned to me to review, made sure I was incentivized to keep going through the series. (Not that I would have given up, just that it might have taken me even longer to keep moving through. You know how life gets in the way.) I don't have a lot to say about 35 Up because it was at this point that the stories began to blend together a bit. As you grow older, seven years starts to mean less in the overall trajectory of your life -- fewer things have changed, you're more set in your ways. But I liked the movie quite a bit.

42 Up (1999, Michael Apted). Watched: July 18, 2011

If eight-and-a-half months seemed like a large gap, how about more than a year? That's how long it took us to finally move on from 35 to 42. So, close to two years between 28 and 42. To be fair, during this year -- when my wife and I were also between the ages of 35 and 42 -- we had plenty of life changes of our own to deal with, let alone worry about someone else's. Our son was born last August, and that's just one of things that has kept us busy. In fact, it took our summer series called Documentary Mondays to finally get the penultimate and final Up movies on the schedule. When we did finally watch 42 Up, however, it felt good to return to these lives and learn of the many new marriages, divorces, children and job changes. Spoiler: Still no deaths yet. However, the movie did contain one big surprise (spoiler): Homeless Neil ends up getting elected to low-level political office ... despite still not having a job.

49 Up (2005, Michael Apted). Watched: August 15, 2011

And in our shortest gap in the series, we hurried on to the final film (so far) less than a month later. Thanks, Documentary Mondays -- finally another Up movie I can review. (I wrote the review yesterday.) 49 Up was a bit more interesting than its immediate two predecessors because there's a real sense of revolt among these people whose lives have been publicly dissected (or at least, that's how they imagine it) for 42 years now. Two of the women basically go at Apted, accusing him of prying too deeply and asking questions that are more negatively weighted than the questions he asks other people -- especially the people with more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. (In defense of Apted, I didn't really see it -- but I guess I might have seen it a little bit, now that they mentioned it.) Then a third women talks in more resigned, exhausted, non-accusatory terms of wanting to bow out after she turns 50 next year. Odd, since this woman -- a social outcast and firecracker when she was young -- seems to have turned into one of the most contented and generally well-adjusted people in the project. In none of the last three installments did I get the impression there was a burden weighing on her.

I feel like I should summarize what I've learned so far from the Up series in some deep and profound way. But per usual, I'm writing this under something of a time crunch. I'm sure there would be plenty to say about cause-and-effect as related to Apted's project, and whether these people would have turned out significantly differently if they had never been involved in the Ups. While there's a presumption that this project has been damaging to most of them, I'm not sure if that's entirely true. Did it hurt their self-esteems? Possibly. Did it strain some relationships in their lives? Almost certainly. (In fact, one couple discusses the effect on their children of discussing the husband/father's infidelity in the previous film.) But we live in an era now where many people would kill to be celebrities -- even "reality celebrities." And though most of these folks are representative of British above-the-fray stoicism in one way or another, one senses they wouldn't keep doing this if it didn't titillate them, if there weren't some kind of inherent reward. And in the particular case of Tony, the cab driver/would-be jockey/small-time actor, a play has been based on his life. That wouldn't have happened if he'd been a cab driver/would-be jockey/small-time actor outside of the public eye.

I got a little off course there. As I was saying, I should sum this all up in some profound way, but I just don't have the energy for it today. So let's leave it at the fact that this has been an incredibly interesting series of films to watch ... interesting in all the ways you might expect it to be interesting, without me going to the trouble of specifically outlining that for you in philosophical terms.

So ... 56 Up is next up. I read on wikipedia that the idea is to shoot the footage this fall and air it in May of 2012. (I'm still unclear on whether these films get U.S. theatrical releases -- I should be able to remember whether the was a theatrical release for 49 Up, since it was less than seven years ago -- but I believe the series airs on television in England.)

So it'll be at least another nine-month gap before we continue Upwards. Maybe, if it does play in theaters, we'll honor 56 Up with a theatrical screening.

After all, it could be the last one. Michael Apted is 70 years old, and who knows if he's got an assistant willing to pick up the project and run with it until all the seven-year-olds from 1963 go to their ultimate reward.

And, if we're to believe them, for some it really will seem like a reward to finally be free from Apted's camera.

Up, up and ... away?

I've had the "Up" series of documentaries on my radar for quite some time. If it's not on your radar, let me explain a little something about it.

In 1963, a director by the name of Paul Almond, as part of a British television show called World in Action, randomly chose 14 British private school children, all age 7, and interviewed them about their lives and backgrounds. This project was known as Seven Up, and it might have amounted to nothing more than a one-off curiosity if it hadn't been for Michael Apted. The young director had been an assistant to Almond on the original project, and seven years later, he decided to revisit these children to see how they were doing at age 14. The resulting 1970 film was called Seven Plus Seven, and a tradition was born. Apted continued visiting these children, soon to be adults, at seven-year intervals throughout their lives and his, resulting in 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1983), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998) and 49 Up (2005). If you ask me, this most recent entry should have been called Seven Times Seven, as a little shout-out to the earlier history of the series.

I'd been fascinated by this ongoing project for years, since it's been made possible only by the continuing health and willingness of at least most of the participants, as well as the health and artistic viability of the director.

So I finally got it on my Blockbuster queue sometime last year, and a month or two back, I promoted it to the upper end, so it would come up for viewing in the near future. When I received the first installment in the mail, I mentioned its arrival to my wife, who had also always wanted to see it, and was excited to proceed on this journey with me.

Well, that was about a month ago. And it has not made it into our DVD player yet.

Yes, it's been a busy month, but that's not really the reason. You see, I've started to drag my heels on the whole thing. I have a very stupid reason for doing so, but if you know me and my stupid reasons, you also know that for me, it's legit.

Namely: I'm not sure if Seven Up is actually a movie.

(Of course it isn't, it's a soft drink, ha ha.)

It all started when I went back to look in my queue, to see when Seven Plus Seven was scheduled to come up. But I couldn't find it. I looked and I looked, and all I could see was 21 Up and then the rest. I didn't know if I wanted to start on this journey if I couldn't get my hands on Seven Plus Seven.

It was then that I realized I already had my hands on Seven Plus Seven. It had come with Seven Up. They had come together because Seven Up had a scant 30-minute running time.

Seven Plus Seven doubled that up to 60 minutes, but normally, neither a 30-minute program nor a 60-minute program would meet anyone's definition of what constitutes a "movie."

Okay, so, my mind shifted to no longer thinking of this as a conquest of a movie series, something I would be able to include on my many various film lists. That's fine, it's a TV show. A different experience, but no less valuable.

But the most recent five installments in the series are most definitely movies. 21 Up clocks in at 100 minutes, and then the next four are each over 120 minutes. And they all had theatrical releases.

So what exactly is the "Up Series"? I'd love to hear your opinion.

Assuming that I'd treat them all the same way, are none of them a movie ... or all of them? Or should I not treat them all the same way? Should only 21 Up and onward go on my lists, while I categorize the others as TV episodes?

What qualifies for my movie lists is an endless source of consternation for me. Of course it doesn't matter in the strictest sense of the word, but on some level, it does.

For example, if a movie originated on TV, is it really a movie? What if it's a miniseries? I have handled this in different ways over time, partly depending on my whims, partly depending on how I felt at the time, even if it's different from how I feel now. For some reason, I have included both Stephen King miniseries It and The Stand in my movie lists. In the case of The Stand, that may be because I actually reviewed it for the website. That has to make it qualify ... right? Yet I wouldn't have included The Shining miniseries that aired a couple years ago, even out of precedent, because I've changed my own rules since then. (While the others have stayed grandfathered in). The Shining was so terrible that I never finished watching it, so it was a moot point anyway.

HBO movies probably give me my greatest pause nowadays. For some reason, I have decided I should not include them. So when we saw (and loved) Recount, the story of the 2000 presidential election, it never made it on any list.

Yet if I were to review that same movie for my website, I'd have to reconsider my stance. My editor assigned me some "films" to review a few years back that included such titles as Sometimes in April and Lackwanna Blues, both of which premiered on HBO. I first became aware of them in the context of them being assigned to me, and it wasn't until I popped in the DVD and saw the familiar HBO emblem that I realized they premiered on cable. So in those cases, I added them to my movie list.

Well, why them, but not Recount? Because I'd already started to think of them as regular movies, and couldn't turn back, whereas I'd been aware of Recount's cable origins from the get-go?

Then the question is, if a movie does premiere on cable, why does that make it any less of a movie? I don't ask the same qualifying questions of straight-to-DVD movies. If the standard is whether a film had a cinematic release -- an Oscar-qualifying run, as it were -- then both cable movies and straight-to-DVD movies would fail on that account. So that standard is clearly too rigid. Why then should straight-to-DVD count, if a movie made by HBO, which is likely to be better made and far more cinematic in general, does not count?

I don't have the answers. Hey, I don't pretend to understand my own rules, I just try to interpret them.

And I'd love to hear what you think. Please, I really want to return Seven Up and Seven Plus Seven so I can get my next movie. And I'll make sure it's a genuine, no-questions-asked, certified, popcorn-and-darkened-theater movie this time ...