Into "Room 237"

You can't be a hardcore movie fan for long without running into someone who has come up with their own personal elaborate theory about a certain favorite film. All serious movie fans do this to some degree - I certainly do, looking for different interpretations and readings of films the same way that academics analyze certain works of literature. There are whole fields of film theory and film studies that examine what films say about the societies and cultures that produced them. However, there are always those fans who take things a little too far, who fixate on certain ideas or theories and then will go to extraordinary lengths to prove that they're right.

The documentary, "Room 237" features six of these people. We never see them, but we hear them speak at length, about the secrets that they believe that they have uncovered in Stanley Kubrick's beloved 1980 horror film, "The Shining." One believes that Kubrick inserted clues that point to his involvement in supposedly faking the moon landing. Another sees coded references to the massacre of Native Americans. Another finds Holocaust parallels. Another works out that the Overlook Hotel has impossible architecture, and thinks the story is a new take on Jason and the Minotaur. "Room 237" presents their arguments, with lots of visual aids taken from "The Shining," Kubrick's other films, and archival footage. Some of the theories are very entertaining, but few are very convincing. Almost all the big "Ah-HA!" moments can be chalked up to coincidence or artistic license taken for completely unrelated reasons.

Does this mean that "Room 237" is a failure? I don't think so. While I don't believe it offers many new insights on "The Shining," what it does do successfully is give you an interesting picture of these obsessive “Shining” fans. Several of them are clearly quite intelligent and well-educated, having done massive amounts of outside research to support their fantastic claims. They all appear to have expended considerable amounts of time and energy watching “The Shining” over and over again, looking for more clues. One segment of “Room 237” is devoted to someone who decided to watch the film run backwards and forwards simultaneously, with the images superimposed on top of each other, to look for any interesting results. He finds some neat moments where the pictures line up in curious ways, and of course he would – people who go looking for hidden conspiracies and secret messages always manage to find them.

It’s fascinating to see how these people have developed their own odd relationships and histories with the movie, treating it quite differently from the way that academics and film critics analyze films when they take them apart. The fans believe that Kubrick, the great stickler for detail that he was, intentionally included these secret signs and messages, and wanted them to be found. Academics often consider the intent of the directors and writers of a film to be irrelevant, looking instead for themes and conventions that reflect unspoken social mores and assumptions. Critics, including yours truly, tend to see unusual elements as stylistic or storytelling choices. Is architecture of the Overlook Hotel impossible? If it was done deliberately, it was probably to increase the viewer’s disorientation. Or maybe it was just a case of continuity errors. Even Stanley Kubrick wasn’t perfect.

The question becomes, not whether any of the theories presented in "Room 237" hold any water, but why "The Shining" has managed to inspire such wild mysteries and mythologies around it. My guess is that it has to do with the notoriety of "The Shining" itself, not just for being an especially effective and multilayered horror film, but for the stories about the intense behind-the-scenes drama during the film's prolonged production, and especially for the involvement of Stanley Kubrick. This was a director who was a perfectionist, who did demand 127 takes of the baseball bat scene, and who not only had the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" pages typed out by his secretary, but also additional ones in different languages for international versions of the movie. If there was any director likely to put obscure secret messages in his work, surely it was Kubrick.

"Room 237" adds to his myth. Those gullible souls predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories will eat the stuff up, and I expect that "Shining" fans will appreciate seeing the little things they never noticed pointed out - the recurring Native American motifs, the television missing a cable, and who was that other man in the office during the interview? But it's plain to see when a skiing poster is just a skiing poster, and a movie is just a movie. "Room 237" is a lot of fun, but it may also make you wince at some of the convoluted reasoning that the six “experts” employ. Contrary to what the marketing may tell you, this is not a documentary about “The Shining.” It’s a documentary about the most extreme fans of “The Shining,” and that in its own way, is a far more frightening thing.
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Two Internet Activism Docs

A pair of interesting documentaries on the subject in internet activism popped up on various streaming services recently: "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" and "We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists." I enjoyed both for different reasons, but one is clearly superior to the other by a wide margin.

First, "We Are Legion," which is a documentary about the recent activities of the hacker group known as Anonymous. I've done some basic reading up on the activities of Anonymous, and the documentary does a decent job of fleshing out events I was already familiar with, like their origins on the 4chan boards and the campaign against Scientology. It was nice to see some of the faces behind the screen names, and some of the interviews were illuminating. If you're not familiar with Anonymous, the first section of the film gives a nice little primer on what they're all about and provide details on some of their greatest hits.

However, where things get a little more slippery is after Anonymous attracts the attention of the authorities, and people start getting arrested. "We Are Legion" puts itself firmly on the side of the Anonymous members, glorifying their exploits and trying to justify their actions. It is particularly one-sided in how it looks at some of the Anonymous members who have been outed and unmasked, painting them as persecuted activists. The documentary also touches far too briefly on the emergence of LulzSec, a splinter group of Anonymous that embarked on a destructive hacking campaign in 2011 and 2012.

By taking the stance that it does, "We Are Legion" avoids asking the most interesting questions about Anonymous's brand of internet activism, dubbed "hacktivism" here. What's the distinction between a hacktivist and a criminal hacker who just causes chaos for fun? The group's rise in popularity and visibility seems like an accident, and maybe the group's altruistic streak will prove to have only been temporary. And if the young, photogenic kids who the filmmakers interviewed aren't to blame for the group's crimes, then who should be? Anonymous is purportedly a leaderless collective, after all. The lack of criticism doesn't sit right, especially since I've seen far more balanced, in-depth coverage of Anonymous's activities from other sources.

I think that's why the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, comes off as a far more satisfying documentary subject. Here is a man who is operating entirely out in the open, who is committing his audacious protests against a repressive government in the view of the entire world. Ai Weiwei is known as a contemporary conceptual artist, but he clearly fits the profile of an internet activist, as he has learned to harness the power of the internet to aid him in many of his projects, and his work is often highly politically charged. Unlike Anonymous, there's no shirking of responsibility or hiding behind screen names. His fame actually protects him in many cases, making it more difficult for the authorities to target and suppress him.

"Never Sorry" often feels like a cat-and-mouse game between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese government. The artist provokes through his art, and the government retaliates. The stakes are high. We watch as these incidents escalate, particularly after the creation of an installation commenting on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Filming becomes a challenge for the documentary crew, with access more and more limited until Ai Weiwei 's blog is shut down and the man himself detained. At the same time, the documentary maintains a strong focus on the creation of Ai Weiwei's art. Significant portions of the film are devoted to observing the development of some of his most famous exhibits, including the celebrated sunflower seed installation at the Tate Modern.

It would have been easy to paint their subject as a saint, but in profiling Ai Weiwei, the filmmakers don't neglect the less savory parts of his character. The man is immensely likable, but pains are taken to ensure that he remains a human being in the eyes of the audience. And ultimately, his eccentricities, his hypocrisies, and his moments of weakness just make his creativity and his bravery all the more remarkable. The documentary makes a strong case for Ai Weiwei being one of the most important artists working today, whose fame could not have been possible without the internet.

Last year I wrote about a group of documentaries where the subjects played with identity and reality, including "Catfish," where Internet anonymity and infamy were used for nefarious purposes. "We Are Legion" and "Never Sorry," feel like the flip side, where we see the potentially positive effects of these same forces. What's particularly interesting is that both of these stories are still very much ongoing. Anonymous is still active, and Ai Weiwei is still working, having recently released his own "Gangnam Style" parody.

Does this mean there's the possibility of sequels to these docs? I sure hope so.
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More TV Shows I Should Be Watching

In the mad rush of the oncoming awards season, I've been neglecting the television world, as evidenced by the fact that I spent last night guiltily scanning through about two months worth of "60 Minutes" episodes that I'd missed, including the entire run-up to the recent election. Last year my "too much to watch" posts helped me do a lot of catching up. So here are a new batch of television shows that have been sitting on my "to watch" list for a little too long. Network television hasn't been too good to me lately, but the cable offerings seem endless.

"Key & Peele" - I knew the Comedy Central sketch comedy show was on to something big when clips of their sketches started being passed around, and I started hearing serious comparisons to "Chapelle's Show." Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are both mixed race comedians, and while their material explores a lot of racial issues, it's far from all they're capable of. The "Bullying" sketch is a good example of this, with its insightful deconstruction of a common trope. That said, I like their "Luther, Obama's Anger Translator" sketches the best.

"The Hour" - British period drama about the production of a newsmagazine show, starring Ben Wishaw, Ramola Garai, and Dominic West. It's often described as a counterpart to America's "Mad Men," since it takes place during the 1960s and covers some of the same thematic ground. However, what really caught my interest was that the primary subject matter, something that seems oddly old-fashioned these days: investigative reporting. Also, Peter Capaldi from "In the Loop" gets an arc in the new series, and he's worth seeing in anything.

"The League" - Having become enamored with the mumblecore charms of Mark Duplass, and having noticed that his wife Katie Aselton and several of his other collaborators are in the cast of "The League" with him, I need to check this FX sitcom out. I'm five seasons behind and I have no interest in fantasy football, so this is probably a lost cause, but I want to at least give it a try. FX has several oddball, cult shows that have slowly sucked me in one by one, including "Louie" and "Archer." This might end up being the next one.

"The Newsroom" - New Aaron Sorkin show! With all-star cast full of actors I like! Pounce! Alas, this is an HBO production, which means a long, maddening waiting period for the DVD sets to arrive. I've been hearing mixed reactions for months, particularly on the subject of the romantic relations between the main characters played by Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer. It wouldn't be an Aaron Sorkin show without some controversy, now would it? Along with "The Hour," it's also nice to see the heroic side of the news media again, even if it's only aspirational.

"Project Runway All Stars" - I was totally caught off guard by Lifetime immediately following up the last season of "Project Runway" with the second season of "All Stars," putting me several weeks behind at the time of writing. Yes, it's a guilty pleasure, but I can't resist. The catfighting, the creative madness, and those crazy, crazy clothes suck me in every time. And the best part about "All Stars" is that there's no "getting to know you phase" with the contestants. You can just dive right in - and this season has both Wendy Pepper and Ivy Higa! And Andre!

"30 for 30" - An ESPN documentary series on sports, marking the 30th anniversary of the network. As I've said before, I'm not usually one for sports, but you can't ignore the caliber of the directors who participated in this series: Barry Levinson, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Alex Gibney, Steve James, John Singleton, Morgan Spurlock, and many more. The series started airing in 2009, and several of the installments have found their way to Netflix, so I'll probably start with those.

And "The Wire." I swear that I'll stop putting it off and watch the series in 2013. Wait. I got all the way through "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" this year. Why should I feel bad?

Also, I want to give a quick shout-out to the one television podcast that I've found this year to be indispensable: Firewall and Iceberg, where television critics Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg review and discuss the best and worst of TV. I originally wanted to write up a post on television podcasts to go with the one I wrote for movie podcasts, but I haven't found anything remotely in the same league as these guys, so that didn't happen. I feel a little bad about appending this recommendation to the end of a sort-of related post, but I also can't think aof anything more appropriate.

Happy watching!
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TJE 7/20 - Baraka (1992)

I saw the last half hour or so of "Baraka" a long time ago, and I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be. There were all these images of concentration camps, a funeral on the Ganges river, Whirling Dervishes, ancient stone images, beautiful landscapes, and starry night skies. I couldn't piece together any kind of narrative, but I kept trying to. What was it all about? What did it all mean? A decade later I finally saw the whole movie, and found some answers.

"Baraka" is categorized as both a documentary and an experimental film, following in the footsteps of the more celebrated "Koyaanisqatsi." Ron Fricke, who was the cinematographer on "Koyaanisqatsi," directed "Baraka," bringing a somewhat different sensibility. The film is best described as a collage of images exploring the natural world and human society. There is no story, at least none that is made explicit. Instead, the film looks at a variety of subjects across multiple cultures, such as religious rituals and industrialization. Like "Koyaanisqatsi," the modern world is viewed negatively, as a source of corruption, pollution, and squalor, but it doesn't dwell on this for very long. Critique is not the central concern of "Baraka." Its gaze is wider, and it spends far more time finding connections between different cultures, cutting from one part of the world to another, architecture in one country of the world echoing that of a different city, the ceremonies of one religion blending into other. Sometimes the viewer won't even notice that the film has moved on from one place to the next. In total, the filmmakers collected their images from 24 countries, across six continents.

Spirituality and common humanity are the major themes here. "Baraka" means "blessing" in Arabic, and some of the earliest images we see include calls to prayer, women reverently kissing a lock, and monks at a Tibetan monastery. There is no identifying information and no context for any of these images. The film requires the audience to recognize and make sense of what they see with little help from the filmmakers. Here are a group of children dressed in colorful tribal costume. Here are people decorating a temple. Here are a group of men in long robes and tall hats being solemnly blessed. And then they begin to dance, and you realize that these are the famous Whirling Dervishes of Turkey. In the modern world segments, shots of crowded subway platforms are intercut with shots of newly hatched chicks being processed and marked, and it's left to the viewer to catch the connecting ideas of mechanization and dehumanization.

The major selling point of "Baraka" is the cinematography, which is absolutely stunning. Throughout, I kept thinking of Tarsem Singh's fantasy film, "The Fall," which also went globetrotting to many different locales in order to find the most beautiful shooting locations that it could. However, "Baraka" has more impact because of the documentary approach. I'm sure there was still some staging for some of the shots we see in the film, but the images feel far more genuine, more candid and spontaneous. The camera is less intrusive, and there is the sense that we are simply watching as real-world events unfold. This is not to suggest that the film is lacking a point of view, because it's not. The inclusion and juxtaposition of certain elements is very deliberate, particularly the later segments of the film that travel to various concentration camps and Khmer Rouge prisons, lingering on photographs and piles of skulls.

However, I found that the images of nature were the most arresting. It's one thing to see lovely shots of waterfalls and desert landscapes and rock formations, but it's quite another to see them in this kind of quality, set to the hypnotic score by Michael Stearns, as part of the larger whole of "Baraka." The film has this wonderful immersiveness, which I think is due to the total lack of dialogue or any artifice we expect from other films, including the usual nature documentaries. "Baraka" is really a silent film, one that derives so much of its effectiveness from some of the oldest montage techniques, and lacks the distraction of modern movie soundscapes. We just have image after image of marvelous things to look at. And soon you get caught up in the rhythm of the editing, which is deceptively languid in the early going, and it's hard to look away from the screen.

There is a common what-if question that tends to come up in movie nerd discussions. If you met someone who had never seen a movie before, what would you show them first? I think I would pick "Baraka," because it shows what the cinematic medium is capable of, and because it provides such a fascinating look at a world it's easy to forget is all real.
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I Watched "Shoah"

How do you watch a nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust? Not all at once. I watched an hour or two a day over a week or so. Some days it was a slog, and some days I felt like I could finish all the remaining hours at once, but I'm glad I didn't. Getting through such difficult subject matter required keeping a distance from what was happening onscreen.

There have been many documentaries about the Holocaust. The most famous is certainly Alain Resanis's "Night and Fog," a thirty-minute short released in 1955 that reveals some of the most graphic footage of what was found at the concentration camps. "Shoah" contains no such material. There is no imposed narrative or commentary. The film consists entirely of interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in the 1970s, decades after the end of the war. Director and interviewer Claude Lanzmann often has to rely on interpreters, making the interviews very lengthy and slow, but the stories are strong and harrowing. He crosses continents to find his subjects, a barber in New York, Polish villagers still living near Treblinka, and reluctant ex-Nazis in Germany.

The total lack of historical footage and dramatizations are key to the film's impact. Lanzmann does include contemporary footage of the concentration camp sites and the railroads that carried the Jewish prisoners to their deaths. It's sobering to realize how quickly all traces of the horrors have been erased, with only a few memorials to acknowledge their existence. The camp at Chelmno, which is the focus of the early hours of "Shoah," is mostly empty green fields and patches of forest. An SS solider, with the help of a map, must fill in details of the notorious Treblinka for us from memory. It's all too apparent that the interview subjects have also grown old, and each first-hand account becomes all the more precious.

Contributing to the length of "Shoah" is Lanzmann's thoroughness. When examining the railway system that brought prisoners to the camps, he interviews surviving prisoners, railway workers, guards, and Polish villagers who saw the trains pass. Even the most incidental accounts turn out to be revealing. Did the Poles know what would happen to the Jews at their destination? Did people try to warn them, or was it considered too risky and futile? A German bureaucrat, responsible for keeping the system running, is happy to describe all the particulars of how the transports worked, but denies any knowledge of the exterminations.

I appreciated that "Shoah" spent much of its time on less dramatic, almost mundane stories. There are some highly emotional ones in the mix, especially toward the end. People break down recalling atrocities, and a few have to be coaxed by Lanzmann onscreen to continue. Yet others, particularly the bystanders, seem largely untouched by what they witnessed. One of the most affecting interviews is one of the final ones, where a resistance member recounts sneaking out of the Warsaw ghetto, and being stunned to discover that the rest of the city was still functioning normally, in stark contrast to the mass starvation and violent oppression of the Jewish population.

In this way, the film provides one of the clearest pictures of how the Holocaust was carried out, and the impact of the events on those who directly and indirectly involved. Perhaps the most fascinating part of "Shoah" is not the oral history itself, but how the interview subjects have chosen to deal with the past. Some ignore or try to forget what happened. Some recontextualize and try to place themselves in the best light. Almost all the bystanders and perpetrators agree that there was nothing they could have done to help matters individually. And then there are the few, chilling moments, where someone tries to rationalize what happened.

"Shoah" was released in 1985, forty years after the end of WWII. It has since been almost another thirty years, and even the youngest survivors of the Holocaust are now in their 70s and 80s. Most of the interview subjects have died, and the historical importance of the documentary becomes greater with each passing year. I greatly prefer Lanzmann's approach to the more direct, confrontational style of "Night and Fog," which was perhaps too self-aware of the importance and the immenseness of what it was showing the world. "Shoah" is far quieter, focusing on the individuals, on personal tragedies and remembrances.

But what it did that was so monumental, what I don't think any of the other Holocaust films have managed to do to this extent, was add to the historical record instead of simply revealing or revisiting it. "Shoah" was not an easy watch, but it was nine-and-a-half hours well spent.
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A Super Secret Disney Documentary

"The Sweatbox," is a documentary about making an animated film, that was completed roughly around 2001, premiered at a film festival, and had a limited run in exactly two theaters before it all but vanished off the face of the earth for over a decade. Nothing in the documentary is controversial or contentious. It's probably not even going to be particularly interesting except to a certain subset of film historians, animation lovers, and Disney geeks. However, it does capture a certain piece of Disney history the company is not keen on acknowledging: the troubled production of "Kingdom of the Sun."

The back story goes something like this. Back in 1997, Sting was approached about writing songs for a new South-America themed Disney animated musical, to be directed by "The Lion King's" Roger Allers. He agreed to do the project on the condition that his wife, filmmaker Trudie Styler, was allowed to document the process. Disney fans will know that "Kingdom of the Sun" was originally meant to be a sweeping epic patterned off "The Prince and the Pauper," but ultimately it reached theaters six months late, reworked as a zany buddy comedy, and renamed "The Emperor's New Groove." The six songs that Sting wrote were reduced to an abridged opening number and a song over the credits. The missing songs only remain on the film's soundtrack, as they were written for an entirely different movie than the one that was actually released.

Since Trudie Styler was given unprecedented access to the film's production, she wound up having a front row seat to all of the film's behind-the-scenes woes. There were delays in production. Early versions of the film didn't test well. A new director, Mark Dindal was brought onboard who often worked at cross purposes with Roger Allers. Finally, Allers quit and the entire film was drastically overhauled. "The Sweatbox," named after the pressure-filled screening room where the in-progress animated footage was reviewed, was completed shortly after "The Emperor's New Groove" was released in theaters. The documentary, which runs a pretty brief 84 minutes, is actually longer than the completed feature, which is an even briefer 77 minutes. Of course, Disney owned the rights to Styler's film and made sure that it was seen by only very limited audiences. It was never publicized, never released on home video, and never made available to the general public except in heavily edited form.

Until now. A few days ago, someone leaked a workprint of "The Sweatbox" to the internet, where it has been making the rounds on filesharing and video sharing sites. As a Disney fan, I'm ecstatic. I never expected the film to resurface, considering how notoriously uptight Disney is about its public image. It was only in 2010 that a mostly candid documentary about the beginning of the Disney animation Renaissance of the 90s, "Waking Sleeping Beauty" was put together by a few Disney veterans with the company's blessing. That documentary was about Disney's successes. "The Sweatbox," on the other hand, was made during that period when things at Disney Animation were really starting to go wrong. Disney fans disagree about when the Renaissance ended and the downward spiral began, but for me the turning point was the Disney films that were released right around the year 2000: the awful "Dinosaur," the uneven "Fantasia 2000," and "The Emperor's New Groove," which was, ironically, a perfectly good movie. After following the rumors of the film's endless troubles for years, I saw "The Emperor's New Groove" in theaters in December, 2000 to wind down after finals, and loved it.

The biggest irony about "The Sweatbox" is that it isn't the shocking expose that Disney seem to think it is. Rather, it's proof that sometimes the creative process is messy, very talented people can go off track, and making one of these films is not nearly as easy as the company like to pretend it is. Some want to bill "The Sweatbox" as the record of a catastrophe for the studio, but I think actually captured the creation of one of Disney's last successes in traditional animation. Though the original version of "Kingdom of the Sun" went down in flames and "The Emperor's New Groove" was considered a bust at the box office, the movie has actually gone on to be one of the most popular of the late-era animated Disney films. It even got its own direct-to-video sequel and a television spinoff. Hollywood has seen a lot of troubled productions and a lot of filmmaking disasters, and in the end "The Emperor's New Groove" actually came out okay, despite all the drama shown in the documentary. I feel badly for Roger Allers and Sting for all their wasted efforts and disappointments. Really, I do. But in the end, I think I'd much rather have the Tex Avery homage with llamas that Mark Dindal whipped up, instead of that big epic musical extravaganza.
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It's Been Another Seven Years

In 1964, the British current affairs program "World in Action," produced by Granada television, devoted a half hour to fourteen children from various different socioeconomic backgrounds, all aged seven. John, Andrew, and Charles were pupils at an elite prep school. Jackie, Lynn, and Susan went to primary school together in a working class neighborhood. Symon and Paul were at a charity home. These children would become the leaders of the country in the year 2000, the narrator informed us, and thus provided a glimpse into the future. In itself, this little documentary short wasn't anything special. The children were interviewed, some together and some separately. They were asked leading and provocative questions which elicited a variety of responses about politics, race, and education. The children were all brought together for one day to interact with each other, first visiting a zoo, then enjoying a small party, and finally amusing themselves at a playground, where the program concluded with the narrator reciting, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." All very well and good, but it was what happened next that was extraordinary.

Seven years later, when the children were fourteen, the filmmakers went back to interview all of their subjects. Seven years after that, when they were twenty-one, they did it again. All together, seven documentaries have been produced since 1964, following the children from the ages of seven to forty-nine. A new installment is anticipated later this year, as the remaining participants are now fifty-six. This is the "Up" series, so named because the original "World in Action" short was titled "Seven Up!" and most of the later films follow the same naming convention, with "35 Up," "42 Up," and so on. All but the first have been directed by Michael Apted, and his task has not been an easy one. The children have all grown up and gone on to lead unpredictable lives. There have been marriages, divorces, and children. Two participants no longer reside in the UK. Some have very successful careers, while others have struggled, and a few have required help from the state. In the mix are two solicitors, two in academics, a librarian, a cab driver, a politician, and manual laborers. Nearly all of them still remain in the same socio-economic circles that they started out in, a subject repeatedly discussed in the films.

The original program emphasized differences based on class and opportunities, but the political and social aspects of the series become less and less important as time goes on, and the films become about simply documenting lives. The experience of watching the "Up" series in sequence is extraordinary. It's difficult to form impressions of the children in "Seven Up!" because they're on the screen so briefly. However, as they start growing up, you get to know them and become invested in their lives. Archival footage is mixed in with the new interviews in every installment, often the same clips or sequences of clips, building on each other, so you can see the people's progression through the years. It's always a little jolting when we are re-introduced to another familiar face, suddenly seven years older. The most dramatic changes in appearance happen in the first few films, but major life events happen constantly. Sometime we'll find a participant married to someone different, or living in another country, or the father of five children. After a while, you'll look back at the archival sections, and be able to recognize the adult you've become familiar with in the seven-year-old on the playground.

Watching the "Up" series today, I find the most fascinating thing about it is the way that certain cultural mores and expectations have changed. The films' subjects are from my parents' generation, and all four women in the group got married by their mid-twenties. Two became single parents, really the first generation for which this was a fairly common occurrence. And though class boundaries are still evident, there's clear social mobility in both directions. Tony, from the rougher East End of London, becomes comfortably middle class. Meanwhile Neil, who has the saddest arc in the series, goes from a bubbly little boy in middle-class Liverpool to a homeless itinerant by twenty-eight. At seven, the boys who went to prep school pretty accurately predict the courses of their academic careers, but as adults they remark that this would be impossible for their own children. Of course, some things stay the same for every generation. Everyone seems a little awkward at fourteen, and a little ungrounded and rebellious at twenty-one, and are complaining about the changing times by forty-nine.

And then there are the ethical considerations. Participation in the films is voluntary, and two of the original fourteen have stopped appearing completely, while others have chosen to sit out specific installments. Some seem to enjoy being part of the program, but others dislike the experience and say so. Some spouses appear in the interviews, while others do not. The complaints about unfair portrayals and manipulative editing are constant, occasionally creating dramatic confrontations on camera. It's fair to call the "Up" series akin to reality television, since the documentaries have affected the lives of its subjects, and made a few of them into reluctant celebrities. No one could have predicted the success and impact of the "Up" series, and the seven year-olds couldn't possibly have known what they were getting themselves into. Yet the fact that so many of those fourteen children are still participating in new installments every seven years reflects very well on the filmmakers.

The "Up" series has become one of those miraculous pieces of media that has far, far exceeded its original ambitions. Not knowing about the upcoming "56 Up," I'd assumed the series had stopped when the participants reached middle age, having passed beyond the year 2000 and become the future promised by the narrator in the original short. Now I'm tempted to want it to go on for a few more installments to chronicle the participants becoming older, which is as much a part of life as everything else we've seen on camera. Apted himself is still going strong at seventy-two years of age. Yet I also can't help feeling that these people have all spent enough time in front of the cameras, more than should be asked of anyone. I'd prefer to see a definite end to the series soon, rather than watching it drag on through people's inevitable declines and deaths. Maybe they could get everyone together for one last trip to the zoo or the playground, and then say goodbye for good.
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