63 Up (2019, Michael Apted) (Patreon)

55/100

Just another entry in the series, to my surprise. Apted didn't know that it would be his last, of course—he'd probably hoped to make it to 70 (at which point he'd have been 85 or so), if only for the numerical neatness—but I'd expected Lynn's death to disrupt the template, bringing mortality very much to the fore. Part of me respects Apted's decision to proceed as usual, interviewing Lynn's partner and kids midway through the film/series, rather than leading or concluding with her, and never bringing it up with the others—not even Jackie or Sue, who flanked her for at least the first half-dozen iterations. But the project has been in mildly engaging stasis since its participants hit middle age (as repetitively noted in my reviews of previous installments), and there's once again little to say apart from "Yep, they're all now a little older, doing pretty much what they were doing when last we checked in, plus more grandkids." (Only real exception is Nick, who's been diagnosed with cancer but is very stiff-upper-lip about it.) I'm a decade away from 63, so the film mostly served for me as a slightly horrifying preview of senescence really starting to ramp up; the men, in particular, have made a visible shift from middle-aged into old, albeit not yet elderly (a fine distinction to which I'll surely be clinging in years to come). Apted having died made the experience a bit more poignant than it otherwise might have been—it's possible that this is the last we'll see of these folks, whose lives I've been following for nearly 30 years now—but the film itself stubbornly declines to offer much in the way of an elegiac quality, so its non-Lynn emotional peak (which occurs in the very first segment) is good ol' vaguely racist Tony revealing that he voted Leave and now regrets it. Even that I could have predicted. 

PERSONAL UP: Once again inapplicable, thankfully. One thing I'm surprised Apted never asked any of them (that I recall, anyway) is how old they feel. It's especially disconcerting to consider that I'm a mere 10 years away from this advanced age, as I've mentally perceived myself to be in my early thirties since the late '90s, when I actually was.