What I Wanted to Tell You

We just watched Seven Up/ 7 Plus Seven. It is a British documentary film project begun in 1964. Fourteen English seven-year-olds, from very different social and economic backgrounds, are followed, to get a sense of what English life is like for them. it has been followed by filmed interviews every seven years, at ages 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and 49 (so far). The first disc has the age 7 and 14 interviews on it. All four of us enjoyed it immensely and we plan to keep the subsequent films in our queue (you probably don’t want to watch these all in a row, as they pull previous footage over and over to remind watchers of what had gone on in previous years).

For all that I support local video stores (and I know I’ve raved about our Best Place Ever in Des Moines), services like Netflix are useful when one wants to watch a more dated movie, or an esoteric film that wouldn’t necessarily be economically feasible for a smaller shop to own.

I would have written this in more detail and with lots of prose exuberance, except that my soul has been drained by unpleasant encounters with European bureaucrats who relish in the power provided by their petty fiefdoms, and by the eye-rolling ineptitude of US Postal Service employees.