How to Live Forever*
May 12, 2011 by Amara D. Angelica
"I'm not like you people, normal." -- Buster Martin (credit: Wexler's World, Inc.)
* Results may vary
I love the premise: take off on a global trek to interview the world’s oldest people, top health and fitness gurus, and smartest life-extension scientists, and ask one question: what’s your secret?
In How To Live Forever, a new film from Variance Films (opening in New York Friday May 13 and L.A. May 20), producer/director Mark Wexler (Seeing Double, Me & My Matchmaker, Air Force One on PBS-National Geographic) does just that. Ya gotta love Buster, a 101-year-old chain-smoking, beer-drinking marathoner in London, Marge Jetton, a 104-year-old iron-pumping Seventh-day Adventist in Loma Linda, California, and Edna Ruth Parker, 115, the then-oldest person in the world, in Indiana.
“There was something exquisitely moving about being in the presence of all my elderly subjects,” says Wexler. “These were people who’d lived through turbulent times and faced great adversity, yet no matter where they were or what their background, they all shared remarkable grace, humor, and resilience.”
Wexler goes into the operating room with Dr. Ellsworth Wareham, a 94-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon. On the other side of the world, Dr. Craig Willcox, gerontologist and Co-Principal Investigator of the Okinawan Centenarian Study, explains how the Okinawan people live longer by consuming a low-calorie, high-nutrient diet and maintaining their daily activities such as walking, gardening and traditional dance.
Among the dozens of interesting people appearing in the film are Ray Bradbury, Aubrey de Grey, Suzanne Somers, Phyllis Diller, John Robbins, Jack LeLanne, Roy Walford, Willard Scott, and Ray Kurzweil, and the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), the definitive source for information on the world’s oldest living people. And as a backup, Wexler visits Alcor, a cryonics lab where patients are preserved after death in the hopes of being reanimated in a more medically advanced era.
This film’s definitely on my must-see list.
Comments (4)
by Logic
Just saw this film and was extremely disappointed. So many fascinating people and areas of exploration, but ultimately the filmmaker doesn’t do much more than point a camera at them, extract the weakest part of what they have to offer (if he even grabs that much), and moves on to the next person.
Understanding Kurzweil’s ideas, one can’t help but be frustrated at the 20 seconds or so of screen time he gets, and why his ideas aren’t given any real thought, considering the basic premise. For that matter, it’s frustrating that NOBODY’s ideas were given any real thought. This is one of those “here are a whole bunch of puzzle pieces; you figure it out” style documentaries. The lingering shots of supercentenarians and meandering moments of what-does-it-all-mean are intended to make the viewer introspective and ponderous, but there’s no real narrative thread here, which completely undermines any potential effect it could’ve had. The narrative question posed above (“What’s your secret [to living a long time]?”) isn’t even the driving narrative here. It’s more a narrative of, “We’re all getting older, and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it.”
What’s most disappointing is that the film isn’t really the pursuit or examination the title implies. I assumed from the trailer that the title was meant humorously (even ironically), so I didn’t go in expecting any real exploration of longevity issues. But the film doesn’t even explore the humorous possibilities available here. Buster, the 101-year-old chain-smoking, beer-drinking man on the poster has an amusing segment, but it just highlights how uneven this film is, and how much time is spent on stuff that doesn’t add up to much.
I commend Wexler on making his film, and anyone who spends his own money to take a project like this to completion has my respect. Watch it to support that effort, if nothing else. But to anyone that’s already thought about these kinds of questions (as I assume readers of this blog have), it misses its mark thoroughly. In the end, there are some entertaining segments, as you would expect in a grab bag of vignettes, but without a clear focus, you can’t help leaving with the real sense that you’ve just witnessed a huge missed opportunity.
by melajara
As for now, there is unfortunately ABSOLUTLY NO PROGRESS in human life extension defined as human lifespan extension.
The proof is in the pudding. The current crop of super-centenarians are still passing away at 115 or before, i.e. 7 years before Jeanne Calment died, in the last century.
Of course, there are more and more people achieving 100+, but so far no progress at all for 110+. What we have is stronger cohorts of centenarians but no more.
IMHO this gives credentials to the theory of aging as the progressive unfolding of a genetic program, notwithstanding the application of the most advanced “therapies” like e.g. the use of Telomerase supplementation to bypass the Hayflick limit.
So much money wasted in “cosmetic” dubious products and still almost nothing on basic research. What a shame.
by Amara D. Angelica
Maria Entraigues http://www.facebook.com/maria.entraigues reminds me that “How to Live Forever” is opening today (Friday May 20) in Los Angeles. (@ the Laemmle Monica 4Plex 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401 at 7pm). Director Mark Wexler will be presenting the movie and answering questions afterwards.
Review:
http://www.facebook.com/l/095d5-ZZFjESxHy3d-JKGqpkcxg/movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/movies/how-to-live-forever-review.html?ref=movie
Website:
http://www.facebook.com/l/095d5rbK7i49vbVjocQYOrmCv3A/www.LiveForeverMovie.com
by Singularity Utopia
For a while I thought the idea of Cryonics was great but then I read about fracturing: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationAndFracturing.html
Despite the fracturing issue I feel cryonics is better than nothing thus if I had the money I would opt fro cryo-preservation but the fracturing issue doesn’t make me feel confident that 100% perfect reanimation will be possible.