Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 25 July

Amazing Grace (Apted, 2006) is a physical rental from Aro St Video and Alice in Videoland

Hunting through my greatest hits for some­thing pos­ted on this day in his­tory, I came across a film that isn’t all that easy to find (phys­ic­al media only in Aotearoa) but seems appro­pri­ate to post after yesterday’s selection.

Funerals & Snakes

Something to watch tonight: Monday 24 July

The first steps towards the end­ing of slavery in the United States was the ban­ning of the import­a­tion of enslaved people into the coun­try in 1807 – 55 years before the Emancipation Proclamation and 57 years before all slaves were effect­ively freed by the end of the Civil War…

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3 years ago · 3 com­ments · Dan Slevin

Here’s what I wrote I wrote in the Capital Times back in 2007 about Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace:

… a hand­some peri­od piece about the cam­paign­ing life of William Wilberforce, tire­less toil­er for social justice and what we now call human rights in the 19^th cen­tury. The film focusses on his lead­er­ship of the move­ment to ban the transat­lantic slave trade in the teeth of entrenched com­mer­cial and polit­ic­al oppos­i­tion. 11 mil­lion African men, women and chil­dren were dragged from their homes, clapped in chains and forced to work in the plant­a­tions and refiner­ies that fuelled the British Empire.

Wilberforce is played by Mr Fantastic (or Captain Hornblower, if you prefer) Ioan Gruffudd and, des­pite his lack of heavy­weight cre­den­tials, he holds up nicely in com­pet­i­tion with some of British cinema’s finest. The Great Gambon (most recently Dumbledore in Harry Potter), Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist), Toby Jones (Infamous), Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys) and the mar­vel­lous Albert Finney all get moments to rise above the occa­sion­ally clunky, exposition-heavy, script.

Finney, in par­tic­u­lar, as the former slave-ship cap­tain John Newton who actu­ally wrote the hymn Amazing Grace (and the line “who saved a wretch like me” comes from deep inside a tor­tured con­science) is splendid.

If you have a US Apple account you can buy (but not rent) a digit­al ver­sion of Amazing Grace.

In New Zealand, you can get it on DVD from Aro Street Video or Alice in Videoland. Your loc­al pub­lic lib­rary may also have a copy.

Further Reading

That 25 July 2007 review also fea­tures Knocked Up (“… a won­der­ful film that shows a deep-seated love for life in all it’s gooey glory” and Year of the Dog (“… Mike White’s first fea­ture as dir­ect­or – after writ­ing films like Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl and The School of Rock – and it seems as if he hasn’t dir­ec­ted this film so much as writ­ten and pho­to­graphed it. That’s not to say that it isn’t enjoy­able – it is. It’s just not ter­ribly cinematic.”)