63 UP, Michael Apted's continuing extension of the landmark British 7 UP series, opens

Film buffs, particularly those who love documentaries, can hardly be unaware of the great British series that began on television back in 1963, with an episode of World in Action devoted to profiling a highly diverse -- in terms of class (and therefore economic station) and in one case race -- group of seven-year-old children, which proved popular enough that its director, a 22-year-old fellow named Michael Apted, did a revisit to the kids seven years later, and consequently a renewed visit at each seven-year period until now, as these "children" reach the age of 63.

With each visit the series has grown richer, stranger, often sadder, and definitely more complex as we watch these lives grow, blossom (in ways both typical and quite unexpected) and now begin to end.

Mr. Apted (shown at right) and TrustMovies both happen to have been born in the same year (1941), a fact that of course has us wondering if we'll be around for any further episodes -- he to film them, I to view them. God, I hope so, and I also hope he has selected someone to follow up for him, just in case.

Younger viewers who have arrived mid-series may be able to last until each of these people have bid the world adieu. Lucky are they! Meanwhile here we are at the participants' age of 63, eager to learn what has happened during the past seven years.

I suspect many viewers will be ever more grateful to Tony, above (and in the red-and-white striped shirt next to the 63UP logo, further up), that short, sweet, energetic little kid who wanted to become a jockey, gave it his best shot, and then went on to drive a cab. One of this series' linchpins is "Give me a child at seven years, and I will show you the man." While Apted continues to ask his subjects if they think this to be true (they seem to agree, to various extents), it appears absolutely truest with Tony, whose positive energy, despite his share of setbacks, continues to buoy the series beautifully. Everything we saw at age seven, we still see now -- in spades.

Other of the children have aged quite differently. Nick (at right), for instance, after a promising physics career here in the USA, has now grown quite ill.

At one point in his interview, discussing his relationship with his late father, he addresses the filmmaker personally. "You know me, Michael: I probably haven't dealt with it fully." Which makes us viewers suddenly realize that, yes: Apted really does know and understand these people -- probably better than some of their friends and/or relatives know them.

At another point in the film, Jackie (at left) gives the filmmaker "what for," telling him, "You didn't have any idea of the changing role of women in Britain!" He doesn't disagree. As this series has rolled on, the role of the filmmaker to and for his subjects has clearly become more and more personal. Which simply adds to the series' depth and pleasure.

Jackie has endured quite a journey -- marriage, divorce, kids, and now, with the death of a partner, single-grand-parenting -- as have most of the "Up" series' participants -- except, perhaps, for a couple of the upper-class males here: Andrew (shown below) and John, the latter of whom has long struck me as the most clueless of the participants (he still does not seem to understand the why and wherefore of inequality in Britain).

John had earlier pulled his participation, due to critical comments made about him, but has now come back, and I do not wish to push his pulling out again, so I apologize in advance. John, shown below, is, as are all the rest, hugely important to this series, but the lives of these two upper-class children, now aging men, seemed to have changed the least. They set their sights as kids, achieved much (if not all, particularly in John's case) of what they wanted and seemed to have worked, lived and married quite well, and to have grown and changed the least of all the participants -- except maybe Tony, who wouldn't waste much time complaining in any case.

Among the women, major surprises are in store from wealthy playgirl-then-happily-married-mother Suzy and especially from that lovely children's librarian, Lynn (shown at bottom), but all the participants here have their interesting life choices (or events that life forces) to share.

Lynn's story will certainly move you, but so, I should imagine, will all of them to varying degrees: Neil (below), still struggling but coping with depression and relationships; Symon, after helping produce a number of children via two wives, is now fostering even more of them; the ever sweet, charming and industrious Sue; Paul, still living and working in Australia; and Bruce, ever heavier but as happy at work as he is now as a family man, too.

I could go on -- and I would like to, about each and every child who has grown into an interesting man or woman -- but those who've already seen the series will want to find out for themselves. For those who have not, 63 Up is as good an entry point as any (except of course the first one) because each participant's story is given as much of the history as viewers will need to fill in enough blanks to appreciate these lives.

If you decide to view the entire series (available on home video), don't even think about binge-watching because there

is so much repetition over the episodes that you'll drive yourself crazy in the process. It is very much worth seeing the entire series, however; just allow ample time to elapse between viewings.

Released by BritBox and running 144 minutes, 63 Up opened this past week in New York City at Film Forum. Elsewhere? Not sure, but one would imagine this film will eventually find its way to home video, just as have the others in the series.

Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman: Mark Passover and Easter with AMAZING GRACE, the story of British abolitionist William Wilberforce who made his country 'great'

Now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video, AMAZING GRACE, the evocative 2006 film that Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls "Your quintessential historic biopic: stately, noble and with plenty of electrifying performances" is worth the two-hour look-back at this 18th century British version of our own 19th century Civil War. However the UK abolitionist movement, amidst centuries of empire building, resembled Martin Luther King's 20th century non-violent crusade for civil rights rather than our own guns-and-bullets conflict of the 1860's.

The film is very well directed by Michael Apted, while the estimable Steven Knight (shown at left, of Taboo, Locke, Allied, Peaky Blinders) wrote the tender, satiric, contentious screenplay that slowly unpacks William Wilberforce's long struggle against British Parliament's endless intransigence on the slavery topic, most MP's having interests that profited from the trade. In fact Britain's empire can be said to have acquired the prefix 'Great' on the backs of slaves who grew, processed, and helped distribute tobacco, sugar, cotton.

The film is stocked with best Brits led by handsome leading Welshman Ioan Gruffudd (above, from Forever, Horatio Hornblower, Titanic, Forsyte Saga, UnREAL) and includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Albert Finney, Romola Garai, Rufus Sewell, Toby Jones, Michael Gambon, Ciaran Hinds, Youssow N'Dour and Jeremy Swift (as Wilberforce's well-read butler, who here previews his dutiful service to Dowager Countess Grantham in Downton Abbey).

Preacher John Newton's poem Amazing Grace (1772) was the moral underpinning of the abolitionist movement and is said to have been performed 10,000 times a year in the U.S., with spurts during our Civil and Vietnam Wars. In Britain, slavery existed from before Roman times (mostly conquered European populations). The human traffic in Africans began much later, commandeered by Elizabethan seafarer, Sir John Hawkins, who formed a slave-trading syndicate of merchants in the mid-1500's, launching Britain's leadership in the Atlantic slave trade.

Newton (1725-1807), above, was a ship owner and slave trader before a religious conversion led him to the ministry. He wrote: “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” We first meet him (Albert Finney) barefoot and in sackcloth, mopping the floors of his London church. Young William Wilberforce, torn between pursuing a religious life or a promising career in Parliament, has come to seek the advice of his old mentor who continues to live with the ghosts of thousands of humans whose lives he had taken or ruined.

Newton urges Wilberforce to shun a religious life and use his leverage as a politician: "Blow their filthy ships out of the water -- the planters, sugar barons of London, Liverpool, Boston, Bristol, New York -- all those streets running with blood, dysentery, puke. You won't come away from those streets clean, Wilber. You'll get filthy with it, you'll dream it." Newton founded a group known as the Clapham Sect which grew among members of Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common, a fashionable area south-west of London. A network of friends bonded together over their enlightenment views and activism, eventually aiding the passage of the Slave Trade Act banning slave trading throughout the colonies and years later the emancipation entirely of all British slaves.

Thus with the prodding of his friend and future Prime Minister, William Pitt (Cumberbatch, above, left, whose acting is so subtly fine, at moments he steals the focus from Gruffudd), and the aid of the Clapham supporters began Wilberforce's near 20-year campaign of oratory and action in the House of Commons to expose his fellow legislators to the ugliness of slavery. London had the largest Black population in Britain in the mid-1700's -- about 10,000. Having black servants was fashionable. In one depressing incident, Wilberforce is gambling in the company of the Duke of Clarence (Toby Jones) who has his black coach driver hauled to the gaming table as 'capital' offered to settle his losses. To his friend Pitt, Wilberforce says bitterly: "For me, slavery is like arsenic. Each new tiny dose doubles the effect". It was their friendship from student days at Cambridge -- Pitt the master politician, Wilberforce the passionate, witty orator -- that positioned Wilberforce at the helm of the legislative process.

"It is with a heavy heart that I bring to the attention of the House a trade which degrades men to the level of brutes and insults the highest qualities of our common nature..... Conditions in Jamaica are... brutal..... Many children are scalded to death by the molten lava. Others die of exhaustion or roll into the fires in their sleep. The result in the morning is a few pounds of pure refined sugar." Wilberforce as a very young MP experienced a religious experience himself. His friend Henry Thornton, banker, economist, MP, great-grandfather of E.M. Forster (Nicholas Farrell), introduced Wilberforce to his wife Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai, below) and to the Clapham activists who persuaded him he could do God's work and politics too by taking up the cause of abolition in Parliament.

Year after year Wilberforce and his Clapham friends assembled new evidence, petitions, demonstrations, and first person accounts. Below center: the freed slave Olaudah Equiano (Youssow N'Dour), chains from a slave ship on the table beside him and at right, Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell).

Patriots refused sugar in their tea; renowned pottery-maker Josiah Wedgwood manufactured an official medallion for the movement (below). Their collective efforts have been referred to as the world's first grass roots human rights campaign.

But Wilberforce would submit his bill in the House of Commons and watch its defeat over and again. Below, Ciaran Hinds (Game of Thrones), is Liverpool's rabid pro-slavery MP orator, Sir Banastre Tarleton. Tarleton had earned a reputation as hated officer and butcher during the American Revolution -- sympatico with his ardent support of slavery.

Each millennia it has to be relearned: when logic and decency fail and other means must be tried, whether more subtle or more violent. In this case it was maritime lawyer, James Stephen, who came up with a clever legal maneuver that broke the logjam. Stephen called it: 'nosus decipio'-- loosely translated, 'we cheat'( the denouement of the film). And they succeeded -- the Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. However Wilberforce (shown below in a portrait from his day) was no liberal. Change, he believed, should come through Christianity and improvement in morals, education, and religion. He opposed unions, women anti-slavery activists, any appearance of anarchy. The essayist William Hazlitt condemned him for preaching the teaching of Christianity to savages while tolerating its worst abuses at home. However he did support prison reform, improved working conditions for chimney-sweeps and textile workers, and less severity of punishments. He died in 1833 just after learning that the final piece of legislation to abolish slavery throughout the empire was about to pass. Nearly 800,000 Africans were freed, most in the Caribbean.

Note: press HERE for the link to a description of the Atlantic Triangle Trade -- in which slaves and goods were moved between Africa, the Colonies, and Europe.

This Sunday Corner post was written by

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman, 

but appears a day late, thanks to TrustMovie's 

current forgetful state. Sorry, Lee!

Life and learning continue as Michael Apted's landmark series reaches 56 UP

If you already know of the memorable and magnificent "UP" series, the latest addition to it will most likely be on your must-see list already. If you don't, it's never too late to come aboard. TrustMovies himself came aboard maybe ten years ago -- somewhere in the time between 42 Up and 49 Up. He began with the first in the series, now called Seven Up, shot back in 1963 for the British television documentary series World in Action. It covered a dozen 7-year-old British school children, all white with one mixed-race boy included, from homes upper-, middle- and lower-class (a couple of kids were in group homes).

The children, being kids, were very open: funny, charming, unique and generally delightful companions. So it was decided (probably more likely hoped) that the series could continue to document the lives of these children as they grew and matured. Indeed it has -- every seven years until this latest offering 56 UP -- with its original director and producer, Michael Apted (shown at right), continuing his yeoman work of interviewing and documenting these rather ordinary lives in a way that makes us realize how special and amazing they are. Just like yours and mine. In fact, if you don't identify -- and not just with one but with many of these people at different points along the way, I would suggest that you're not paying enough attention. The result is unique: the kind of documented personal history we've never had the opportunity to see until this particular collaboration, and the effect is equal parts bracing and moving. There is a profundity here that is in no way manufactured or strained. It simply is.

If you are new to the series, I would beg you to tackle it in a different way than I did. I watched the initial episode, along with its follow-up (called Seven Plus Seven), and then within two weeks had seen 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up and 42 Up. This proved too much too soon, and I felt there series contained far too much repetition. It doesn't, however, because the real waiting time between episodes is seven years.  We need the repetition at that point, because we've forgotten so much. So if you plan to watch, beginning-to-end, give yourself a respite of at least a month or two between episodes. Maybe even more time.

I met another critic at the press screening yesterday, who first came to the series by watching the penultimate episode 49 Up, and then went back to the beginning. That worked just fine, she said, and so I suspect you can enter the series via any of its (at this point in time) eight portals. What we get from all this is an understanding of the children we first meet, and of the young people they grow into, then the adults that come from these and finally, rather slowly in some cases, to the maturity and aging we have now. To call this a rich experience is woeful understatement.

It occurred to me only with this most recent addition to the series that I may not live long enough to see another segment; if I am lucky perhaps I'll see two more, which will take our people to the age of 70. And since Mr. Apted and I were born less than a fortnight apart, it also occurred to me that he might not live to finish the series, but I surely hope that he does. The fellow has made some other good movies in his time, but nothing to equal this. The Up Series will be a memorial not just to its participants but to the filmmaker.

Interestingly, we have noted along the way that those participants are not always happy with their participation nor its result. They feel, and rightly so, that the series is only showing a small piece of them. Yet when you total all those small pieces, you get -- maybe not the full character you would if you lived with the man or woman -- but still something vital and amazing.

Another caveat expressed by a couple of the participants is that of the filmmaker having an agenda -- to show up the British Class system. I'd love to speak with Apted about this, but from what we see and hear here (and have elsewhere over the past, what, century or three?), that system indeed exists (does anyone actually doubt this?) and the series' more affluent participants express it notably along the way. In 56 Up one fellow says it has changed and gone away; another says, Oh, no, it is still with us. (Both of these men are of the upper class, it is worth noting.)

Yet every one of these eleven people, from whatever class they come, are worth watching and listening to. TM is not going to go into the specifics of what we learn from this installment. Be there and find out for yourself. Once you've seen even one of these films, I believe you will be hooked for life -- theirs and yours.

56 Up, from First Run Features and running 144 minutes, opens tomorrow, Friday, January 4, in New York City at the IFC Center. Beginning January 17 and 18 , it will open in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively (and in Ottawa, too!) and from there appear in cities all across the U.S. in the months to come. You can see all currently scheduled playdates by clicking here.

Michael Apted's glorious NARNIA chronicle: Third time's the charm

They finally got it right. After designing a filmed version of C.S. Lewis' Lion/Witch/Wardrobe property that began quite well, only to peter out in an endless, poorly-handled battle scene (that was Chronicle One), continuing with Part Two (little more than plots and battles), now -- finally -- comes the good one: Part Three, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.

Directed by no less a cinematic light than Michael Apted (shown at right), the guy responsible for such mini-treasures as the Seven through 49-Up British TV documentary series, Amazing Grace,  Enigma and Thunderheart (to name a few), Narnia 3 proves a delightful child's adventure full of exciting incidents, effects that are indeed special, and a climax that is meaningful and moving in just the right measure. (The religious connotations are still here, but this time they seem less religious and more personal.) The former director and co-writer Andrew Adamson has gone missing for this film, and, my, what a difference that makes. Instead of the unending battles (that may have pleased dumb boys of all ages), we now have a seafaring road movie that has our cast hopping from one interesting, enchanted place to the next.

The older kids from the first two films are also missing this time, leaving the stage open for Lucy (Georgie Henley, center, right) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes, center, left), joined by Will Poulter (far left, from Son of Rambow) and Caspian (Ben Barnes, far right). All are very good, but Master Poulter in particular shines. It's his character, cousin Eustace, who must go through the major change, and Poulter handles the role with humor and skill.

Also on hand again is the terrifically well-animated rat Reepicheep (at right above), voiced by the inimitable Simon Pegg, and a gorgeously-drawn dragon, above, who turns out to be someone we know. The effects in this film -- its entire "look," really -- are rather stupendous, and if you can view it on Blu-ray, do. In fact, this is one of the best Blu-ray renditions I've seen over the past year. (The film's fabulous cinematography is by Dante Spinotti.)

If this becomes the final chapter in the current Narnia series, it's a good way to bid adieu; if not, let's hope the lessons Apted delivers will stick. Or might something else be involved here? After making the first two, so-so films in the series, the Disney studio passed on a third, leaving the franchise to 20th Century Fox. What Fox has produced is in every way a better movie for both kids and adults. Kinda makes you wonder, no?

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is available now, for sale or rental, on DVD and Blu-ray.