Saturday, April 28, 2012

Life In A Day (2011) Review


What can you make of Life in a Day, a movie that is scrambled together from 4500 hours of footage from thousands of contributors from all over the worlds? First of all, you should be amazed by the sheer size of the whole project. Ok, ok, I'm not gonna tell you what to feel about this film, judge for yourself.


Nonetheless the idea sounds ambitious and awesome: Collect video clips that were taken on a single day (more specifically July 24, 2010) and assemble them to make a movie that reflects the whole world in a single day. It's a huge project and director Kevin Macdonald together with a team of film students and editors manages to create something that hasn't been done before.

Of course there is no real narrative going on, the footage is more or less categorized by topics that touch people all over the world: love, fear, you get the idea. Some of the clips are quite interesting, others are funny, and then there are some that are just "Meh".

There's really not much more to say about this film. It is nice to watch while it lasts but once it's over most of it is already forgotten and leaves you none the wiser which might be the biggest problem. Life in a Day is not a simple documentary, it's a mosaic of the world, pretty as a whole but the bits itself leave you quite unsatisfied, like a meal completely comprised of appetizers. I've seen the film about two months ago and I remember only 2 of the snippets in the film.

So Life in a Day reaches for the sky but ultimately falls flat due to its grand magnitude. So make your call: Either you watch "Life in a Day" or you go on YouTube and browse through random clips for two hours, the payoff will probably be the same.

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