Life in a Day 2020

A very nice and beautiful documentary about life, specifically on the day of July 25th 2020. It covers topics like covid, the BLM protests, pollution, life, death, love, work, meaning and so much more. This docu also did a wonderful job showing all walks of life, cultures, struggles, people with unique hobbies and more in a way that never felt forced or remodeled for the purpose of the documentary, it all felt pure.

I think my only complaint would be that I felt like it jumped around a lot and has no real transitions, but it all fit together nicely and compacted well in its hour and 20 minute run time.

For what this movie proposes itself to do, it accomplishes it in a beaultiful result. If movies are the best of way of telling stories, this one does that in the most wonderful way - visiting all the corners of humanity and their tales in a well crafted way. I recommend this for everyone.

I remember an old show called "Ben Casey" that began with the lead in, "Birth, Life, Death, Infinity." This is the task of this documentary which has had mixed reviews. The original was done in 2010 and this was a follow up. It must have been a monumental task. While there are some pretty gripping scenes, the editing was all over the place. Transitions were unclear and sometimes it was hard to see where things were going. Maybe a little voice over using poetry or some literary pieces would have helped. I suppose since so many cultures were engaged, that might be unfair. I stayed with it, but I never had the aha moment. Certainly worth a look.

This is a nice collection of home videos collected across the world but the editing is poorly done and makes it feel like these videos were randomly put together. This movie would have made more sense if those videos actually told a story in a way but it they didn't.

I felt like I went to YouTube Shorts and watched a bunch of random short videos at the end of this movie.

What was the main story of this movie? What was its take home message? What were we expected to take from it? What did editors of this movie accomplished that couldn't be accomplished by watching a bunch of random short videos on Youtube?

I felt like this movie left a lot to be desired due to poor editing.

Following on from Life in a Day from 2010, we're now back again with an update, the 2020 version. Directed by Kevin McDonald again and executive produced by Ridley Scott (who I'm sure did sod all). It's essentially the same idea repeated. People film stuff themselves (324,000 videos we're told at the start), all shot on 25th July 2020, uploaded to YouTube and Kevin sticks it all together in some meaningful way. I can't remember a damn thing about the last one and ask me about this in 10 years... or maybe next month and I'll have forgotten. It's not that it's crap. There's some exquisite content here and it's interesting while you're watching it. But with no context given to the material, it's mere forgettable wallpaper. Some of it very nice wallpaper, shot beautifully in 4K, or underwater or a in staggering amount of drone shots. It does it's best with a dramatic start, a montage of women in labour and sunrises as cities wake up. Cows are milked, roosters crow, the world prepares for the day. It's fun, frivolous, a bit quirky. Most of the clips are cut too tight to truly enjoy, but there are some sequences left to breathe a little easier. In general the tone is kept light, hopeful, everyone sharing their best selves, with even the sadder moments kept brief. We get proposals and weddings, lots of masks and social distancing of course. Shot in 2020 this is inevitable and in a way that makes it a little more interesting as a document. We've had the births and marriages, Covid covers the death quota and it gets a lot of screen time, but all the big events of the year are here, the BLM marches and trouble in America does in many ways appear to carry the most weight. Ultimately it's a love letter to life, to humanity. I'm not sure it's really much of a success in summing us up or summing up one day in July, but it's pohsitive and that should probably be celebrated.