Delayed Reaction: Life in a Day 2020

Premise: Footage collected from real people on 7/25/20 is edited together into a movie.

 

The Life in a Day idea is very cool. They ask for thousands of videos, watch thousands of hours of footage, and piece it together to make something coherent. This is a marvel of editing and about as ambitious as it gets. I wasn't aware of the first movie in 2010. I don't know if it was always their plan to do another in 2020, but last year turned out to be the perfect year to revisit. With COVID disrupting everyday life around the world, much of the footage ended up being unique to that year. I admire all the work that went into this movie. I mean, just think about how much raw footage they had to translate. That alone sounds like a herculean task.

 

However, here's the thing. Hours and commitment don't mean that much to me as a movie fan. I remember when Boyhood came out in 2014, people praised Richard Linklater for the unique idea and years put into it. I tried to give bonus points for that too, but really that's a disjointed and uneventful movie that plays like a clip show of a long running TV series. If you take out the meta narrative about how the film was shot, it's an unfocused screenplay that, in any other scenario, would've been rewritten and polished. Or a couple years ago, the critical community gushed over Kristen Johnson's documentary Cameraperson, which was a collection of extra footage she had from decades of working as a documentary camera person. Again, it sort of works as a metanarrative about the person behind the camera for all these experiences, but at the end of the day, it's still just some footage edited together that kind of works. The only time I can remember this idea really working for me is the 30 for 30 doc "June 17th, 1994", which covers all the eventful sports stories going on at the same time. The structuring of that is very purposeful.

 

This is all one long-winded way of me saying that as much as I admire the amount of work that went into Life In a Day 2020, it still is just a collection of clips lightly organized by topic. It offers the same thrill to me as that page in the yearbook where they chose 20 random pictures for a collage. It's not bad. Just not for me.

 

Side Thought: It bothers me that this is actually more like 2 days. presumably, footage was from any time that was July 25th in different time zones. So, when they are going to sleep in the US on 7/25, it's already 7/26 in China. I think I'm more intrigued by the idea of what people are doing at the same actual time, not relative time. It seems a little uninspired to be like "here's a bunch of clips of people waking up. Here's people eating. Here's lovers embracing. Etc." Put even more simply, maybe this movie is a feat of collection and sorting even more than editing.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend