Life in a Day - Why I dislike the movie!

I recently watched the premiere of Life in a Day. The movie title is interesting, the concept is interesting and interestingly, Life in a day is not that interesting.

Life in a day’s filmmaker, Kevin MacDonald asked people around the world to submit video clips filmed on the 24^th July 2010 via Youtube. He and his team then picked the clips which they found interesting and put them altogether into a 90-minute of a Life in a Day. Some of the clips were divided into several parts while some were shown for merely a second or two.

Real Random Clips

Life in a Day starts out quite nicely where you can see people of different walks of life waking up at early hours of the day, performing different tasks. It doesn’t state the time or the place. At daybreak, that’s when most people wake up for their daily routine, we see the boring stuffs like brushing teeth, shaving, being lazy in the bed and the likes.

As Life in a Day gets deeper, they are all just random clips. Yeah, of course it’s random as those video clips were submitted by people all over the world. Well, to make a film this way, you have to at least make it meaningful rather than wasting the Life in a Day. Somehow, Life in a Day does not focus on a specific topic.

Some of the clips were so funny that I thought I was actually watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. Alright, imagine watching America’s Funniest Home Videos for one and a half hour without any advertisement breaks or a commentator. At least America’s Funniest Home Videos' clips are more organised than Life in a Day.

Over 190 countries and 80,000 submissions

I just feel that there could be more to Life in a Day. It was said they received clips from over 190 countries yet Life in a Day seems to be restricted to only a few countries. I admit that they must have received dozens of useless clips but surely there are a lot more interesting clips which should have been included.

All is not lost

Clips with first person view interested me the most but there are not many. There is a clip by an Afghan boy explaining his love of cameras as well as that it is safe to travel in Afghanistan. It just makes some of us realise that Afghanistan is not all about war and torture. The people there do want to live in harmony and move forward.

A Korean, who travels around the world for years, explaining his vision of a united Korean even though he thinks that it is impossible. And yet he is optimistic that impossible is possible. An American whose husband has to leave home for war and they can only communicate through the internet.

Finally...

As mentioned, Life in a Day is just a combination random unmodified clip selected by the filmmaker and his team. A lot of random clips being made into one clip just make a random movie. Had they selected meaningful clips, it would become a meaningful movie. I just couldn't get my head around the kind of message the movie is trying to relay. Is it just as simple as showing us Life in a Day or more? I live for so many days and I am sure some of the movie-goers are older than me. Do we have to be reminded or see our Life in a Day?

The film could have been much better if there were clips about things that are not known to us. I wake up from my sleep, brush my teeth, eat my breakfast, drink my coffee, go to the toilet and these are the things that most of us would have done in a normal day. What about others who are less fortunate than us? I am sure there are more meaningful clips out of the 80,000 clips submitted.

Maybe I am a little too harsh. It's a nice concept, no doubt. If they had better instructions on how they envisage this movie would be, they may not have received too random clips. After all, who would make a video of someone urinating? Maybe that's the beauty of the randomness but I just don't get it.