Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie Review

He read the Blus today, oh boy.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 9, 2011

The Beatles’ snapshot of a moment in time, A Day in the Life, remains one of their most enigmatically charged songs, one which seems infused with hidden meanings even as it details a laundry list of everyday occurrences, from getting up and going to work to (sadly) committing suicide, all wrapped up in that casual elegance that always seemed to be at Lennon and McCartney’s fingertips. Life Magazine in 1974 published a fascinating special edition called "A Day in the Life of America" which documented one 24 hour period in the United States, and a number of books followed suit doing similar service for any number of regions and/or nations. A somewhat broader sampling of the global population within that same idea of a 24 hour period is captured in filmmaker Kevin Macdonald’s fascinating Life in a Day, a documentary culled from literally thousands of hours of amateur footage submitted through YouTube and assembled by Macdonald and his ace editor Joe Walker. There have been films somewhat like Life in a Day before, in content if not in how that content was achieved, films like Koyaanisqatsi or Baraka, but Life in a Day is in its own way more profound while at the same time more banal, as it cuts quickly from incredibly disparate locals, capturing everything from a drunken man on a bench in Armenia trying to figure out what day it is to a Korean bicyclist trying to tour the entire planet on his two wheeled companion, to a wife and mother in Illinois literally just home from major cancer surgery, replete with her chemotherapy pouches hanging from her waist like errant mutant teabags. There may not be a unifying principal per se in Life in a Day, other than the unification that chaos creates out of itself, but the film maintains a surprising momentum and builds to several equally surprising emotional moments as it wends its way through an incredible variety of submissions from people who were attempting to be everything from silly to provocative to simply documentarians of their own life. Life in a Day is not just a celebration of one twenty four hour period on our planet, it is also in a perhaps more subtle way a reaffirmation of what the internet has made possible for Mankind at the dawn of the 21st century. This is a documentary literally made by the thousands of people who submitted clips, and the real unifying thread of Life in a Day is the perhaps subliminal message that everyone participating in this grand experiment was taking time out on July 24, 2010 to contribute to something global.

We can thank Wired Magazine and writer Jeff Howe for yet another exciting new term hoping to explicate the wild and wacky world in which we live, in this case “crowdsourcing,” which refers to relying on amateurs as well as professionals to complete a project, made possible by technological advances. There’s probably no more potent filmic example of crowdsourcing than Life in a Day, for aside from Macdonald’s overall input into the flow of the piece and the often brilliant contributions from editor Walker, this is a film compiled from everyday people’s own home videos. What is so amazing in a way is the sheer ubiquity of minicams in the hands of everyone from goat herders to indigent tribesmen. One pretty much expects an industrial nation’s inhabitants to be attached symbiotically to their electronic devices, but what Life in a Day makes abundantly clear is that there is virtually no corner of the world now that is untouched by the omnipresent reach not just of physical technology like home video cameras, but by more intangible technologies like the internet and YouTube.

Director Kevin Macdonald may be most familiar to feature film lovers for pieces like The Last King of Scotland and the feature film version of the brilliant British miniseries State of Play, but his career actually got off to an Oscar winning start with the documentary One Day in September (Macdonald seems obsessed with 24 hour periods, evidently), an amazing piece of filmmaking about the horrific murders of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Macdonald’s contribution here is perhaps more subtle than usual, considering the fact that the raw footage was literally supplied to him, but he has given Life in a Day some nice shape and tempo as he visits seemingly every corner on the globe from midnight to midnight.

The film is an odd mix of the banal and profound. We get some nice coming of age sequences, including a great longer than usual segment featuring a 15 year old boy learning how to shave, but the bulk of this film is brief snippets here and there, babies being born, people facing their own mortality, farmers herding cattle, and a couple of somewhat questionable sequences, including one of people urinating and, well, you get the idea. There are a number of troubling, albeit very quick, sequences here that argue against letting the youngest, most impressionable, viewers see the film, at least without a parental pre-screening. There is one laugh out loud moment where a prospective father is filming the birth of his child, which is fairly graphic (as anyone who’s attended a live childbirth will know), but who faints, with the camera going all willy-nilly for a moment. The next shot is of a nurse holding the father’s legs in the air as he lies prostate on the ground. Funny stuff.

Special kudos need to be given to editor Walker, who is probably at least as responsible for the ebb and flow of the imagery as is Macdonald. Life in a Day moves at drastically different tempi, with quick cuts establishing locales all around the planet interspersed with longer sequences that give the viewer a little breathing room and help them to get to know at least a handful of the participants. Some very inventive editing of various shared actions (like cooking breakfast) is effortlessly melded to an appealing score by Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert.

The question remains, though, is Life in a Day anything other than an interesting experiment? My personal take on the material is, yes, within certain confines. There’s no question that the method of assembly as it were is experimental, but the film manages to be a rather cohesive piece, albeit one not traditionally narrative in form. The subliminal message of Mankind being linked beyond its conscious ken is perhaps Life in a Day’s most salient accomplishment, but it’s one that can’t be underestimated.

Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Life in a Day arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a variety of aspect ratios, with 1.78:1 and 1.33:1 being the most prevalent. This is by its very nature an amateur video enterprise, and often individual segments are shot in less than ideal conditions, resulting in lots of digital noise, murky contrast, blurry imagery and overall softness and fuzziness. What's perhaps more surprising generally about Life in a Day is that it looks actually decently sharp quite a bit of the time, especially when we're seeing the daylight footage shot out of doors or in brightly lit interior locations. There's certainly nothing here that is going to even come close to setting videophile hearts on fire, but that isn't the point of an exercise like this. This is home video, pure and simple, and taken within that context, it's watchable more often than not, and even remarkably enjoyable most of the time.

Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Life in a Day features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix as well as a surprisingly robust Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix. As with the video element, sonic activity is somewhat variable, with the bulk of surround activity coming courtesy of the inventive score and what might be a few added sound effects in the sequences which feature rapid fire editing. Otherwise, we simply get people talking into the camera and those elements are squarely front and center. Fidelity is rather good, considering the wide variety of filming conditions, and dynamic range is exceptional. It's hard to judge something like Life in a Day by the usual benchmarks, but if you come to the film understanding the completely unique way in which it was put together, chances are you'll be pleasantly surprised by the depth and nuance of the 5.1 track.

It should be noted that subtitles for the sections in foreign languages are forced, but pressing the optional subtitles offers viewers a nice bonus, added supertitles which identify the locations for each segment.

Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Kevin Macdonald at the Mass Observation Archive (1080i; 4:10). This archive is at Sussex University, an archive which collects diaries and the like by "everyday" people, going back to the 1930s. It was this archive which gave Macdonald his inspiration for the film.
• Life in a Day Stop Frame (1080i; 1:22) is a quick featurette with editor Walker talking about his team trying to sort through the 80,000 clips to fashion the final film.
• Ridley Scott on Life in a Day (1080i; 1:49). Scott was one of the film's producers and talks about what he wanted this film to achieve.
• Kevin & Joe offers the director and editor discussing various subjects, including A New Kind of Filmmaking (1080i; 2:58), Rawness (1080i; 2:27), Serendipity (1080i; 1:44), and Contributors (1080i; 2:51).
• Deleted Scenes. With 80,000 submissions, there's no dearth of material here. This supplement is split into three sections, Group 1 (HD; 12:59), Group 2 (HD; 4:49) and Group 3 (HD; 18:55).
• Director's Commentary. Macdonald provides a lot of background information here on how he partnered with YouTube to create this idea. He also gets into some specifics of various sequences and how he's actually become friends with some of the participants.
• Editor's Commentary. Walker is somewhat bemused by the sheer volume of material he needed to sort through, but also talks about how he and Macdonald chose some footage and discarded (lots of ) other stuff.

Life in a Day Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Whatever you ultimately take away from Life in a Day, chances are you will have never seen anything quite like this film. It's brisk and frequently breathless, but it packs a surprising emotional punch on more than one occasion and it in its own quietly celebrates the goodness of life and the unity of Mankind. Who knew YouTube was for something more than old television and records? Highly recommended.