'Life In A Day': The World According To YouTube
Director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland) and overtaxed editor Joe Walker culled their one-world symphony from a total of 4,500 hours of home video, raw material from 80,000 amateur cinematographers who shot between midnight and midnight on July 24, 2010. With 192 countries represented, the film sets about making the personal universal, one montage at a time. But while it has certain organizing principles — the rituals of waking up, for example, or marriage ceremonies of varying flavor — what it lacks is a compelling point of view.
Occupying a no man's land between experimental film and micro-documentary, Life in a Day basically has two different modes: associative montage and minute-long bits of portraiture. The early sequences lean heavily on the former, as dawn finds people prepping for the day — roused by alarm clocks or roosters or small children, putting bare feet on the carpet, brushing teeth and combing hair, and shuffling off to work at a parking garage in Roanoke or paddling down an African river to destinations unknown. There are montages of eggs cracking, babies being born, forms of transportation, celebrations and tragedies, and views from doorsteps (and steppes) around the globe. We may come from different places, the film suggests, but all of us put on our pants one leg at a time.
Though the film tends to make the banal universal and the universal banal, it improves when it slows down — relatively speaking — and gets to know its subjects a little better. A section about love yields a handful of touching and funny vignettes, like a young gay man coming out to his grandmother over the phone or an elderly couple remarrying with naughty handwritten vows. Other fleeting glimpses are potent, too, like witnessing a nimble practitioner of parkour (the art of swiftly scaling obstacles) shoplifting from a grocery store, or an overhead view of the stampede at the Love Parade dance music festival in Duisburg, Germany, which ended with 21 people dead.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/29/138722900/life-in-a-day-the-world-according-to-youtube?ft=1&f=1057