1 Best Releases From Flying Object Studio

The Spool Staff

Life in a Day 2020

The gimmick to Kevin Macdonald's worldwide snapshot of 24 hours has lost its novelty this deep into the social media age. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) A little over 10 years ago, Kevin Macdonald & Zillah Bowes directed a documentary fully comprised of footage that people across the world recorded over one day. That was July 24, 2010, and the documentary, Life in a Day, premiered that following January. On July 25 of last year, the same production method went into effect to create Life in a Day 2020. Of course, 2020 was a much different year. Hell, it’s still going on now, and some even turned it into a meme of a year. What a difference a decade makes. The big shift here isn’t just the time. It’s the fact that the approach isn’t special at this point. We all know what 2020 was like because we all lived it, sure, but on top of that, the entire world documented it ad nauseum. There’s no reason to consolidate all of this into a movie. It doesn’t even quite feel like a movie at this point. This gimmick may have worked 10 years ago, but that’s because it was a specific time when people recorded a lot, not quite everything. The sliver of novelty is gone now. Continue Reading →