Rating: 2/5
On October 10, 2010, the filmmakers asked ostensibly every country to film a day in their life — births, birthdays, parades, charity, vaccines, vacations, moments of tranquility and moments of loneliness, learning, fighting, playing games, performing music, dancing, cuddling, loving, kissing, weddings, funerals, labor, travel, pollution, exploitation, starvation, policing, abuse, imprisonment, torture, propaganda, imperialism, car wrecks, forest fires, heart attacks, baptisms, prayers, sermons, deaths
The entire doc feels like an ad for the doc — every scene gets 3-5 seconds before moving on or intercutting it with a thematically similar image. Doing that for 104 minutes is exhausting. Still, the film finds moments of beauty: the passage with the various countries performing music is quite nice
Any time they let someone speak, it’s often inane platitudes that people repeat to themselves or put on kitchen decorations. Or they’ll use footage from a speech or Ted Talk — like, did no one say anything interesting on Earth that day?
It’s odd how much footage of North Korea they use, considering it’s footage from the same tour they give all outsiders. And being American filmmakers, they use so much footage from the United States, which is so boring
The collected footage could do better in a gallery space, where some curation and breathing space could help anything sink in. Otherwise, it shows so little of each moment that it renders everything equally prosaic
At best, this gives you the feeling that you’ve experienced more of the world. But mostly, it cheapens the experiences of others into meaningless seconds