Last summer, Ridley Scott and Last King of Scotland director Kevin McDonald teamed up with YouTube for a "historic global experiment" that would work like this: You send them some video of your activities on July 24, 2010 (a Saturday) and they would edit the best footage into a documentary film about the world's events that day, credit you as a co-director and premiere it at the Sundance Film Festival under the title Life in a Day. Finally, the trailer has arrived. Let's take a look!
I hate to break it to all of you "co-directors" out there, but your feature length debut plays like a really ambitious cell phone commercial. Which is not entirely negative, because it's still "really ambitious" in that it looks like AT&T gave you a lot of money to show that all walks of life -- the skydivers, the citizen seniors getting married, the kid speaking French and wearing a clown nose -- are united by their wireless packages. And more importantly, their pulses. Unite world! (And sorry to bring up money. I know you weren't paid for this project or the subsequent distribution deal with National Geographic. You will always have the pride of knowing that you contributed to a Tony Scott Samsung Solstice commercial, I mean, film.)
Now more importantly, I'd like to address all of the YouTube users who submitted footage that was not (and I quote from Ridley Scott's press release) "compelling and distinctive enough" to make the uplifting Life in a Day cut: It's going to be OK. Maybe your video will be included in a special DVD feature about uninspiring daily activities? Maybe it won't. At the end of the day though, I would rather watch your home video without sweeping orchestral music underscoring the time you gave your monkey a mask and cane and then pushed it into traffic. (That was at 1:12 if you missed it). Call me old-fashioned?
VERDICT: I respect the concept, but I'll pass on the finished product.