Life in a Day

Collated from over 80,000 video clips amounting to 4,500 hours of footage, this rare ‘user generated’ documentary gave YouTube subscribers the chance to show the world a small portion of their life. The footage was to be shot on 24^th July, 2010, and surmounted to a 90 minute collage of life spanning 192 countries which aired live online but has been recently given a full theatrical release. Without any specific narrative, Life in a Day weaves us through the many intricate and subtle situations humans face on a daily basis, and director Kevin McDonald (famous for Last King of Scotland but well known for One Day in October, the Oscar winning documentary on the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich) has portrayed us as beautiful, interesting creatures, however mundane we may claim to be on camera.

Who can remember what they were doing on July 24^th, 2010? The fact that we had all lived through this day makes us think that however uninteresting our own experience may have been; objectively it can be a fascinating look at how others lead their lives. A small scene in the beginning shows a father waking his son in a messy, cramped apartment. They walk to a small shrine in their living room where, in front of a photo of a middle-aged woman, both say a prayer for their deceased loved one. It is at this point when we understand why they are living in this unkempt environment, and without knowing anything about the pair, feel a torrent of sympathy towards them both.

It is hard not to see the irony of media today; so many streams claiming to be ‘reality’ based (Big Brother, Survivor) or documentaries which aren’t quite documentaries (Catfish, I Am Still Here), purvey the notion of ordinary people going through extraordinary things. Life in a Day is riddled with short slices of human nuances, which do not need to be staged or pre-written to be astounding. Another tear jerking moment came from a young gay male explaining his sexuality over the phone to his grandmother for the first time. In these moments the films intentions are clear, and with an ever increasing sentiment of the destructive nature of humanity, we are reminded how genuine and warm-hearted the majority of us really are.

Shot using a range of cameras at varying levels of quality, the film ultimately feels like a time capsule of human life on one particular day. The subjects’ willingness to expose their often inner-most personal thoughts turns what could easily have been a series of random videos pasted together into an uplifting collage of human experiences. Like in a Day ends on a very contrasting note; we are taken from the German Love Parade music festival at which 21 died in a stampede, to a young American woman who is eagerly rushing to explain her uneventful day before the midnight cutoff. The polarity of what life can hold is addressed humbly, hopefully for the first in a series of similar ‘user created’ documentaries.

Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure

After a number of shorts tackling issue such as Hollywood stardom and the British electronic music scene, Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate’s first feature length documentary Shut Up Little Man! follows two ex-roommates attempting to track down a group of old alcoholic neighbours who became famous for their insane drunken rows.

Friends Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitch Deprey recorded these middle-aged alcoholics screaming incessantly about homosexuality, the war, and most often how much they hated one another, by taping a microphone to a pole and hovering it near their neighbor’s window. This voyeurism was taken to a viral level before the Internet was born via the medium of cassette tapes, and the popularity of these recordings grew to such an extent that record labels were vying to get the rights to use this wacky delinquent material.

Pete and Ray, the main culprits in these recorded arguments, were clearly friends as they slept in the same room, but when they drank, all hell broke loose. Bate was fascinated by this strange love hate relationship, however the film’s comedic edge turns somber as the audience is taken through the moral and ethical questions that are raised by this fairly exploitative form of viral entertainment.

When offered money for his unwilling contribution towards the material, Pete reluctantly agrees, however the $100 hardly compares to the thousands Eddie and Mitch have made since their website began to sell CD’s, shirts, and even fake Ray death certificates. The film touches on this aspect and asks the question as to whether the recordings themselves were obtained ethically but focuses more on the story of Pete and Ray and where they are today.

Although a documentary, a majority of Shut Up Little Man!’s narrative aspect came about purely by chance, as Pete was found through an online database for sex offenders in San Francisco. The filmmakers along with Eddie and Mitch then pushed to interview him on camera, which he was clearly uncomfortable taking part in, but what ultimately ends the film with an interesting inside look on Pete and Ray’s very unique relationship.

The film uses a combination of interviews, stock photos and reenacted footage of the recorded arguments. Cut in-between these are cartoons drawn by indie comic book artists Daniel Clowes and Ivan Brunetti, which were inspired by the outrageous characters that they had conjured from listening to the tapes.

Shut Up Little Man! eventually asks more questions than it answers. This is not uncommon for a documentary however less time could have been spent on the story of the pair and more on the ethical questions the film raises. For the most part, though, the film is a good laugh and is interesting enough to carry the audience, but falls short on analyzing why it is we are actually laughing at the misery of two retired alcoholics.