Watch "Life in a day" on YouTube

Remember the collaborative documentary I posted about a while back?

Well it is ready and last night it screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Reactions where quite positive. The full film will be available on YouTube in a few hours so be sure to check it out. It certainly sounds very interesting.

"Life in a day"

Do you want to be a part of a documentary shot entirely by normal people around the planet? Life In A Day is your chance.

Produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald, Life In A Day is an experimental documentary. The concept is simple: the film makers are asking you to film a moment of your life on July 24th and upload it to YouTube. The best videos will be put together to create a unique perspective of everyday life around the planet.

The film will be presented on January 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival and 20 of the people whose footage is used in the film will have a chance to go to the premiere.

Find out more details here and get your cameras ready!

Geeking out: Ridley Scott sci-fi double feature.

Last night I went by a friend's place to hang out and ended up watching two of the greatest science fiction films ever made, Alien (the Directors Cut) and Blade Runner (the Final Cut).

The crew of the Nostromo.

As we were sitting there we decided to watch a movie and immediately a problem emerged. You see when 4 film geeks get together to watch a film, it's not always easy to decide what that film should be, since between the four of us we have watched a very large number of movies. But then the host said: "What about Alien?" Since none of us had watched it in quite a long time and we all love sci fi, our little problem was solved.

Upon finishing that movie we decided to make it a double feature. And what better way* to follow up Alien than Ridley Scott's next film, Blade Runner. Especially when it's the Final Cut which none of us had ever watched before.

Downtown L.A in 2019.

Watching those two films after such a long time, sure makes you realize they deserve all the praise they get and why they are considered classics of not just science fiction, but cinema in general!

PS. A little fun detail we spotted: a screen readout as Ripley is leaving with the shuttle from the Nostromo is exactly the same as a screen readout in the Police car as Gaff is picking up Deckard from the noodles place. Both screens say ENVIRON CTR PURGE 24556 DR 5. And here are the screenshots to prove it!

Alien: Space Shuttle screen

Blade Runner: Police car screen

*OK, maybe Aliens, but a) we didn't have it and b) it was the obvious choice.

Body of Lies

I just got back from the cinema where I watched the new Ridley Scott movie Body of Lies featuring Russel Crowe and Leonardo Dicaprio. Let me start by saying that this was a pretty solid and very entertaining spy movie. This was not though your usual spy-super gadgety-james bond-sort of film. It was more down to earth, more brutal when it had to and more provocative when it was needed.

I must admit that I did not know alot about the movie before watching it. All I knew was that it was directed and produced by Ridley Scott and what the tv trailer had to offer. The first few minutes I got upset watching Crowe justifying war in Iraq and setting a black and white scenery of bad arabs-good americans. Soon though, it became clear that that was not the case with this movie, mostly because of the conflict between Dicaprio and Crowe with Crowe not being a very likable character. In fact he was very good at not liking him but not quite putting a finger at what was that bothered me most about him. DiCaprio plays a CIA agent who is fluent in arabic and is stationed in Iraq. He keeps himself busy by hunting down Al Qaida terrorists. Crow is his boss and besides bossing him around middle east from the confort of CIA's headquarters, he is not very clear as to his ways.

The film gets you interested in the development until the very end showing you pieces of the script and then has you wandering what the characters would be pulling out of their sleeves to overcome the situation. The action was solid and done very well while adding to the script, rather than leading it, as is the case with the genre. The film responsibly differentiated itself from my initial fears and sets a line between downright fundamentalist terrorists with normal arab people that just want to get on with their lives having been wounded psychologically and/or psychically by conflicts, that were brought upon them. In fact the film goes as far as to state that loving your country does not mean that you are willing to wage a war on another nation just because there are interests there. As superfical as this might be, it is still true and I am very happy that mainstream cinema accepts it rather than showing a black and white view of good westerners and people who work with them and bad everybody else.

Overall a movie worth spending the admission ticket. A movie that is not great in a sense of a great film that will be remembered, but again one that you will thoroughly enjoy from start to finish. At the end, isn't this what movies are about?