Will we ever fully be ready to remember 2020? The masks. The quarantines. Racial injustice. So much death.

Assembled from video footage shot by people from around the world on July 25 of last year, “Life in a Day” is a well-meaning but unnecessary crowdsourced documentary, a companion piece to a 2011 version of the same name, that thinks we’re ready.

The film gets off to an obvious start: with a symphony of child birth. Mostly, though, the breezy snippets capture everyday mundanities (世俗之事) that include a vast range of human experiences and multicultural behavior, bringing together beauty and darkness, birth and death. 【小题1】 What this video portrait doesn’t do is focus enough on its subjects to allow for any true investment in their lives.

Though participants’ experiences vary, their clips are cut together into montages (蒙太奇) to create a sense of pandemic-era interrelational connection. 【小题2】 The result is a tediously formatted stream of categorized clips that might as well fall into hash tagged classifications: Environmental Conservation, Zoom Life, Class of 2020, Love Is Love and You Weren’t the Only One Cooking All the Time.

The film indicates that the director Kevin Macdonald and the producer Ridley Scott received 324, 000 videos submitted from 192 countries for this project. That’s a lot of videos. 【小题3】 I know his pursuit is meant to be an unusual break from other cinematic portraits. But over and over in a film about 2020? When a young Black woman is only briefly shown lamenting the death of two of her brothers who died while in police custody? I want her story.

“Life in a Day” seeks to be a time capsule during a period of great racial divide and pandemic distress. 【小题4】 As it stands, it hasn’t captured anything that 90 minutes of TikTok surfing can’t.

THE MOST ANTICIPATED MOVIES OF 2020

Welcome to the year when your patience finally pays off. The movies 2020 is offering have us almost hyperventilating - mostly because it feels like we’ve been waiting forever for many of them to land in theaters.

The Grudge

Directed by: Nicolas Pesce

Opening on: January 3,2020

A remake of the American remake of the Japanese horror favorite, Grudge once again focuses on a vengeful ghost with a long memory. Critical darling Andrea Riseborough stars, and director Nicolas Pesce has some form: critics called his The Eyes of My Mother a haunting slasher.

Weathering with You

Directed by: Makoto Shinkai

Opening on: January 17,2020

The latest animated adventure from Makoto Shinkai, the acclaimed director of Your Name, centers on a pair of teens, one of whom can control the weather, who meet and form a bond with each other, before one of them reveals a secret that will change both of them forever.

The Gentlemen

Directed by: Guy Ritchie

Opening on: January 24,2020

After a bit of a departure with 2019’s live-action Aladdin remake, Guy Ritchie returns to his roots with this British gangster tale about an American expat ( Matthew McConaughey) with a weed empire in London whose imminent retirement from the business spawns a criminal free-for-all for his territory. Fans of Ritchie’s early work are excited to see him at the helm of another crime caper, and it’s hard to beat the sight of a slimy-looking Hugh Grant playing against type’

The Rhythm Section

Directed by: Reed Morano

Opening on: January 31,2020

Blake Lively stars in the latest troubled female assassin movie, based on the eponymous novel by Mark Burnell. She plays Stephanie Patrick, a plane crash survivor who wants to get to the bottom of the disaster that killed her family and discovers it was no accident, which sets her on a path of revenge.

Watching wooden dolls come to life may not be one of the most popular forms of entertainment today, but with over twenty years’ experience, talented puppeteer (木偶表演者) Peter Roberts has earned himself the title “master puppeteer” because of his great ability to turn puppets into believable, almost living characters. “People are quite often surprised to hear what I do for a living and have little appreciation of puppet as a form of entertainment. But while the exact origins of puppet theatre are unknown, it has been popular in many cultures and may have been the very first kind of theatre,” he explains.

Roberts’ shows are highly original. “A puppet show can involve anything from clowning (傻逗) to storytelling,” he says.   Equally diverse are the audiences he performs for. “Some are attracted by the puppets themselves, while others enjoy the dialogue.” Roberts believes that this form of entertainment can be appreciated by people of all ages and cultures.

Roberts’ interest in puppets started when he received some beautiful glove puppets one Christmas. He started putting on shows with these for family and friends and then moved on to handmade Chinese string puppets. Learning mostly from books and personal experience, he explains, “I was already spending most of my free time carving puppets and putting on shows, so I hardly noticed the change from students to full-time professional puppeteer.”

The puppets are designed specifically for each show, which is extremely time consuming. According to Roberts, “Sometimes what you expect and what you actually create in the end are two very different things. I’ve made some of my best puppets ‘accidentally’.”

When most people hear the word “puppetry”, they more than likely think of a way of keeping children entertained at birthday parties. Certainly the subject matter will be expected to be light-hearted rather than serious. However, Roberts wants to point out that puppets convey serious messages sometimes.” he says.