Doc News: “Life in a Day” Special Release Date; SnagFilms on Roku; RIP Adolfas Mekas

– This July 24, one year following the date all footage was (or should have been) shot for Kevin Macdonald’s user-generated doc “Life in a Day,” the film will be released to select U.S. cinemas. Now, that is a sunday, but due to the anniversary occasion, this sort-of soft opening will happen for a one-night event, in which participating filmmakers (aka contributing camera-persons) will take part in a live, interactive Q&A, courtesy of Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. Then, the documentary, which was produced by Ridley Scott, will officially open in theaters that Friday, July 29.

Having been skeptical going in, I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised by this film, which I jokingly coined “YouTubisquatsi.” In my review from Sundance I also called it a “spellbinding montage” with a “gradient spectrum of moods and tones, tropes and answers” that will be experienced differently by each of its viewers. I highly recommend seeing it on the big screen.

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Doc News: Brad Pitt; “The King of Kong” Remake; Wim Wenders; Divine

– Brad Pitt has allegedly been confirmed as narrator for Terrence Malick’s upcoming IMAX documentary “Voyage of Time,” which will apparently be like “Tree of Life” without all the pesky human drama stuff. (Hopefully Malick can also one day give us a version of “Tree of Life” that’s just the human drama stuff without the ineffectual space-time context. Or Sean Penn, who is hardly part of the human drama stuff because he’s so lacking in anything resembling a human being. Anyway, that’s a discussion for another place.) Up to now, Pitt’s involvement in documentary has surprisingly been fairly slim. He has an executive producer credit on “God Grew Tired of Us,” appears in Spike Lee’s “If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise,” and can currently be heard supplying part of the voice-over narration in Harry Shearer’s “The Big Uneasy.” I actually don’t see any certainty in the claims that Pitt will be attached to this film, since the L.A. Times’ 24 Frames blog only references an old outline that gave us the initial notion in the first place. But it’s probably going to happen anyway.