Wake up from your daydreaming and go see the Secret life of Walter Mitty. It's pretty alright film

Rating: 7/10 (3 March 2014)

I glad it was finally made after going through development hell, but it doesn't really follow the 1939, short story by James Thurber. It's so loosely based on. The 1947 movie of the same name was different from the book to the point that the author hatred the film for its crude humor, but as less it was follow the book more closely. This 2013 adaption directed by Ben Stiller is very different from the original. In this film, Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is a negative assets manager of photographs at Life magazine who frequently daydreams of fantastic adventures, and has a crush on his coworker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig). When he lost a very important photograph from Photojournalist Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn). He is forced to stop daydreaming, and live life by finding Sean O'Connell across the world and recover the MacGuffin type missing specific negative Frame 25 call '"Quintessence" of Life" before Life Magazine final print issue converts to online status. In the short story, it deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. These heroic episodes should had been in this film, or at less, mention, because the movie is really slow to start off. It takes a very long time, before Mitty is call to adventure here. Surprising, the movie doesn't have that many daydreaming sequences which kinda bug me. It lacks the satirical over the top tone of the original story. I would had love to see him as a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a deadly assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. I guess, jumping into an ocean with sharks and escaping a volcano is daring, but it's less Mitty when you think about it, because he does those things for real, not imagining it. The best thing about Walter Mitty was the daydreaming and how it was fantasies by details of Mitty's mundane surroundings. It was cool to see what triggers them. The movie could use the symbolism better, like the Stretch Armstrong scene. It's weird to see, Walter Mitty had an over the top fight with obnoxious corporate transition manager Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott) over it, then easily give it away to some kids for a skateboard, seeing that his family got it for him. The Stretch Armstrong toy could represent a lot about his child life nature, and him slowly getting over it, to grow up. Surprising the daydreaming scene weren't that funny, it felt really dumb, than smart. One joke kill it, Benjamin Button. The only time, it was semi-funny was when reality hit in. I love the whole isolated frontier humor. I do love the film for its great use of music. David Bowie's "Ground Control to Major Tom" was the highlight of this. I do like the Life magazine symbolism as he works for a magazine, when he doesn't have little to no life of his own. Still, the film put Life magazine in a negative light with how they supposedly treat their workers, badly. I surprised, Life magazine allow them to use their brand. I do have mixed feelings about the use of pop culture references such as Papa Johns and E-Harmony. The movie has way too much product placement. There isn't much of a secret life of Walter Mitty as everybody can tell that he is daydreaming all the time. Also missing in the film is Thurber's love of wordplay can be seen in his coining of several nonsense terms in the story. What I love about the film is that Walter Mitty doesn't intentionally attempts to mislead or convince others that he is something that he is not. He's pretty honest about who he is, and what he does. Still, it bit unrealistic to think that Ben Stiller's Walter Mitty was once a skater. In this film, Walter stops being Walter Mitty and more like Edmund Hillary halfway through the film. It seem really unrealistic for him to become that good in hiking in two weeks. Honestly, it felt like a movie about mountain climbing. It was pretty beautiful shots of Iceland throughout the film. Then there was a pretty good scene with Mitty trying to photograph a rare snow leopard that represent the whole film very well without being too preachy. In my opinion, they could had stop there, and I would be happy with the ending. The true ending was a bit lacking. It felt like his unrealistic romanticism of his fantasies were coming true. That isn't what the film should be telling as it became too predictive. It should be telling, how to understand disappointments in life, and move on and keep dreaming. Overall: This movie lacks a lot of things that the original done well, but it shows the 'Be in the moment' lifestyle in a good light that it's worth watching.