![]() In doing so, all he ends up thinking about is Cheryl. When Walter cannot locate a valuable negative from renowned field photographer Sean O’Connell (a soothsaying Sean Penn) that is deemed “quintessence” and vital for the final Life magazine cover, Walter gets motivated enough to solve the mystery and embark on his own adventure to track the photograph down. It’s natural imagination at work and where much of inspiration to act forward in life starts. The film wisely asserts that all daydreaming and spacing out isn’t a bad thing. Too often, daydreamers are cast in a negative light, and some are even judged so far as to be diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder. Lately, they’ve either been centered around getting the attention of a cute new employee at work named Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig) that he has a crush on or his douchebag new boss Ted threatening his job. ![]() Walter lives mostly in his space-out moments of elaborate daydreams. He can barely formulate a viable eHarmony profile, much to the joking chagrin of Todd Maher, one of their customer support specialists (Payton Oswalt). Though he’s got a comfortable downtown job and a loving mother (Shirley MacLaine, perfectly cast) and sister ( Kathryn Hahn), Walter has never done too much of anything spectacular in his life. Led by an incoming takeover/transition team headed by Ted Hendricks (a villainous Adam Scott), the last print issue is due out in two weeks, and jobs will be subtracted as necessary. Like most print media nowadays, paper is becoming paperless, and Life is going digital and downsizing. Stiller stars as Walter Mitty, a young-looking forty-something who has worked as a photo negative processor for Life magazine for the last 16 years. Screenwriter Steven Conrad, whose credits include The Pursuit of Happyness and The Weather Man, traded in Thurber’s original satiric slant for a more serious one that fits the internet age. It is in this long line of artistically realized dreams that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the remake directed by and starring Ben Stiller, succeeds in a wondrously entertaining and affecting way.ĭirecting his fifth film and first since the purposely over-the-top Tropic Thunder from 2008, Ben Stiller turned the macho dial way down and took his shot at loosely adapting the famous 1939 James Thurber short story that was previously made into a film starring funnyman Danny Kaye in 1947. They can aim higher, go bigger, and still be in the tradition of Melies, Spielberg, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Christopher Nolan, and other fantasy-driven filmmakers. With the advent of more and more advanced special effects, fantasy and reality can have smoother seams.ĭream sequences no longer have to look like a Wayne and Garth dissolve from Saturday Night Live. Theatre is great and all, but there is no better place to bring dreams alive than on the silver screen. If you need another list, check out What Culture‘s list of “10 Movies That Remind You Imagination is Wonderful.” Face it fantasy is what movies were made for. Where would be without that door opening from a sepia-colored farmhouse to a colorful land of Oz in 1939’s Wizard of Oz, let alone the rest of the movie’s tale? Where’s the fun if you take out the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters? The list of influential imaginative dreams in cinema is endless, from the flights of fancy of films like Amelie, Big Fish, Being John Malkovich, and The Princess Bride to the darker overtones within titles like Fight Club, Donnie Darko, The Matrix, and American Psycho. Some of the most unforgettable moments in film are those that come from imagination and dreams, elements that bend reality to suit its story and richly entertain. Ever since innovators and filmmakers like Georges Melies took the first moviegoers into outer space with A Trip to the Moon in 1902 and the way of Jules Verne with The Impossible Voyage in 1904, the artistic medium of cinema, since this infancy, has been about the imagination to make fantasy come alive.
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