Review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I didn't get the original Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Danny Kaye always made me uncomfortable. This is a much different remake about a photography processing expert at the to-be-revamped Life Magazine who has to locate the negative for the shot which will cover the last published edition of the magazine. Ben Stiller is usually very accessible as an actor, we can get into his head and relate to his predicaments and his solutions. That is never more true than in this movie, maybe because Ben also directs as well as stars. Kristen Wiig is also fine in an understated manner as the girl Ben would like to get to know better. Some of the fantasy sequences (Walter has a penchant for day dreams, often at the wrong time) were a little hard to follow. But some of them worked grandly, particularly Wiig's acoustic rendition of Space Oddity at the Greenland bar, which is a magical and pivotal moment in the movie. There are many breathtaking panoramas of the places visited by Mitty, mostly filmed on location in Iceland. Each time I see this it grows a little more on me, and the enchanting musical score compliments things very well. This sort of has to be taken on its own terms but on those terms it is a very very nice work.