Fantastically Real In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ben Stiller directs and stars in THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY(opening January 22 in Phils.), James Thurber's classic story of a day-dreamer who escapes his anonymous life by disappearing into a world of fantasies filled with heroism, romance and action. When his job along with that of his co-worker (Kristen Wiig) are threatened, Walter takes action in the real world embarking on a global journey that turns into an adventure more extraordinary than anything he could have ever imagined.

In 1939, when James Thurber first published “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” he brought a playful, modernist style to the story that lured readers directly into the experience of Walter Mitty’s fantasy life. In Ben Stiller’s latest adaptation, he hoped to do something similar, using modern cinema to open the story up visually in a way that couldn’t have been imagined in Thurber’s day. He knew there were several ways to approach Mitty’s fantasizing. But there was only way he felt that was right for what he wanted audiences to feel: using a deftly crafted hyper-reality that merges Mitty’s inner stream of consciousness into the fabric of what’s going on in his outer world.



Check out the movie’s latest featurette with Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig talking how the movie is about courage and going into the unknown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLT8WwOB3Pc&list=PLcZs6n5iZPx_miw9DVX-BUBQ3Ic62z90Z&feature=c4-overview-vl

“Everybody can connect with the idea of talking to somebody while actually having this crazy, imaginary fantasy going on in your head of where you’d rather be in that moment,” he explains. “That’s what we wanted to capture.”

Stiller thought intensively about how to achieve that. Creating Walter’s fantasies would certainly involve many moving parts, and a sense of spectacle, but Stiller used his effects judiciously, with an eye towards unbroken integration into the flow of the action. “In terms of visual effects, we wanted the overall approach to be very photo-real,” he says. “I’ve always found that the best results come from doing as much as you can practically in real-life situations and then just tickling that with the digital effects.”



Ultimately, Stiller would put together a visual design team including Oscar-nominated director of photography Stuart Dryburgh(“The Piano”), production designer Jeff Mann (“Tropic Thunder,” “Zoolander”), editor Greg Hayden (“Tropic Thunder,” “Zoolander”), costume designer Sarah Edwards (“Salt,” “Michael Clayton”) and visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron (“Life of Pi”).

The constant yin and yang of dreams and reality in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” made for an extremely ambitious production – one which would take on the rigors of shooting in the middle of New York City then jet off to the other-worldly environs of Iceland, where cast and crew moved from volcanoes to helicopters to the middle of the frosty ocean.

Each location would host scenes that could not have been filmed elsewhere in the world. In New York, Stiller had the chance to shoot the epic chase between Walter and Ted in the live-wire dynamics of a typical crowded day in the city.

In Iceland, Stiller would shoot a scene that pushed him to new edges both as director and actor: when Walter jumps into the raging waves of the North Atlantic, which Stiller simulated with his own plunge into the ocean. “It was really important for me that we not do that scene in a tank,” he recalls. “I felt we had to shoot in real high seas, with a real boat there, a real helicopter and real waves,” he explains.

“That’s when Mitty literally dives into life,” muses John Goldwyn. “It’s the big transition moment of the movie, and it looks incredibly real, because most of it is.” The scene turned out, just as it does for Walter Mitty, to bring a bit more reality than even Stiller anticipated.

“We were about a mile out at sea with seven-foot swells -- which, when you’re in the water, are really big,” admits Stiller. “The boat with the camera in it went away to come back and do the shot, but there was this two-minute period where I was just in the North Sea with nobody around. I was in the ocean just by myself with a briefcase, floating there waiting for the camera to come back and was thinking, ‘I hope they can find me when they come back for the shot,’” he laughs. “There was a real sense of danger and it was one of those moments when I thought, ‘oh, this is what real filmmaking is all about.’”

Step out and live your dream. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” opens January 22 in cinemas nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Review

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is endearing and fascinating. It's a movie that celebrates life and the joys of living albeit with a touch of Hollywood-ic flair.

I loved everything about the film from a good acting job for the cast to the beautiful locales, the vibe and feel of the story, the music used throughout the various parts and the lessons that come along with the film locally distributed by 20th Century Fox. While I'm raving about it, it does hit a few snags here and there; but it still won't let you down.

Ben Stiller plays the titular character who 'zones out' aka daydreams about other lives and fantasies all the while working at LIFE Magazine as the 'negative assets manager'. Things change when the negative for Life Magazine's final issue gets lost and Walter takes it to himself to find the missing negative by tracking the photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn). All this while juggling family and heart problems. 

It's a bit ambitious and obviously is far from the original Thurber story and the 40s film adaptation where Mitty daydreams of being THE HERO. The hero that we all imagine, selfless and willing to lay down precious life for the good of others. Stiller's version plays to a different tune (I cannot help but think of Stiller's silly flute dance when I wrote that). THIS Mitty plays up to a more self-centered version. Yes self centered, self realization and self actualization. Still good.

Though the film doesn't have a "powerhouse cast", the actors and actresses chosen did a fine job. Sean Penn was awesome here. I have no tangible reason why, but his was the best and meatiest (if not shortest) role. Patton Oswald's appearance here was also a surprise. Stiller once again shows us that he can do exceptionally well in both comedic parts to more serious and dramatic turns. 

Visually arresting is how I would describe the film. Name it, they probably have it from gale force winds, dangerous seas, raging volcanoes, breathtaking Himalayan slopes. Had they added a rainforest or some tropical island this could have been mistaken for a Nat Geo movie and not a big Hollywood movie that positively glorifies the concept of YOLO (swag excluded). After seeing this, you'll most probably have this hankering to go on an out of town trip or go abroad. 

The story is excellent and brings forth a cathartic effect. It's one of those films that will make you reassess your life without having to go through the ringer of getting hurt by the things that happen to the lead character i.e. character deaths, plot twists. I like how the they change the Macguffins here; from the negative # 25 to Sean Penn's character to ending up a new person. Honestly though it's hard to imagine you'd go through lengths like that just to find something like a negative. It's also funny to realize that the whole "quintessence of life" can have a double meaning for the film. Applause.

Props to Theodore Shapiro who did the music for the film (which I assume including the picking of songs). It's upbeat as hell and with songs from bands like Of Men and Monsters and Arcade Fire to solo acts like David Bowie and Jose Gonzalez. 

If there's any gripe in this film, it's got to be product placement and endorsement. To date this is a film that can be a match to Vic Sotto's immensely lucrative and somewhat controversial "My Little Bossings" in the number of products shown.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty opens January 22 from 20th Century Fox through Warner Bros. Pictures.

Sean Penn in Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ben Stiller’s reimagining of James Thurber’s original story is highly entertaining and inspiring, revolving around a man who loves to daydream, frequently retreating into an imaginary world in which he is the hero. A photo editor at LIFE Magazine in New York, he enjoys his job but longs for passion and excitement. As he was about to lose his job as the company shifts and downsizes, Mitty finds himself out of his office in no time. The final issue of the prestigious magazine will soon be on newsstands, but a worried Mitty cannot find an important negative that has mysteriously gone missing.

The picture was taken by the iconic and elusive photographer Sean O’Connell played by Sean Penn. Sean is the only one who knows where it is. But where is Sean?

For all his fantasies of becoming a hero, Walter Mitty has his own very real hero: the famed LIFE photographer Sean O’Connell, an elusive adventurer who has become a kind of rock star of the photographic world, renowned for his relentless commitment to chasing a story no matter the cost.

It seemed just the right match to cast Oscar®-winning actor and director Sean Penn in the role of the mysterious icon who beckons Walter Mitty into the big, wide open world. “Sean O’Connell is a guy who represents creative integrity and he had to have this amazing presence that the audience connects with instantly when Walter finally meets him. That’s why Sean Penn was really my first choice because Sean embodies all that in life for me,” says Ben Stiller. Stiller was also keen to cast Penn in the kind of role where one of the leading dramatic actors of a generation wouldn’t normally be seen. “Sean actually has a really great sense of humor,” he notes, “which I think doesn’t get showcased that often in his film work, so it was fun to give him a chance to do something different.”

Adds producer Stuart Cornfeld: “Sean O’Connell has a certain kind of mystique, as does Sean Penn. What was amazing about his performance and the way the character is written is that when Walter finally does meet Sean, he's everything that Walter was looking for, but he's also completely different at the same time. For all of us, Sean was just amazing to watch in action.”

A two-time Academy Award winner, Sean Penn has become an American film icon in a career spanning more than three decades. Penn has been nominated five times for the Academy Award, as Best Actor for “Dead Man Walking,” “Sweet and Lowdown” and “I Am Sam,” and won his first Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance in Clint Eastwood's “Mystic River” and his second Oscar as Best Actor in 2009 for Gus Van Sant's “Milk.” The performance as gay rights icon Harvey Milk also garnered Penn Best Actor awards from The Screen Actors Guild (SAG™), New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

As a journalist, Penn has written for Time, Interview, Rolling Stone and The Nation magazines. In 2004, Penn wrote a two-part feature in The San Francisco Chronicle after a second visit to war-torn Iraq. In 2005, he wrote a five-part feature in the same paper reporting from Iran during the election which led to the Ahmadinejad regime. Penn's landmark interviews with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Cuba's President Raul Castro were published in The Nation and The Huffington Post. Penn's interview with President Castro was his first-ever interview with an international journalist.

His humanitarian work found him in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and, more recently, in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. In January 2010, Penn established the J/P Haitian Relief Organization (J/P HRO). J/P HRO has become a leader in Haiti across multiple sectors, working to improve living conditions in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps and surrounding neighborhoods by clearing rubble and providing medical services, education and enricmment programs, housing construction, and neighborhood redevelopment. J/P HRO's main objective remains to help displaced people get back to durable, safer, and permanent homes in revitalized neighborhoods.

Be a part of a man’s transformational journey in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as it hops from the four corners of one’s office to Greenland, Iceland, Himalayas and ultimately to self-discovery when it opens January 22 in the Philippines from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

More Color for the Extended Trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The extended trailer definitely shows a lot of great things to happen in this adaptation of the graphic novel "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" starring Ben Stiller and Kristin Wiig.

Ben Stiller takes adventure a notch higher in his latest starrer “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” This life-affirming adventure takes Stiller’s character MItty, a negatives manager in Life magazine, from land into the high skies, the deepest of seas and on peaks of mountains to find a negative crucial to the magazine’s last issue.

20th Century Fox presents the extended trailer of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” on their YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDG8XHSE6gg&list=PLcZs6n5iZPx_miw9DVX-BUBQ3Ic62z90Z where Mitty, a long-time daydreamer finally finds himself living out his dreams to save their jobs.



“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” also stars Kristen Wiig, Shirley McClaine, Sean Penn and Kathryn Hahn. It will open January 22 in cinemas nationwide.

Celebrating the Potential Everybody has in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Meet Walter Mitty, an ordinary person given to adventurous daydreams far grander than his real life. Directed, produced and starred by blockbuster actor and filmmaker Ben Stiller, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” follows a modern day-dreamer, an ordinary magazine photo editor who takes a regular mental vacation from his ho-hum existence by disappearing into a world of fantasies electrified by dashing heroism, passionate romance and constant triumphs over danger. But when Mitty and the co-worker he secretly adores (Kristen Wiig) stand in actual peril of losing their jobs, Walter must do the unimaginable: take real action – sparking a global journey more extraordinary than anything he could have ever dreamed up.

“What I love about this story is that it can’t be categorized,” Stiller says. “It has comedy, it has drama, it’s an adventure story, it’s real and it’s fantastically hyper-real. Yet at the heart of it all is a character who I think everyone can connect to – someone who appears to be just going through the motions of modern life but is living a whole different life inside his head. To me, he embodies all those things we imagine about ourselves and the world but that we never say.”

The film lovingly winks back at the great American humorist Thurber’s timeless fable about a mild-mannered man’s need to turn his failures into something far more astonishing in his head. But Stiller’s Mitty is very much a man of our times. Like so many of us, he feels hemmed in by an increasingly depersonalized, electronic world that is rapidly changing everything– one that is making his very way of life obsolete. His only out is a madcap barrage of reveries that keep him a constant hero battling for a better, fairer world. It’s his own private realm he shares with no one . . . that is, until his search for a famous photographer’s (Sean Penn) missing negative gives him an unexpected chance to connect with another.

It was the tug-of-war between Mitty’s shaky, uncertain reality and the beautiful impulses behind his eye-popping dreams that first drew Stiller to Steven Conrad’s adaptation of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” He’d seen other attempts at re-visiting the story, but none had hit home.

“Steve’s script wasn’t trying to revisit the 1940s Danny Kaye classic, which was so wonderfully unique to its time. He found a different way of telling the story, one that was smart and compelling but that created a modern context for this character that audiences can relate to,” says Stiller. “I loved that the script honored the idea of an ordinary guy as hero in a way that’s lyrical, soulful and funny. Steve said to me, ‘inside the breast of every American man beats the heart of a hero’ -- and I wanted the film to have that kind of respect for all the things ordinary people go through and how challenging life is for all of us whether you’re a guy that nobody pays attention to or you’re the President of the United States. Walter’s journey celebrates the potential that everybody has.”

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” opens January 22 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

More Posters for Fox's THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

The good folks from 20th Century Fox has sent in two more posters for the film THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY which stars Ben Stiller and Kristin Wiig. 

This time our hero is seen swimming with sharks and seated on top of what seems to be Mount Everest.





The Secret Life of Walter Mitty opens January 29, 2014 from 20th Century Fox

Daily Dose of Mitty Moments Revealed via Posters Debut Starts

Ben Stiller takes us to an exhilarating journey in the upcoming feel-good adventure movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Directed and starred by Stiller, the movie celebrates one’s true potential with the story of a daydreamer who finally embarks on his most extraordinary journey.

Walter Mitty (Stiller) is your everyday ordinary guy who efficiently gets things done at the office but never gets recognized for his efforts. Until one day, he finds the courage to take a leap of faith and bring his daydreaming into the grandeur of reality. Stepping out of his confines, he finally breaks out of his daily grind to achieve his dreams.

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” opens January 29, 2014 in cinemas from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Like 20th Century Fox (Philippines) on Facebook, follow 20thCenturyFoxPh/YouTube and 20thCenturyPh on Twitter for more posters, photos and promos.

Check out the trailer as well (that's if you haven't seen it or you just simply enjoy the trailer)

Ben Stiller in Visually Stunning Trailer for "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Directed and starred by Ben Stiller, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as the photo editor of Life magazine who have gone out of his comfort zone in search of a missing negative. From James Thurber’s classic story of a day-dreamer, Mitty (Stiller) who escapes his anonymous life by disappearing into a world of fantasies filled with heroism, romance and action. When his job along with that of his co-worker (Kristen Wiig) are threatened, Walter takes action in the real world embarking on a global journey that turns into an adventure more extraordinary than anything he could have ever imagined.

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” opens January 2014 in theaters from 20th Century Fox.. Check out 20th Century Fox's youtube for trailer here: http://youtu.be/lrbqf9QPWIU



Major props is Kristen Wiig says "Lipstick taser"

Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn Ward Off Aliens in "The Watch"

Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn reunite in “The Watch” along with Jonah Hill and British comedian Richard Ayoade who band together in the film to uncover the mysterious events happening in their neighborhood.

Ben Stiller’s Evan is a senior manager at the superstore Costco, having made a not-so-lightning-fast ascent to that position from assistant manager. Evan is a dedicated employee, but his heart is with the Glenview Neighborhood Watch, of which he is the founder and CEO. “Evan is very community-oriented,” says Stiller, “because he has so few friends, and these clubs give him the opportunity to meet new people.”

Jumpstreet's Jonah Hill in Another Outrageous Comedy - The Watch

After debuting in the comedy “I Heart Huckabees,” Jonah Hill has steadily posited himself as a solid hilarious support in the string of his movies that followed. Appearing afterwards in acclaimed hits like “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Superbad,” “Forgettting Sarah Marshall,” “Get Him to the Greek,” “Moneyball” and the most recent “21 Jump Street” with Channing Tatum which is Hill’s highest grossing film after “Superbad.”

Ben Stiller's "The Watch" To Open September 5 in the Philippines

Meet the neighborhood watch: civic-minded Evan (Ben Stiller), fun-loving family guy Bob (Vince Vaughn), tough-talking “wild card” Franklin (Jonah Hill) and the looking-for-love divorcé Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade). In a seemingly serene suburban enclave and safe haven, Evan Bob, Franklin and Jamarcus have decided to join forces to safeguard their community. In addition, they’re enjoying some of the perks that come with being a “Watcher”… like drinking beer and just being guys.

MOVIE REVIEW: Madagascar 3 - Europe's Most Wanted

Reviewing Madagascar 3 from Dreamworks courtesy of Solar-UIP.

Alex the Lion and the rest of his zany zoo friends are back for a third serving of adventure. This time however they're going all across Europe to get back to New York. And they're bringing along some new friends and a new human nemesis to boot.

I wasn't a big fan of the second movie more probably because of the sequel curse but the third caught my interest the right way. By focusing more on developing the character all thanks to a linear story structure I actually started to think of watching the previous two Madagascar movies in one sitting. 

Here are some of the things that I pretty much enjoyed in Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted: