movie thoughts … The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a while, but the wife didn’t want to. We finally sat down for a few quiet hours together and she gave it the ok promptly before falling asleep for roughly 85% of the movie, but whatever – welcome to married life… 😛

I actually really liked this movie, though!

If we’re being honest, and I see no reason why we wouldn’t be, the only part that didn’t really jive with me was Walter’s daydreams because sometimes they got a little too in depth for me … I can appreciate the concept that they were going for, but like when he had the battle with the new jerky boss guy, it more reminded me of one of those chicken fights from Family Guy than anything that fit the feeling of this movie.

It’s interesting to read the development notes on Wikipedia to see not only just how long it took them to actually get around to making this movie (1994?!), but also how much comedy is actually intended. I’ve never seen the original, circa 1947, but apparently it’s a very satirical story the first time around, whereas I rather enjoyed this as more of a dramatic adventure of a man who finally figures out that life has more to offer him than the plain and ordinary.

Also, not for nothing but I couldn’t picture any of the earlier actors slated for this role doing it any justice. Jim Carrey? Owen Wilson?? Borat?! 😕

All in all, I think the reason this movie kind of struck a chord with me was in a not trying to sound depressing-sort of way, in a lot of ways I could kind of see parts of my life today in the life that Walter Mitty played on screen. You work your job, day in and day out, and you do all of the things that you’re supposed to do, and one day you’ve been there for 15 years and suddenly you have to worry about randomly getting fired. I think a lot of people can relate to that story because you sort of hit a point in your life when you look around and think, “What have I really done with it all???”

Which is why I’ve also got this post flagged as a creative-type post because after watching this movie, I came up with what I think is a neat little project that I’d like to put together inspired by this movie. I don’t want to share too much just yet because it’s honestly going to take me a while to pull together – not necessarily time-wise, but more so because I need to spend some time going through old memento, a lot of which are up in Michigan that I don’t have easy access to right now.

Believe me, if I did I’d probably just stay up all night to do it tonight because I’m that excited and I don’t often have neat, little projects that are both this in depth without also requiring an ongoing commitment that I’ll have to figure out how to schedule later!

So look forward to that … I don’t know, sometime after the next time I get a vacation up north? I don’t know – we’ll see… 😉

But I really did enjoy this movie, and it made me do a lot of thinking about accomplishments and bucket lists and I guess just doing things each day that you’d actually be proud to look back on doing years and decades after the fact. Everyday life tends to be exactly that, but I don’t necessarily think that it has to be, and this movie was a quaint reminder that life is happening out there whether you go out and pursue it for yourself or not.

So why not?

🙂