I went ahead and copy-and-pasted by review over the movie from another thread, simply because it's fitting for this thread:
If there was ever a short-story, or entertainment medium that so eloquently summarized a lot of my thoughts, fears, and worries, it'd be the Secret Life of Walter. I remember whenever I first read it in high-school, and honestly, there's a lot of books that don't mean anything to me that you read in school. I don't care about To Kill a Mocking Bird, I respect it, but I think Atticus is extremely likable, but I don't think it's one of the greatest stories out-there. The Great Gatsby is decent, Romeo & Juliet is one of the best tales ever thought of, in my opinion, but it was written by one of the most irritating authors in history. (Poetic brilliance is real easy to fake when doth thy sentence no ****ing sense make.)
And really, it isn't a matter of how well-written they are, or what they teach you, but the Secret Life of Walter Mitty meant a lot to me. A tale about a guy whose life may not have gone the way he wanted, but he still dreams and yearns for something more. It's sad and kind-of beautiful, but I really related. I'm the type of person who is extremely spacey, eccentric, and bizarre, I have had social-anxiety my entire life, and really, I feel like I've missed out on a lot of great things as a result. It pisses me off, but I always imagined different, imagined what would have happened if I would have done this or this, and I hope for something more.
That's why I love the short-story, and when I found out about the movie, I was excited. I saw it was Ben Stiller. Ehh, .... No, I'm still excited! Negative critic reviews? Still excited.
I saw it. I loved it.
You can dissect a movie until it means nothing, you can throw around witty terms like commercialism or phoniness, or you can talk about symbolism, foreshadowing, or other literary terms, but those people can also go **** themselves, because an opinion is only worth the individual. There are movies we like, movies we don't like, and there are different reasons for all of them. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was cheesy, spectacular, over-the-top, and there's a lot of things that I would have done differently. However, it's what they did right which made me like the movie, the cinematography was absolutely amazing, it's seriously some of the finest visuals around, but Ben Stiller plays his character with a certain charm that I appreciated. An awkwardness that remains awkward through and through, even when the time comes to be something, it doesn't unravel like an uncanny transformation, because there is no transformation, he finds a way to live life. A lot of people mocked it for being motivational, which isn't even a bad thing. I liked it. It was funny, over-the-top, but had heart, which were some of the main-elements in the short-story, and was what I related to.