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Ben Stiller’s early career was made on laugh-out-loud roles in movies like Zoolander and Tropic Thunder, which are now cult-classics. However, beneath the goofy exterior, there’s a more contemplative artist, one who ultimately emerged through Apple TV+’s Severance.

Stiller is an executive producer and part-director of the cerebral and dystopian workplace drama. But fans who have been paying close attention to his journey might have already seen the glimpses of his evolution decades ago. But if you’re unaware, then allow us to introduce you to a misunderstood movie that walked, so Severance could run.

How The Secret Life of Walter Mitty paved the path for Severance Adam Scott in a still from Severance | Credits: Apple TV+

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was Ben Stiller’s directorial swing at something deeper. We can see that in the grand timeline of the actor/filmmaker’s career, this...

More than 1.4 billion people are estimated to have traveled in 2024, while the number of tourists was expected to grow to more than five billion in 2025 for the first time ever. We're no sociologists, so we won't pretend to know exactly why travelers feel the need to escape from their everyday lives in search of ... what exactly? What beckons billions of people the world over to traverse the roads, seas, and skies to arrive at a new destination beyond their familiar surroundings? Many things: pleasure, entertainment, adventure, peer pressure, Fomo, Yolo, Ig-worthy backdrops for their social media (#takemeback), and self-discovery.

Cinema has sought to capture this essential drive for a century. We're celebrating the best by highlighting travel movies, which we define as "movies where characters go from A to B for personal reasons." So we won't be looking at movies about traveling for work ("Midnight Run") or set in a...

Now that he has a reprieve from filming a TV show in the bowels of Lumon Industries, Ben Stiller has been making a number of guest appearances on various internet talk shows, such as Chicken Shop Date, the YouTube series that involves deep fried chicken but doesn’t end with celebrity guests passing out and/or getting explosive diarrhea.

Stiller also popped by the Konboni Video Club, where actors and filmmakers peruse the aisles of a Parisian video store and discuss some of their favorite movies and TV shows. Stiller chatted about acclaimed works of cinema like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and also some of his own movies like There’s Something About Mary. Of course, only one of those begins with a scene in which a guy gets his balls stuck in a zipper.

Stiller also paused to shout-out The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the 1947 comedy in which Danny Kaye...

A trailer has been released for the star-studded and highly anticipated film The Roses, from Searchlight Pictures. The film, releasing August 29, 2025, comes from director Jay Roach and writer Tony McNamara, and is an adaptation of the classic 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler. The Rosesstars Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Belinda Bromilow, Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao, and Kate McKinnon. Check out the trailer below.

The synopsis for The Roses reads as follows:

"Life seems easy for picture-perfect couple Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch): successful careers, a loving marriage, great kids. But beneath the façade of their supposed ideal life, a storm is brewing – as Theo’s career nosedives while Ivy’s own ambitions take off, a tinderbox of fierce competition and hidden resentment ignites. The Roses is a reimagining of the 1989 classic film The War of the Roses,...

Benedict Cumberbatch remains as busy as ever these days, with no less than three movies premiering in 2025. There's a drama (The Thing with Feathers), an espionage thriller (The Phoenician Scheme), and a remake of the '80s classic The War of the Roses, which has now set a summer release date. Simply titled The Roses, Cumberbatch stars in the film alongside Academy Award-winner Olivia Colman, with the duo playing a married couple whose life seems picture-perfect on the surface, but underneath is anything but.

Per Searchlight Pictures, The Roses will hit theaters on August 29, 2025, the same day as the long-awaited remake of The Toxic Avenger. Directed by Danny DeVito and based on the novel by Warren Adler, the original The War of the Roses starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner debuted all the way back in 1989, and earned each of its two stars a Golden Globe nomination. This new adaptation...

As a director, Ben Stiller is a wily one. After skimming the surface of Gen-x disillusionment with his debut feature "Reality Bites," the son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara made his name helming silly-smart films whose zany exteriors belie their depth. Take his 1996 comedy "The Cable Guy." Though it initially proved to be something of a divisively dark curiosity (Roger Ebert actually listed it among his picks for the worst movies of its year), it's since undergone a reevaluation and is now regarded as being prescient in its satirization of the public's true crime obsession. Stiller's 2001 fashion industry burlesque "Zoolander" has likewise become a full-fledged cult classic, while his edgy takedown of Hollywood ego and excess, "Tropic Thunder," is just as audacious now as it was when it first arrived in 2008.

In contrast to their barbed social commentary, these films are pretty broad when it comes to their humor and characterization.

Let’s talk about Ben Stiller – you know, the guy who made us laugh in Meet the Parents and brought museum exhibits to life in Night at the Museum. But here’s the thing: while most of us think of him as that funny guy who can’t catch a break in romantic comedies, he’s actually been killing it behind the camera for years.

Ben Stiller | Credits: President.gov.ua, Cc By 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

From making us cry with laughter in satirical comedies to keeping us on the edge of our seats with psychological thrillers, Stiller has quietly built an impressive directing portfolio that deserves way more attention than it gets.

Ready to have your mind blown about what this comedy legend can do when he sits in the director’s chair? Let’s dive into five amazing projects that show just how talented Ben Stiller really is.

Exclusive: Veteran sports and news broadcaster Keith Olbermann has signed with Buchwald.

Olbermann is the host of the podcast Countdown with Keith Olbermann for iHeart. The podcast, which averages more than 1 million downloads per month, includes a news-driven mix featuring his trademark “Special Comment” segment, and his readings from the works of James Thurber.

Olbermann’s career spans multiple networks including ESPN, CNN, Fox Sports, TBS, Current TV and MSNBC, where he hosted the long-running nightly news and analysis program Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He helped launch startups like ESPN Radio, Fox Sports Net and Rko Radio, and hosted news, politics and sports programming for ABC.

He also anchored election nights for MSNBC and the World Series for Fox.

Olbermann is the winner of three Edward R. Murrow Awards and author of six books, the first of which was published when he was 14.

Spirited Away (2001) Screenshot: Gkids In the Disney and Pixar era, most American moviegoers have come to define animation as candy-colored kiddie fare that traffics in facile, rugrat-ready themes about family and finding yourself. But according to Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, that definition is not only limiting, it’s insulting.

Who would have expected that Derek Zoolander himself would end up becoming one of today's most prominent dramatic storytellers? In recent years, Ben Stiller has set his comedic aspirations aside for an emphasis on prestige television. He directed the entirety of the riveting prison break miniseries "Escape at Dannemora" and the psychological thriller "Severance." If you've been paying attention, it's been clear that Stiller is a creative storyteller who knows how to surprise an audience. It's only a surprise to see the new direction in his career because he's always been making us laugh so much.

In the late 1990s, a group of comic actors known as the "Frat Pack" began to dominate mainstream comedy. While the careers of Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carrell, Jack Black, and Paul Rudd were fairly consistent, Stiller managed to mix in a variety of independent projects alongside mainstream studio films. Although...

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Lucy Simon, the composer and sister of pop superstar Carly Simon who received a Tony nomination in 1991 for her work on the long-running Broadway musical The Secret Garden, has died. She was 82.

Simon died Thursday at her home in Piedmont, New York, after a long battle with breast cancer, a family spokesperson announced.

She and Carly began their careers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as The Simon Sisters, and their folk act opened for the likes of The Tarriers in Greenwich Village nightclubs. Their recording of “Wynken, Blynken & Nod” reached No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964.

Lucy Simon became the rare female composer to have a show on Broadway when The Secret Garden debuted in April 1991. Starring Rebecca Luker, Mandy Patinkin, Alison Fraser and Daisy Eagan and based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s novel, the musical ran for 709 performances on Broadway, won...

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Joan Hotchkis, who appeared as Oscar Madison’s girlfriend on ABC’s The Odd Couple and in films including Breezy and Ode to Billie Joe before becoming a playwright, screenwriter and feminist performance artist, has died. She was 95.

Hotchkis died Sept. 27 of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles, her daughter, Paula Chambers, announced.

A member of The Actors Studio, Hotchkis played the wife of William Windom’s James Thurber-like cartoonist on the high-concept NBC comedy My World and Welcome to It in 1969-70 and the lascivious Lydia on the five-days-a-week syndicated sitcom The Life and Times of Eddie Roberts in 1980.

In 1974, Hotchkis wrote her first play, Legacy, about a day when an upper-class housewife suffers a mental and emotional breakdown. She starred in the one-woman drama, directed by noted Method acting teacher Eric Morris, at Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.

Hotchkis...

Murray and musician friends Jan Vogler and Vanessa Perez perform a sprightly investigation into civilisation with droll readings and awful singing (from him)

Maybe you had to be there. There is something extravagant and irresistible about the idea of an old-fashioned cultural evening of musical and spoken-word performance. Hollywood legend Bill Murray does the droll literary readings and occasionally some awful singing, and he’s joined musically by his friends: cellist Jan Vogler and violinist Mira Wang (married to Vogler), with Vanessa Perez on the piano. James Fenimore Cooper, Hemingway and James Thurber are among those being read and Gershwin and Schubert among those performed.

This is the filmed record of the final night of this show’s world tour on the Acropolis stage in Athens: their curated performance being a sprightly, tongue-in-cheek homage to civilisation itself. It’s an elegant, eccentric evening in many ways and maybe only Murray...

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear sold for $71.5 million at a November 1998 Christie’s auction. The artist created it after dropping a package off at a brothel for a woman named Rachel, telling her to “guard this object with your life.” That was in December 1888. Van Gogh was an unknown artist at the time. Adrien Brody plays a similar art curator to those at Christie’s in Wes Anderson’s anthology film, The French Dispatch. The first vignette in the three-story film exhibits how commerce in the art world is a cut-throat business, especially when it’s personal.

The French Dispatch is Anderson’s homage to The New Yorker during the magazine’s heyday under founder/editor Harold Ross, fictionalized in the film as Arthur Howitzer, Jr., portrayed eccentrically by Bill Murray. With writers like James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, James Baldwin, and Rosamond Bernier, it was idiosyncratic and utterly original.

In the birthplace of Western philosophy, Bill Murray dropped some wisdom on a receptive audience.

“I swear to you,” he told the crowd in Athens, quoting Walt Whitman, “there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.”

Divine things, like the music of Bach, Shostakovich and Ravel, the melodies of Gershwin and Bernstein, the songs of Stephen Foster and Van Morrison.

For one magical evening in 2018, on terrain once walked by Socrates and Plato, Murray was joined by cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang, and pianist Vanessa Perez for a concert combining music and poetry. The film New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization captures that performance at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus near the Acropolis, the culmination of a tour that took the quartet to Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the U.S., and across Europe to their final date in Greece.

The show grew out of a friendship between Murray and Vogler,...

Wes Anderson returns to live-action in “The French Dispatch,” opening Oct. 22 from Searchlight Pictures. With the film set amid the world of a magazine, Anderson called on his go-to production designer Adam Stockhausen to build the world of fictional city Ennui-sur-Blasé and the offices of a New Yorker-esque publication.

The crew found a derelict felt factory in Angoulême, France, which turned out to be the perfect home for the sets Anderson would utilize for the film, divided into sections created as articles written by the Dispatch staff.

Stockhausen described how he built key sets.

The Newsroom

“The guiding idea was that the building was not built for them, they had moved in. So, it allowed the architecture to be mismatched. We had this image of a beautiful newsroom, a regional office of the Associated Press in Paris. It had this arched window that we loved and it also had this...

Journalists are the heroes in “The French Dispatch,” so expect film critics to be a little bit biased in their embrace of Wes Anderson’s latest. It flatters the field, after all, just not in the way that Pulitzer-centric mega-scoop sagas “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight” may have done before. Anderson is more of a miniaturist, albeit one whose vision grows more expansive — and more impressive — with each successive project.

Here, the Texas-to-Paris transplant sets out to honor The New Yorker and its ilk, re-creating the joy of losing oneself in a 12,000-word article (or three) on the big screen while relocating the entire affair to his adoptive home. Set in the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé — a cross between Paris and frozen-in-time Angoulême (where most of the exteriors were shot) — the film offers an expat’s-eye view of France, packaged as a series of clips from the eponymous publication.

While long-running TV favorites have dominated the Emmys, series that ran for one season or less have also won over the academy. They often faced strong competition in their time slots or were ahead of their time. These shows are generally just faded memories but many are available on YouTube. Do you remember any of these Emmy winners?

“The Barbara Stanwyck Show”

Barbara Stanwyck, who was nicknamed Missy by her friends and co-workers, was a formidable presence during the Golden Age of Hollywood earning four Oscar nominations for 1937’s “Stella Dallas,” 1941’s “Ball of Fire,” 1944’s “Double Indemnity” and 1948’s “Sorry, Wrong Number.” In 1960, she starred in her first TV series: an anthology show for NBC. Directors included Arthur Hiller, Richard Whorf and Stuart Rosenberg. And guest stars ran the gamut from Anna May Wong to Lee Marvin.

Though the anthology series format worked like gangbusters for another classic Hollywood legend,...

1950: The First Hundred Years premiered.

1981: Falcon Crest premiered.

2000: Port Charles kicked off the "Fate" arc.

2009: Venice premiered."History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images."

― Anselm Kiefer

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1933: After its August 14 debut on local station Wlw in Cincinnati, radio soap opera Ma Perkins graduated to the NBC Red network in the 3 p.m. Et timeslot. The show was produced by Frank and Anne Hummert, the prolific team responsible for numerous radio dramas including Just Plain Bill, Backstage Wife and Young Widder Brown.

In his New Yorker essay “O Pioneers!

Exclusive: In its first original scripted series, Cinedigm is embracing its close ties with China by telling the story of Emily “Mickey” Hahn. The noted feminist and adventurer helped introduce Shanghai and greater China to U.S. readers in the 1930s through her articles in the New Yorker magazine.

The project is the first about Hahn’s life and the first major green-light for Cinedigm since it was recapitalized by Hong Kong investment firm Bison Capital Holdings in mid-2017. Mark Yellen Productions and Rosenbloom Entertainment are teaming with Cinedigm on the series. The exact distribution road map has yet to be fully drawn, but the companies see the series as a prestige property suitable for streaming, broadcast and cable networks around the world.

Production on location in Shanghai and Hong Kong is expected to start in 2019. The shoot will make use of Shanghai’s picturesque waterfront district, The Bund, which...

Marjorie Lord actress ca. early 1950s. Actress Marjorie Lord dead at 97: Best remembered for TV series 'Make Room for Daddy' Stage, film, and television actress Marjorie Lord, best remembered as Danny Thomas' second wife in Make Room for Daddy, died Nov. 28, '15, at her home in Beverly Hills. Lord (born Marjorie Wollenberg on July 26, 1918, in San Francisco) was 97. Marjorie Lord movies After moving with her family to New York, Marjorie Lord made her Broadway debut at age 17 in Zoe Akins' Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Old Maid (1935). Lord replaced Margaret Anderson in the role of Tina, played by Jane Bryan – as Bette Davis' out-of-wedlock daughter – in Warner Bros.' 1939 movie version directed by Edmund Goulding. Hollywood offers ensued, resulting in film appearances in a string of low-budget movies in the late 1930s and throughout much of the 1940s, initially (and...

Chatting about writing, The Muppets, DreamWorks, Clockwise and Charles Crichton, all with Mr John Cleese...

Now out in hardback is John Cleese's autobiography, So Anyway. It's a genuinely interesting read, very much written in his own voice, and he spared us some time to have a chat about it, and his career.

Here's how it went...

Can we start with the predictable stuff first, but I always wonder this when anyone writes an autobiography: why do it? Why put your life down in a book, who is it for, and did you enjoy it?

Well let's go backwards on that. Yes I enjoyed it very much. Who is it for me? In a funny kind of way it was for me, because some people seem to think that I've had a very interesting life, which compared with people who have fought in wars, and been spies, and discovered rivers in Africa,...

Who knew that Ben Stiller, the funnyman behind Zoolander and There’s Something About Mary, was the right man to bring James Thurber’s classic short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to the big screen? Of course, much of the short story is absent from Stiller’s adaptation, but that was always a certainty (beautiful though it is, the original story is hardly enough to fill a short, let alone a major studio tentpole). What Stiller does manage to do, however, to my great surprise, is capture the adventurous heart of his title character.

Part of what makes Stiller’s characterization so enjoyable is how he nails the mannerisms of the Everyman. Working as a negative assets manager for the fictional Life magazine, Walter is quiet and awkward, more inclined to drift off into daydreams than actually look at what’s in front of him. Without alienating the character from the audience,...

This week: Old and new Ben Stiller, Kevin Hart hits the big time, and another trip to the attic. ► The second movie version of James Thurber's 1939 book, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty has Ben Stiller as a chronic daydreamer working for Life Magazine who creates his own adventure by going to Greenland to track down the man who took a mysterious photo the magazine wants to use for its final issue. A fun cast, spectacular...

Digital Release Date: April 1, 2014, Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 15, 2014

Price: DVD $29.98, Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.99

Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Ben Stiller (Tower Heist) returns to directing in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, to mixed love from critics.

Based on the classic short story by James Thurber, the movie follows Walter Mitty (Stiller), a timid magazine photo manager whose only adventure comes in his constant daydreamers. But when a negative goes missing, he embarks on a real-life adventure that proves much bigger than anything he could have imagined.

The PG film also stars Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) as Walter’s love interest, Adam Scott (Friends With Kids) as the work bully, Kathryn Hahn (Wanderlust) as his sister and Shirley MacLaine (Bernie) as his mother.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty grossed a moderate $58 million in theaters, perhaps because of the mixed reviews the movie got from critics. Richard Roeper called...

Fox Searchlight

A former bastion for heavy weight Oscar films, the Adaptation category appears to be in a bit of a weird transitional faze at the moment. At one time, the films in the Best Adapted Screenplay category were too numerous to fit into one category, lately however, the Writers branch has had enough room to accommodate practically every single major Best Picture contender that qualifies (and then some in recent years). As the craze in young adult fiction and comic books has consumed much of the time of talented writers who specialize in the art of adaptation, perhaps the willingness of studios to hire these writers for adaptations of loftier literature has decreased. Even of the films that have found award success in this category over the last few years, many have come from sources that don’t exactly qualify under the strict traditional definition of “literature”. For instance,...

Vancouver -- Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the second film inspired by James Thurber’s 1939 short story, pushed reality to the outlandishly impossible. "Beautified reality" is how Desiree Ryden, an FX technical director at Mpc in Vancouver, calls audiences experiencing reality as fantasy in the live action comedy. "It's over-the-top, and yet photo real," she told The Hollywood Reporter after taking part in a panel at Spark Fw 2014 on the visual effects in the 20th Century Fox remake of the 1947 film. That blend of reality and fantasy sits well with Ryden as Stiller

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Film: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; Director: Ben Stiller; Cast: Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, Sean Penn, Shirley Maclaine, Adam Scott, Patton Oswalt, Kathryn Hahn, Josh Charles, Terence Bernie Hines, Adrian Martinez; Rating: *** - intriguing, appealing.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is an emotional yet enigmatic, light-hearted comic adventure film, based on James Thurber's 1939, classic short story. It is a tale of a nondescript day dreamer who escapes his monotonous life by fantasising events contrary to the situation.

Packed with heroic action and romance, it is a simple story that makes up in charm and.

Throughout The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I never really viewed Patton Oswalt’s character Todd — Walter’s personal eHarmony counselor who goes above and beyond the call of duty — as legitimate. I just thought, “Huh, well, that’s an interesting way for Ben Stiller to sneak his funny buddy into the movie.” Most of the time I assumed Todd might be fictional, another element of Walter’s overactive imagination, and that eHarmony was in on the joke.

“I’m incredibly dumb,” my own eHarmony profile might say — because Not Quite!

eHarmony says it did not pay for promotion within the film.

Throughout The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I never really viewed Patton Oswalt’s character Todd — Walter’s personal eHarmony counselor who goes above and beyond the call of duty — as legitimate. I just thought, “Huh, well, that’s an interesting way for Ben Stiller to sneak his funny buddy into the movie.” Most of the time I assumed Todd might be fictional, another element of Walter’s overactive imagination, and that eHarmony was in on the joke.

“I’m incredibly dumb,” my own eHarmony profile might say — because Not Quite!

eHarmony says it did not pay for promotion within the film.

Here's my favorite way to spend the New Year holiday – up at my snow-kissed cabin in the Pennsylvania Poconos where deer, pheasants and chickadees dart between the trees and across a frozen lake while I get snug before a dancing fire inside. I'm reading an old tradepaper book. Remember paper? It's "The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century," which includes short works by literary titans like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, James Thurber and Flannery O'Conner plus spookmeisters Ellery Queen, Harlan Ellison and Ross Macdonald. I'm surprised by who I think has the best work so far in my reading: Stephen King. His "Quitters, Inc." is … wow, yikes, yeowsa. I've made a sorry mistake underestimating this man till now. -Break- Such are the splendid discoveries I enjoy while I put aside my cyber-obsession and Oscarmania for a moment as 2013 winds down. I hope you're doing so.

Walter Mitty, as played by Ben Stiller in this disjointed update, would have done better to keep his life secret

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was a spry short story written by James Thurber back in 1939 and spinning the tale of a henpecked fantasist in humdrum Connecticut. The yarn was later converted into a 1947 Danny Kaye vehicle, which beefed up the plot with some real-world heroics. Ben Stiller's 21st-century overhaul goes further still, stuffing Thurber's central conceit with so many steroids that it becomes an impediment. The film has a good heart but it's indecisive and bloated.

Stiller directs and stars as Walter Mitty, a lowly office drone in a land of mirrored office blocks and criss-crossing railway lines. He has a job as a "negative asset manager" at Life magazine where framed portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali gaze down from the walls. Mitty pines for...

New Ben Stiller 'Secret Life of Walter Mitty' movie got mixed reviews from top critics. 20th Century Fox released their new adventure/comedy flick, "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" into theaters this past Tuesday,December 24th, and the reviews from the top critics are in. It got mixed reviews with a 54 score out of 100 across 37 critic reviews over at metacritic.com. It stars: Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, Shirley MacLaine, Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn,and Sean Penn. Joe Neumaier at New York Daily News, gave it a great 100 score, stating, "The story Stiller tells manages to float in a most peculiar, satisfying way." Peter Keough from the Boston Globe, gave it a solid 75 score, stating, "The quest ends in a surprise Capra-esque resolution, which both satisfies and cloys." Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times, gave it a 70 grade. He said, "Stiller's sensibility creates a movie that's smarter than you think it will be.

From Game of Thrones to Thor, lots of productions are filmed in Iceland, but most have it doubling for another country or a mythical land. Until Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

It's not uncommon to find Iceland grabbing attention in Hollywood movies – it's just rare for audiences to know it is Iceland. In the last two years, the country's glaciers, volcanoes, black sands and waterfalls have lent the required other-worldliness to films such as Oblivion, Prometheus and Thor, while also featuring in HBO's Game of Thrones TV series.

But in the Ben Stiller-directed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which goes on UK national release on 26 December, the island's epic scenery gets a lead role, and this time the locations aren't supposed to be an alien planet – this time it's all about Iceland.

Stiller's romantic comedy, which is based on the classic James Thurber short story,...

Ben Stiller's take on James Thurber's famous fantasist strips the story of all its humour and charm

Ben Stiller directs and stars in this narcissistic and even slightly humourless new adaptation of James Thurber's classic short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, about a fantasist always drifting off into a world of his own. In striving so earnestly for a redemptive and genuinely heroic happy ending, Stiller's movie jettisons the original's lightness. Mitty here is employed as a picture researcher at Life magazine in modern-day New York; he keeps zoning out, and indulging in reveries of greatness, action and adventure: they are satirically dramatised before our eyes, but keep snapping back to reality like burst balloons. That magazine job is incidentally derived from the 1947 Danny Kaye version, in which Mitty was a publishing employee addicted to racy pulp magazines; this in turn evolved from the moment...

I wasn’t holding out much hope for this one. Like anyone with a brain and a distinct fear of transforming from an adventurous roustabout into an office drone, I have a deep appreciation for the work of James Thurber (not to mention Danny Kaye, who starred in the original adaptation), and when the trailer hit, […]

The post Movie Review: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty appeared first on The Flickcast.

★★☆☆☆Ben Stiller directs and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), this festive season's family-friendly dramedy. Based on a short story by James Thurber - already adapted for the big screen by Norman Z. McLeod back in 1947 - this romanticised wish fulfilment adventure attempts to reconfigure the idealist spirit and creativity of Thurber's prose and synchronise it to today's disenfranchised generation. Yet the original story's denotation of an ineffectual individual who spends time fantasising about imagined heroism to escape the banalities of the real world feels redundant in Stiller's cloyingly pedestrian take.

Ben Stiller excels at playing genial outsiders lost in their personal grievances; as a director, from the unfairly maligned broadcast satire of "The Cable Guy" through the outlandish fashion world satire of "Zoolander" and the Hollywood satire of "Tropic Thunder," Stiller has shown a penchant for wacky energy that builds on seemingly real world situations with cartoonish absurdity. On paper, then, the idea of Stiller directing and starring in a new adaptation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the 1939 James Thurber short story previously turned into a 1947 feature starring Danny Kaye, makes perfect sense: The actor is a natural fit for the role of an everyman daydreamer lost in far-out heroic fantasies, which present an opportunity for a contrast between normality and dramatic overstatement that Stiller theoretically has the filmmaking chops to explore. Unfortunately, his long-gestating "Walter Mitty" treatment, less an adaptation than an original story that transports the.

First, the good news: this isn’t a stupid comedy. In fact, it’s barely a comedy at all. That’s the bad news. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty doesn’t seem to know what it is. Although it takes place in the present day, it centers around a nerdy worker-bee in the photo morgue at Life magazine, which in real life went out of business years ago. The major plot point of a famous, photo-centric publication transitioning to an online business seems oddly anachronistic, if not downright irrelevant. As for the influence of James Thurber, whose 1939 short story put “Walter Mitty” into the vernacular, the device of an ordinary fellow having heroic daydreams is employed at the beginning of the...

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The last time busy Hollywood triple threat Ben Stiller (actor, writer, director) stepped behind the camera was way, waaaay back in 2008 for the Summer satirical comedy smash Tropic Thunder. So what work has inspired him to return to film making this winter? Why it’s a short story from James Thurber, himself something of a multiple threat (author, playwright, cartoonist) who passed away over fifty years ago. Now his work did make to the big and small screen during (and soon after) his lifetime. The Male Animal was a starring vehicle in the 40′s for Henry Fonda. His story “A Unicorn in the Garden” became an acclaimed Upa animated short subject in the 1950′s. And in 1970 his writings and drawings were the inspiration for an NBC sitcom in 1970 called “My World and Welcome to It” (a gem that lasted barely one season). Two years later those same works also inspired...

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Written by Steve Conrad

Directed by Ben Stiller

USA, 2013

Any adaptation of the iconic James Thurber short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” would have to deviate vastly from the source, as it’s barely more than 2,000 words long. After a seemingly endless period in development hell, Ben Stiller, both as star and director, has remade The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, moving far away from both Thurber’s story and the Danny Kaye film from 1947. Here, the key word in the title is not “secret,” but “life.” The 2013 version of Walter Mitty is going to embrace life, live to the fullest, and understand its purpose, let alone its meaning. These are surface-level ambitions, heady aims in a grad-student kind of way that befit a surface-level film. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is slickly produced and shot; it is a shiny, stylish bauble,...

"The whole creative experience is much more fulfilling as a director." He's a world famous actor, a beloved comedian, a director, a writer, a producer. The latest movie from Ben Stiller is a contemporary take on James Thurber's short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Stiller as a humble photo editor who dreams of an exciting life with his crush. Joey Magidson fell in love with the film at the New York Film Festival; I wasn't the biggest fan myself, but it is enjoyable. Fox invited me to sit down for a 10 minute chat with Ben Stiller, and I chose to focus on asking him about being a filmmaker more than an actor/comedian. Ben Stiller's directorial debut was the 1994 romantic comedy Reality Bites, which he also appeared in with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. He later went on to direct the cult comedy The Cable Guy...

Exquisitely produced, immaculately acted, and thoroughly uninvolving, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a perfect nothing of a movie. It takes James Thurber's beloved short story about a man who spends all his time daydreaming of heroic feats in far-away places, and expands upon it in the most schematic, belabored way. This time out, Walter (Ben Stiller, who also directed) runs the photo archive at Life magazine. It’s a job most people would probably love to have, but in Stiller and screenwriter Scott Conrad’s vision, it's the ideal purgatorial position for a submerged, extra-in-his-own-life type. In this iteration of the story, Walter is no longer a henpecked zhlub and more a lovestruck dreamer: He wants to go and speak to leggy, kindhearted fellow employee Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), but he can’t, much to the ridicule of the folks around him. Instead, he fantasizes about sweeping her...

Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig make a romantic pair but Secret Life Of Walter Mitty offers few laughs Sweetness chips away at longstanding snarkiness each time Ben Stiller appears on screen throughout The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, his warm and loving remake of the beloved 1947 Danny Kaye comedy and classic James Thurber story. This modern day Mitty, featuring Stiller on both sides of the camera, is something of a creative shift for the 48-year-old actor/director and a bold grasp at trying something new.

Had it not been for the success of There's Something About Mary, Ben Stiller's career might have flown off in an entirely different direction.

At the time of that movie's release Stiller was a notable presence on the small screen, but he'd also directed two movies - Reality Bites and the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy. Mary's success turned Stiller into a bona fide comedy leading man, and roles in big budget fare such as Meet the Parents, Dodgeball and Night at the Museum followed.

Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig talk Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty review

Of course Stiller has still found time to make films - who could forget Zoolander and Tropic Thunder? - but his output of five films in the space of a 20-year directing career could have been significantly higher had it not been for the Farrellys' 1998 comedy classic.

With The Secret Life of Walter Mitty...

*Editor’s note: Our review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty originally ran during this year’s Nyff, but we’re re-posting it now as the film opens wide on Christmas Day.* The joke of Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an old one – far older than both the James Thurber short story that inspired it and the 1947 Danny Kaye-starring film of the same name – centering on a man so prone to daydreaming that he has ceased to live his life inside the “real world.” It’s hard to blame Walter (Stiller), however, because the real world hasn’t been especially kind to him for a long time. It hasn’t been particularly cruel, either, but Walter has long suppressed his dreams of something more (and of being someone more), and his more creative and individual instincts come out to play in the vivid (and overly effects-laden) daydreams that Walter periodically...

Captivatingly combining both amusement and the nostalgia of the journeys people take as they chase their seemingly unattainable dreams has always fascinated movie audiences. Naturally merging that humor and sentiment was what helped make actor Danny Kaye’s 1947 musical comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty a classic. Ben Stiller, who both portrayed the title character in, and directed, the new fantasy drama remake of the movie, used his natural comic ability to show how the common man could face and overcome outrageous circumstances to obtain what he wants.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is also based on the 1939 short story of the same name by James Thurber, follows the title character (Stiller), a modern-day daydreamer and magazine photo editor who regularly takes a mental vacation from his mundane existence by disappearing into a world of fantasies.

One day Walter, along with his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), discover that their employer,...

Actor-filmmaker Ben Stiller returns to the director's chair for the first time since 2008's Tropic Thunder with his adaptation of the James Thurber short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The story follows Ben Stiller as the title character, a daydreamer who ends up losing an important photo negative, sending him on a journey to track down the photographer who sent it, played by Sean Penn. The director recently held a Q&A session after a Los Angeles screening, where he revealed details of his original opening sequence that he cut out of the final version.

"We used to have an opening to the movie I ended up cutting. A little montage at the beginning of the movie of Walter's morning routine. And it started out with him on this exercise bike - I like talking about this because I miss it - the first image was the Led...

"We have ahead of us the privilege of publishing the very last issue of Life Magazine. And, for the final issue, we just received negative 25 from Sean O.Connell for the cover." There.s something surreal about hearing your name in a movie. Like, your full name, spoken by a movie star in a feature-length film. The quote belongs to Adam Scott, setting up the premise of Ben Stiller.s new dramedy, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. He.s talking about a world-renowned photographer played by Sean Penn in the movie. His name just happens to be Sean O.Connell. Again, very strange. Walter Mitty is Stiller.s fifth directorial effort, following darker and more bizarre hits like Reality Bites, The Cable Guy and the hysterical war comedy Tropic Thunder. This holiday effort is adapted from a short story by James Thurber, casting Stiller as a mild-mannered office drone...

A cheery, airy fairy tale filled with a very modern ache and buoyed by an infectious joy. I love this movie. I’m “biast” (pro): like Stiller as a filmmaker; the trailer thrilled me

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

I have not read the source material

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

The first thing I had to do after laughing through, weeping over, and reveling in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is grab two amazing songs off the soundtrack to listen to over and over again, to recapture the walking-on-air feeling the movie left me with. Those songs are “Step Out” by Swedish folk-pop singer José González and “Dirty Paws” by indie Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men. Everybody sings in English, and both songs are available on iTunes, and you need them, too, even if you’ve only heard these songs in the trailers for the film,...