Dave Martin

This is a good movie.

It’s got Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig and it’s about a guy who’s never done more in his life than travel to Arizona, and also to Nashville (just the airport, in transit to Arizona).

It’s an inspirational movie.

Ben Stiller knows what sells. And you can’t blame him. I think there’s only 2 reasons he makes a lot of the movies he does:

1. He can spend a few weeks or months just having fun and a laugh with his friends, with cameras pointed at him.
2. Those few weeks or months having fun with his friends will make him a lot of money.

That’s pretty much it. What more reason do you need to do something? It keeps bread on the table (in Ben Stiller’s case, a nicer type of bread) and you have a good time while doing it.

But one other thing that Ben Stiller does once in a while, is commit to doing a role which lets him doing something out of the ordinary and allows him to do some really cool stuff in a cool place, and play a character that is a challenge. He did it brilliantly in Reign Over Me, Funny People and Along Came Polly and this movie is another one of those.

There are some amazing pictures in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And without spoiling it, he ends up in Scandinavia.

I have travelled to about 25 countries, but I would say I have truly experienced about 5 of them. America is a place that I have definitely experienced – from living in Southern California, to living in Colorado and also calling New York City home for a little while. But I’m more interested in experiencing other places around the world now.

America is one of the most fascinating places in the world and I totally understand why some Americans never leave their country.

You can go from Southern California to Northern California, to the Pacific North West, to Colorado, to the midwest, to Texas, to New Orleans and up to New York and you feel like each of those places is not just a new state, but a new country.

Scandinavia is that place for me. It looks amazing. Particularly outside of the main cities of Helsinki or Rejkavik for example, the countryside looks so beautifully low key and quiet and peaceful. And at some point, hopefully in the near future, I’m going to confirm that it is.

Getting back to the movie, it’s also about a magazine (Life), which was over 120 years old (going through different forms over that time). It gets taken over and basically folds. There’s a lot of obvious promotion of brands and glorifying of Life in the movie (as a Time magazine affiliate now) but the motto that Life Magazine lived by is still powerful and something good to think about:

To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.

Learning, connecting to people and to nature. I’d say those are definitely some of the great things about being alive.