We're Allies...

"We're not marauders. We're allies." -- Enfys Nest

Solo: So I watched Star Wars: Solo this weekend. I will refrain from doing an in-depth review it until I have a time to digest it more. I will say this; I was not offended, nor was I blown away... 

Fun and a little shallow: There is a lot to chew on, fun story telling, no real major missteps, and a few nods to the fans of the larger story that are meaningful. Characters were fun and the action constant, leaving little time for the development that we rabid fans have come to crave in the Star Wars universe. But for me there was a clear and winning moment--an unknown actor (like so many of the greats in Lucas' world), a compellingly strong character, a complexity of potential storyline, (but sadly), not enough development. Although this is true for most of the characters, Enfys Nest seemed to deserve more... 

Glass Breaking: Erin Kellyman plays Enfys Nest, a marauder who fights with the confidence of a seasoned warrior, but who is in fact young, scrappy, and purposeful. I would have loved to see much more of her story than most of what was offered in Solo... Elusive through most of the film, and reveled late, her presence makes me want a sequel, but I am not terribly interested in seeing more of Han Solo or his childhood girlfriend. I AM interested in following the path of this new warrior with clarity of purpose. Sigh... But still... Thank you Star Wars for offering another strong female character who is worth looking up to. Next time, give her a little more bandwidth please...

Integrity, inspiration, and hope...

Nakia

T'Challa

From Wikipedia: Black Panther is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Jack Kirby, first appearing in Fantastic Four #52 (cover-dated July 1966) in the Silver Age of Comic Books. Black Panther's real name is T'Challa, king and protector of the fictional African nation of Wakanda. Along with possessing enhanced abilities achieved through ancient Wakandan rituals of drinking the heart shaped herb, T'Challa also relies on his proficiency in science, rigorous physical training, hand-to-hand combat skills, and access to wealth and advanced technology to combat his enemies.

T'Challa: If you weren't so stubborn, you would be a good queen.
Nakia: It is because I am so stubborn that I would be a good queen.

King T'Chaka: [to his son] You are a good man, with a good heart. And it's hard for a good man to be a king.

-- from Black Panther

"My son, it is your time": I loved Black Panther. Not a standard action hero movie, it has a level of depth and self awareness that I have found lacks in most other DC and Marvel cinema adaptations of their respective pantheons. [I still like the Batman trilogy best; I am super biased to the lack of Batman's super powers, and the darkness of his near perilous dance with vengeance vs justice compels me.] Black Panther is a close second.

The nobility of the positive leadership is refreshing. When so many stories give us moral ambiguity in the portrayal of "interesting" characters (read corrupt, corruptible, or flawed), the core positive characters of Black Panther are unyieldingly, straightforwardly, awesomely, good.

At the heart of this is a question of leadership, and neither stubbornness nor a lack of goodness is what makes T'Challa and Nakia (amounts a few others) good leaders. Edmund Burke said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." King T'Challa is a good man who was willing to something. Driven by desire to serve and improve the lives of people, he is unwavering in his focus, and therefore offers what all great leaders offer in time of difficulty, hope.

T'Challa: Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We can not. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we, as brothers and sisters on this earth, should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.

Garth: Look, we don't know nothing about children, so if you need something... Hub: [interrupts] -find it yourself. Better yet: learn to do with out.

Typographical Art by swesomesauceexp

Hub: We're fix'in to die anytime, so if we kick off in the middle of the night, you're on your own: So I watched one of my favorite movies again for the umpteenth time this weekend, Second Hand Lions (2003). Two old men, Hub (Robert Duvall) and Garth (Michael Caine), have lived adventurous and interesting lives. In their later years they have taken to sitting on a porch in Texas and shooting shot-guns at traveling salesmen while sipping tea surrounded by a pack of adorably lounging and watchful dogs. Their disaster of an opportunist niece drops off her young teen child, Walter, as she heads west to con out an existence, and hoping her son can sniff out a reported fortune of hidden cash in the McCann brothers possession. Her son, the focus of the film, is an innocent, just trying to find a place to find some support. It is a sweet, exciting, schmaltzy, satisfying, humorous, family film; just quirky enough to make it light, and just poignant enough to offer real lessons about relationships, this film hits a sweet spot with me despite a lower Rotten Tomatoes score of 59, an Ebert score of 3/4, and an IMDB rating of 7.6/10. [90% of Google users like the film though.] The following is a bit of script that I particularly like:

WALTER (Haley Joel Osment)
Those stories, about you, about Africa: they're true. Aren't they?

HUB (Robert Duvall)
It doesn't matter....

WALTER
It does too! Around my mom I hear so many lies I don't know what to believe in....

HUB
Dammit, if you want to believe in something, believe in it! Just because something isn't true, that's no reason you can't believe in it!

Walter blinks, confused. Hub SIGHS....

HUB (Cont'd)
There's a long speech I give to young men. Sounds like you need to hear a piece of it....

(pause)

Some times the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, virtue, and courage mean everything; that money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. That true love never dies.

Walter's eyes are wet. Perhaps, so are Hub's.

HUB (Cont'd)
Doesn't matter if they're true or not. A man should believe in those things anyway. Because they are the things worth believing in.

Walter thinks, finally nods: he understands. They both watch moonlight ripple the water, both lost in thought.

WALTER
That was a good speech.

HUB
Thanks.

"Like an antelope in headlights."

America, we have a problem: We have issues with race in America. We have a race problem, for sure. It's part of our fabric, and although we strive to improve, we clearly have this problem, still, and have since our beginnings. We have "racists," and people who are "race-conscious," and people who try to be "race blind;" we have folks who are ignorant and behave in a way that projects that ignorance in ways that create conflict, and we have folks who are just driven by a much more base values/beliefs that promote hate, and anger, and fear, and, and, and...

Am I allowed to draw attention to how we should pay less attention?: While I cannot profess to know how to fix our four-hundred year problem, I do know that sometimes when we try to fix a thing, in all our good intentions, we over focus on that thing and it spawns its own new set of problems. Part of what I suspect will help us deal with some of our race issues, and I am hesitant to even weigh on of this subject, is to merely be more mindful of what we take for granted as "normal"...

Q. What color is Marge Simpson? A. Yellow: A student who was watching a Japanese anime film in my classroom asked why most of the characters looked white if it was a movie about Japan. I had not thought they looked particularly one thing or another, but understood where the question came from. I had heard it before and not had, nor looked for, a good answer. So I googled it. I came across a blog that I found well written that mentioned an anecdotal study where Japanese students were asked what ethnicity these same "Western" looking characters were. The Japanese students replied that the anime characters looked Japanese. BB chat rooms are filled with similar discussions, many of concluding with statements that they just look "anime," neither white nor Asian. The premise is that we often attribute what our "normal" is to a neutral subject. The thing that is normal is not focused on too much, nor is it ignored. It just is. Allow me to offer a different analogy that might transfer...

Like big eyed children attending their first circus: How do you identify a "country mouse" visiting the city for the first time? They are always looking up. We city mice (rats if you will), do not forget the buildings are there, and we even look at them from time to time, but it is not the gawking, staring-up-while-walking-into-things type of looking. I still appreciate awesome rooflines and architectures, but the height of buildings does not amaze me, nor freak me out. I like them as part of a normal "landscape" of cities. The country mouse often feels overwhelmed by the pressing skyline, or is enthalwed by it such that it becomes a distraction of just expeicneing the city in a free-flow way. Only after spending some meaningful time in a city does that person become more open to cities as just one more type of space where people live. In fact, over time it's the individual city cultures and towns', and villages' that take on unique identities, rather than being "types" to be separated and categorized...

I grew up on TV from the 70s and the 80s. It's only just now starting to get better: So part of the solution for our "race" problems is for the normalization of "race" (what a bonehead misnomer  "race" is by the way). I remember watching Friends, a story about six white kids who worked (did they actually work?) and lived in New York City. They owned lots of nice things in their large apartments, and hung out in a coffee shop all day. They were pretty funny to watch, but I was always distracted by how everyone was white. It didn't seem normal. And then there was Martin, same problem. Or All in the Family, or Different Strokes... So many shows seemed to either loudly ignore race or trumpet its presence in stereotypical ways, each in their own way exasperating the problem of normalization. (Or was that never a goal?) Survivor was a show I enjoyed watching until they chose tribes by skin color. How messed up is that, unless the sensationalism was the whole point... oh yeah, ratings and controversy makes for great television (sarcasm implied)...

Hollywood and their ideas about what will sell: And then there are our superheroes movies. Overwhelmingly white despite 100s of characters of color over the last seven decades of comic book writing.

John Stewart debuted in Green Lantern vol. 2 #87 (December 1971/January 1972) when artist Neal Adams came up with the idea of a substitute Green Lantern. The decision to make the character black resulted from a conversation between Adams and editor Julius Schwartz, in which Adams recounts saying that given the racial makeup of the world's population, "we ought to have a black Green Lantern, not because we’re liberals, but because it just makes sense."^[1] The character was DC's first black superhero.^[1]

There were screams of "Green Lantern cannot be black!" by folks who felt a character that had been white since 1940 could not somehow be different. Why not! It seems so stupid that it makes my head hurt. Enter Black Panther...

Black Panther 2018: The less said by me at this point the better. I need more time to properly review this film that has defied Hollywood conventional wisdom about race. In has become a phenomenon. It has cleared a billion dollars at the box office in under 3 weeks (3/4 billion in the US alone).  It is flooding entertainment and financial news and my social media feeds have been touting its awesomeness since day one. It is a movie with a predominately black cast, set predominately in Africa (with side trips to the US and South Korea), and written by black screenwriters. It could have been a racially polarizing film; in fact polarizing race features in much of the plot line, yet I did not feel the film polarizes at all. It is exactly the sort of normalizing I could have hoped for in anticipation of its release. I have yet to fully digest it, but for a guy who is maxed out on superhero movies this one is a Ten, ranking with the Batman trilogy as my favorite in the genre. But somehow I spent much of the film recognizing the skyline so to speak, but not gawking, head turned upward to the sky. Despite being an action superhero movie, it was refreshingly not as formulaic as some much from Marvel and DC in recent years, and I cannot wait to see it again...

"Abuelita: Tonight is about family."

A holiday trip to the movies: I recently went to the movies to see Coco, Pixar's newest animated film and holiday release. I wish to offer a positive recommendation without overselling it, nor do I wish to fail in giving it proper lip service. Here is a story on NPR (audio version of the story available as well). NPR: Coco. And here are the numbers: Metacritic Metascore: 81%, Metacritic User Score 8.4/10, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 96%, Rotten Tomatoes User Score: 96%. 94% of Google users liked this film and the IMDB User Score is a 8.9/10. I give it a thumbs up.

Bias?: Before I proceed further (and perhaps as part of my efforts) I should declare my bias and my loose criteria. I love animated film. I look to be delighted and moved by drawings in the same way I expect to be by real images of real-people action. The wonder of animation that is value added to "real" looking movies is that a teapot can dance, a broom can have malicious intent, a house can be floated across the world with helium balloons... and the path from the living to the dead can by traversed on a bridge of illuminated marigold petals.

There are 7 million animated lights in the computer model of the city of the dead.

And because it is animated, it is somehow more believable than some of our best CGI moments in "real" looking films. The suspension of disbelief is easier when the subject matter is cartoon. BUT the characters, whether a  gimpy-fined fish, a non-verbal robot, or the personification of the emotion "fear", must be believable; and when they are believable, then the magic happens. We are moved deeply by good writing and narrative delivery, but can still immerse ourselves in a world that can only be imagined in "the real."

Bias cont.: Although I loved Shrek by DreamWorks, their other animated films have almost universally failed me. And while I have animated favorites (which includes stop-animation like The Nightmare Before Christmas, old classics like Watership Down, and animation newcomers like Cartoon Saloon's The Secret of Kells), the bulk of my favorites come from the Disney empire. I place the works of Pixar Studios over those of Disney Annimation (The Lion King, Frozen, etc.), and at the top of my hierarchy are the films by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited away, Naussica, etc.). [It should be noted that if it were not for Disney buying Pixar and getting John Lassiter back into its fold, Miyazaki's works would not have been brought over in any quality for English speaking audiences. Lassiter may be king of the hill in the animation world. Dare I say "Thank you Disney?"]

The List: So that said, the following list is sorted with a combination of initial wonder and repeat watchability in mind. It was a hard task for me and I may shift it around if asked again tomorrow:

1	Finding Nemo	2003
2	Ratatouille	2007
3	WALL-E	2008
4	Monsters, Inc.	2001
5	Up	2009
6	Inside Out	2015
7	Coco	2017
8	Brave	2012
9	Toy Story	1995
10	A Bug's Life	1998
11	The Incredibles	2004
12	Finding Dory	2016
13	Toy Story 3	2010
14	Cars	2006
15	Toy Story 2	1999
16	Cars 2	2011
Haven’t Seen	Monsters University	2013
Haven’t Seen	The Good Dinosaur	2015
Haven’t Seen	Cars 3	2017

So Coco falls at the top of the second grouping for me. The first group represents films that changed how I watched animated films as a whole, and which for various reasons I have watched many times. The bottom third speaks for itself, sequels for the most part. In the middle are films that I enjoyed but may not wish to see more than a few times each.

Last words: Coco may not have legs for repeat views (time will tell), but on first viewing I was delighted. It is visually gorgeous, musically catchy, culturally appropriate and sensitive to its setting and spiritual theme; and it was emotionally powerful in real and difficult ways that Pixar seems unafraid to approach. I smiled, laughed, cried (in more than a few places), and said more than a once to my date "I am really liking this film..."

"As long as you can breathe you can survive"...

Opening shot from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

He smelled like Captain Black: There is a story that goes like this: A little boy had a kind old grandfather who brought him gifts and smelled of pipe tobacco. The boy's name is inconsequential, his grandfather was Fred, but the boy called him Gran-pa...

Yellow-green skies and brown-grey pipe smoke: The boy has a memory of running into the yellow-green-skied tropical winds of his backyard during Hurricane David's run up the east coast while Gran-pa watched on from the shelter of a side porch. It's a strange memory to have and might be corrupt*, but in it the sky was so weird, the wind powerful enough to knock the boy down, and the pipe-smoking kind-smiling leather-skinned Gran-pa, so calm. It's a suspicious memory that might be a hybrid with ties to two or more separate side porch moments, perhaps even spanning two homes and multiple days in the late 70s; but it is a powerful recollection, nonetheless, for a seven year-old contrasting exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke...

He was a great man: Gran-pa, at one point in his life, had been a mayor of a small town that surely had white picket fenced houses, a candy store on the corner, and a gazebo/band-stand at the center of town across from the soda fountain/diner. He was married to a woman who was elegant and had one child who fit right-in on the fall-harvest float in the town parade. Gran-pa had also been a volunteer firefighter in his time; and he had a kind smile. Gran-pa died when the boy was seven of emphysema. Everytime anyone spoke to the boy about his grandfather, they said things like, "He was a great man. He was a firefighter, you know." The little boy always heard, "Your grandfather was a great man, BECAUSE he was a firefighter." And so he always thought firefighters were great men (and women)...

Life imitating fiction imitating life: The boy visited the local firehouse in North Baltimore throughout his youth, and eagerly watched any movie or show that featured firefighting as he grew older:

• Emergency (1972-1977) - TV
• Towering Inferno (1974) - Movie
• Code Red (1981-1982) - TV
• Backdraft (1991) - Movie
• Firestorm (1998) - Movie
• Third Watch (1999-2005) - TV
• 9/11 (2002) - Movie
• Ladder 49 (2004) - Movie
• Rescue Me (2004-2011) - TV
• Chicago Fire (2012-present) - TV

The quality of some of these cinematic depictions of firefighting is suspect, as is the acting and plot in places. Director of Backdraft Ron Howard has commented on how hard it is to film fire well, but makes it exciting in Backdraft, and the fire in Jay Russell's Ladder 49 is near perfect. What is captured consistently in each of these shows and films is the camaraderie of the firefighters themselves as they do the work they are trained to do and rely on each other as soldiers must in any conflict...

And so the boy decided one day to be a firefighter and perhaps be a great man like Gran-pa...

4/4/12

"If this ain’t the greatest job in the world, I don’t know what is.": Many events from my childhood, along with relocation to my own small town with picket fences and volunteer firefighters, and ultimately the events of 9/11 (2001) moved me to join the local fire department and train to be a firefighter. God, I love my jobs! Both interior firefighting and wildland firefighting are a mix of exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke... We don't run into buildings or forests on fire, spazzy and uncontrolled; we walk in, find the beast, look it in the eye, and kick its ass. The chaos of an interior fire and limitations of equipment on light-hearted communication makes fighting structure-fires acute and exciting, but lacks the slow buddy-building that fighting a fire in the woods might. Wildland firefighting is its own beast, and requires different gear and training than interior work; it yields a different sort of camaraderie, not better or worse, just different. Walking into the woods at dawn with your crew to resume battle on a fire that has been resting all night but ready to spring back to life is an amazing feeling...

2013 events fictionalized in 2017: On October 20, Columbia Pictures will release Only the Brave, a movie based upon the story of hotshots battling the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire of Arizona. Although the director, Joseph Kosinski, is reasonably unproven, the trailer for this film has me very excited nonetheless. "We’re only seconds away, it’s going to feel like the end of the world. As long as you can breathe you can survive"...

* I called my mother after writing this and found some facts. Oh, how memories can be corrupted by time. We lived on Midherst until Summer '78. The porch there had steps leading into the back yard. Fred loved that porch. He visited Overhill before he died and loved the porch there as well, but it does not have stairs leading to the back yard. Hurricane David did not land in Maryland until Fall '79, several months after Fred had died. Memories of green skies and brown grey pipe smoke are just the mind of a boy grasping at wisps of his beginnings it seems...  

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner (1982): Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a replicant, a bioengineered, biorobotic android, who is being hunted by Richard Deckard (Harrison Ford), a Blade Runner cop who's job is to retire rogue "skin-jobs." The year is 2019, a future in which our science is pushing back against it's creators. In the final moments of the film, perched atop the canopy of a post-apocalyptic urban landscape, Deckard has his final moments with his prey turned hunter...

Roy Batty: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die." [exeunt]

Richard Deckard: "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life... anybody's life... my life. All he'd wanted was the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do is sit there and watch him die."

Neo-Noir Cinema: I fell in love with cyberpunk when I graduated from middle school to the time of disenfranchised angst that is adolescence. I am not sure when I first saw it, but Blade Runner rained down upon my imagination like futuristic nuclear rain and drowned me in a love of the dark sci-fi that would come later, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Gattaca, 12 Monkeys, Dark City, City of Lost Children, and so many more. Although I was moderately tantalized and intimidated by Pris' (Daryl Hannah) thigh crushing fight with Deckard, and terrified by the sheer maniacal taunting and power by Roy, it was the repeated use of the extreme close ups and close ups of eyes that for 35 years has been what I cherish most about the film...

Proverbs 30:17: "The eye is the window to the soul":  Perception / reality, android soul, lens vs. mirror, intimacy and coldness; the eye is the object theme that Ridley Scott returns to scene after scene. Whether reflecting the urban landscape, being used as a test of humanity, or bringing us to the intimacy of emotion in a sea of indifference and coldness, Scott uses eyes in this film that way Tarantino uses the F-bomb and bullets, frequently and without mercy. The dark grey & black sets lit by hazy sunsets or neon lighting make many characters eyes pop in almost inhuman ways, and makes one wonder if it is intentional when occasionally certain characters eyes are allowed to languish in dull shadow. The eyes in this film haunt me and I have been thinking about whether androids dream of electric sheep ever since. On October 6 producer, Ridley Scott returns with Blade Runner 2049! I cannot wait...

"Use your minds. Follow your plans and you will all find safe squares"...

I recently watched Queen of Katwe, a true story about the discovery and achievement of a chess prodigy discovered in the slums of Katwe, Uganda. Disney hits a home run with this at-times gut wrenching (yet never lending to complete despair) story of eventual triumph. Did I mention it's a true story? Amazing that it is so! In the lowest moments there is always a ray of hope and way out. Here is Wikipedia's plot summry:

Living in the slum of Katwe in Kampala, Uganda, is a constant struggle for 10-year-old Phiona (Madina Nalwanga) and her family. Her world changes one day when she meets Robert Katende (David Oyelowo) at a missionary program. Katende coaches soccer and teaches children to play chess. Curious, Phiona approaches and learns the game. She becomes fascinated with it and soon becomes a top player under Katende's guidance. Over several years, her success in competitions and tournaments leads to greater competitions, stress, and identity issues. Phiona must learn more than the game as she is exposed to life outside Katwe. Her education, both formally and informally, continues as she dreams of escaping a life of poverty for herself, her mother, and her siblings. --Wikipedia

I need more time to write a proper review, but for now I offer the trailer to peak your interest. I liked the film a lot. It dod not blow me away, but I am still thinking about it long after the credits have rolled. Phiona's story is quite compelling; her coach is something amazing, her family tenacious, and that Disney pulled this off, impressive. Filmed on location the film has received favorable reviews and is worth the time to take an interest in:

Queen of Katwe received positive reviews from critics, with David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o's performances receiving unanimous praise.^[43][44] Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 92%, based on 135 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's consensus states: "Queen of Katwe is a feel-good movie of uncommon smarts and passion, and Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo's outstanding performances help elevate the film past its cliches."^[45] On Metacritic, the film has a normalized rating of 73 out of 100, based on reviews from 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[46] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an "A+" grade.^[41] --Wikipedia

"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."

On March 18, 1939 James Thurber's short story masterpiece, The Secret Life of Wallter Mitty, was published in The New Yorker. Words like Mittyesque and Mittyish have become oft used adjectives for people who seem to resemble the ineffectual fantastical day-dreamer, Walter.
Although the two film adaptions of this story differ greatly from the original story, the central roll of a  character, Walter Mitty—who fantasizes heroic and triumphant moments sometimes at the expense of very real moments in his own life—is common to all three. I recently watched the most recent film adaption a second time, liking it even more than my first viewing—in which I felt "I really liked that movie a lot. What a great, fun, movie. Why didn't we see this when it was in theaters?"

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a 2013 romantic comedy-drama adventure cult film directed by, produced by, and starring Ben Stiller. Gore Verbinski served as executive producer.^[7][8] This is the second film adaptation of James Thurber's 1939 short story of the same name. The 1947 version was produced by Samuel Goldwynand directed by Norman Z. McLeod, with Danny Kaye playing the role of Walter Mitty.^[9] The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 5, 2013.^[10] The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was theatrically released on December 25, 2013 in North America, to generally mixed reception, and was a moderate box office success, however the film has gathered a cult following since its release.^[11] (Wikipedia)

I want to avoid plot items and spoilers, but need to figure out how to convince people to go back a few years and see this movie that so many seemed to have missed. It's a film where the underdog has moments of success that we can share. It is not overly sickeningly sweet, but offers elements of optimism in the midst of seemingly overwhelming insurmountable odds. None of it feels real, and yet all of it feels completely real. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, eh? Ultimately, Mitty is supposed to be an ineffectual dreamer, but Ben Stiller (lead actor and director) manages to present us with an extremely likable Mitty who manages to DO something in his life beyond just dream. He comes off as heroically likable while somehow still playing the teased schoolboy who often gets picked last or who is overlooked completely.

The cinematographic shots are excellent. There is a quirkiness that works well with Mitty's day-dreaming. Locations from Greenland to Afghanistan make me want to travel and trek. It seems fitting for a plot that centers around the last print cover for Time-Life Magazine:  

Watch a trailer and then go rent the movie: