Erich Stauffer

Tag: Movies

  • The Room of Requirement: Why Hidden Spaces Appear in Stories, Organizations, and Real Life

    The Room of Requirement: Why Hidden Spaces Appear in Stories, Organizations, and Real Life

    In Harry Potter, the Room of Requirement is one of the most powerful ideas in the entire series – not because it’s magical, but because it’s true.

    The room appears only when it’s genuinely needed.
    It takes the shape of whatever solves the immediate problem.
    And it exists outside official authority, yet quietly makes survival possible.

    It doesn’t show up because the school planned well.
    It shows up because the institution failed to provide something essential.

    That pattern turns out to be everywhere – in movies, in organizations, and in real life.

    The Room of Requirement in Harry Potter

    At Hogwarts, students don’t use the Room of Requirement because they’re rebellious or sneaky.

    They use it because:

    • the curriculum doesn’t prepare them for real danger
    • authority figures are constrained, compromised, or absent
    • open discussion would expose vulnerability or incompetence

    Dumbledore doesn’t officially sanction it.
    Umbridge would destroy it instantly.
    Yet without it, the students would be helpless.

    The Room exists because truth, practice, and preparation needed somewhere to live.

    The Rooms in The Goonies

    In The Goonies, the kids don’t operate from city hall, the police station, or their parents’ living rooms.

    They operate from:

    • basements
    • tunnels
    • hidden pirate ships
    • off-the-map spaces adults don’t control

    Why?

    Because the official system has already decided:

    • their homes are expendable
    • their voices don’t matter
    • efficiency matters more than people

    So they build their own operating space – informal, risky, collaborative – and save what the system was willing to lose.

    That’s not childish fantasy.
    That’s an accurate model of how under-supported groups survive.

    Rooms of Requirement in real organizations

    This isn’t just storytelling. It happens in real companies all the time.

    First example: inventing leadership when it isn’t allowed

    At one agency I worked at, there was a clear need for a function the company didn’t want to formally support. The work still needed to happen — so a small group of us created a private space where we could:

    • talk honestly about how to run projects
    • share what actually worked with developers
    • cross-pollinate ideas without fear

    It worked extremely well.

    Morale improved.
    Outcomes improved.
    Leadership emerged naturally.

    Eventually, the space grew visible enough that someone tried to expose it to management. Leadership shut it down.

    Not because it was wrong – but because it proved something uncomfortable:

    The organization worked better when truth had a place to exist.

    The Room of Requirement returns

    Years later, the same pattern reappeared.

    Public discourse about how to do work was constrained – not maliciously, but structurally. Visibility was risky. Admitting uncertainty was punished. Narrative control mattered more than shared understanding.

    So intelligence routed itself sideways again.

    A private Slack channel emerged – half jokingly called a “Room of Requirement.” Inside it:

    • communication was fluid
    • people shared real practices
    • leadership happened without titles
    • morale went up

    No rebellion.
    No gossip.
    Just people solving the problems the formal system couldn’t acknowledge.

    And once again, it worked.

    The uncomfortable lesson across all of this

    Rooms of Requirement don’t appear because people want to hide.

    They appear because:

    • a critical function exists
    • the system won’t name it
    • the work still has to happen

    When that gap opens, one of two things occurs:

    • reality degrades openly
    • or intelligence moves underground

    Most organizations choose the second – at least for a while.

    What Rooms of Requirement are actually good for

    Used well, these spaces can:

    • preserve morale in rigid systems
    • allow learning without exposure
    • prototype better operating models
    • help people lead before they’re allowed to

    They are:

    • relief valves, not replacements
    • labs, not final answers
    • bridges, not destinations

    They buy time.
    They keep things alive.
    They prevent collapse while everyone pretends nothing is wrong.

    A practical recommendation

    Rooms of Requirement are most useful when they are:

    • small
    • voluntary
    • clearly informal
    • focused on learning, not power
    • treated as temporary scaffolding

    They should help people think, connect, and survive – not carry the entire structure on their backs.

    When they become load-bearing, something else needs to change.

    Closing thought

    Every time a Room of Requirement appears — in fiction or in life — it’s telling you the same thing:

    There is a truth this system cannot yet afford to see.

    The room isn’t the problem.
    The room is the signal.

    And learning how to read that signal – without confusing it for the solution – might be one of the most important leadership skills there is.

  • Pixar’s Soul – Themes and Reflections

    Rather than be specific, which I couldn’t be without re-watching the movie and taking notes, I’ll give you a summary of what happened and make comments along the way.

    The main character is a part-time band teacher in a middle school. The movie opens with him getting promoted to full-time work. He immediately feels let down because he really wants to be a full-time jazz musician. I felt that as I’ve often had to compromise on ‘my dreams’ for ‘a job’. And that is part of the central theme of this movie, which I’ll come back to later.

    However, as luck would have it, the main character gets a phone call from one of his former students who is in a band with a famous jazz musician and needs someone like him to fill in for someone who recently left the band. He ends up getting the gig, but dies shortly afterwards. The main character is now in the afterlife and very upset that ‘he finally got what he wanted and then it was taken away’ so he escapes to the ‘before life’ where souls are born. We have now seen a second aspect of the central theme, which is ‘for the fish to recognize water’, in other words, a misplaced search for something you already have.

    In the ‘before life’, the main character is matched with a soul who hasn’t been able to graduate to earth because they are never satisfied (a kind of opposite twin of the main character). The rules are that you have to get a spark of something you like in the ‘before life’ before you’re allowed to go to earth. The characters mistakenly believe that this is their ‘purpose’ in life and without having it or achieving it, then their life is meaningless. The main character believes their life is meaningless despite people like his students telling them they helped improve their lives. I felt that.

    The soul’s name is 22, which is the day of my birthday. I took this personally. 22 was never satisfied with anything. Nothing excited him. He had seen everything and tried everything and nothing moved the needle for him (or her). However, along the way, after being mentored by all of the great minds in history, 22 had become very intelligent, but not necessarily wise (intelligence applied). I felt that too because I’ve often spent a lot of time learning, but never really finding what I want to do in life.

    Eventually they figure out a way to escape to earth where the new soul learns about things on earth and realizes…I’m not quite sure….something about ‘living itself’ or ‘life itself’ or ‘the act of learning how to live’ is that soul’s spark. They like to learn, not necessarily do. And once learned, they like to tell other people about what they’ve learned, but not necessarily as a teacher, but as an unintentional mentor. I felt that, too. The fact that I’m sharing this with you right now shows that I’m like that. It’s why I used to blog and vlog.

    Eventually they learn, like the fish looking for the ocean, that each person doesn’t have a pre-destined purpose. The barber wanted to become a veterinarian, but he needed money sooner to pay for his daughter being born, so he became a barber. People who know him think he was born to be a barber because he is so good at it. The barber says he has found joy in being a barber despite it not being what he wanted. He realizes that he is still able to help people and in doing so, help himself. That is the theme of this movie – to realize that what you have and what you are doing is your purpose and you are having an impact. Realize what you do have and the impact you are making and think less about what you don’t. That thing you’re searching for…you already have it.

    And that’s also the theme of books like The Alchemist who goes on a grand journey for treasure that ultimately leads him back to a treasure under the house where he started. Or the idea of “diamonds in your own backyard”, a famous sermon repeated over the years about a farmer who sold his farm to go looking for treasure only to later realize his farm had a natural abundance of diamonds.

  • Review of All You Need is Kill

    I was 13 years old in 1993 when Groundhog Day was released in theaters. 5 years later, I started writing a looping screenplay of my own called “Breeze Way”. In 2009, Hiroshi Sakurazaka published All You Need is Kill, a looping war action drama, which was released as Edge of Tomorrow in 2014.

    I was so excited when I first saw the trailer. I was like, “Yes, Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds – starring Tom Cruise!”, but when I found out it was based on a book, I was like, “I can’t wait, I’m just going to read it.” I ended up reading it in one evening and found it very riveting. The ending of the book is much different than the movie, but I won’t ruin it here. There are no spoilers in this post.

    Quotes from All You Need is Kill

    The book is, at times, more insightful than the movie (emphasis mine):

    What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don’t coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?“

    This one covers talent vs. deliberate practice and self improvement:

    I didn’t possess any extraordinary talents that set me apart from my peers. I was just a soldier. There were things I could do, and things I couldn’t. If I practiced, in time I could change some of those things I couldn’t do into things I could.”

    There are some technical explanations for how the looping is happening, which the author, Sakurazaka, attempts to explain and wrap up the story, but I found them a little bit of a stretch. However, it’s much more of an explanation than what you get from Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day.

    The ‘Science’ from All You Need is Kill

    In the book, the alien fighters use “tachyons”, theoretical particles that can travel faster than the speed of light, to travel backwards in time. Tachyons were also used in Watchmen (2009) where Dr. Manhattan’s ability to see into the future is blocked by tachyons generated by Adrian Veidt. In All You Need is Kill (2009), alien terraformers use tachyon pulses to send information back to themselves to win a battle.

    Tachyons Research in Reality

    In 2012 the Higgs Boson particle was confirmed, which is a particle in “tachyon condensation” meaning it is in a quantum field with “imaginary mass” (whatever that means). In 2011, before the Higgs Boson particle was confirmed, scientists theorized that Higgs “singlets” may be traveling back in time and sabotaging the discovery. I guess that wasn’t happening since they were able to discover it eventually, but who knows?

  • Predestination Explained: a Timeline without Paradoxes

    Predestination_Movie

    The following timelines show how the timeline we saw in the movie, Predestination, was not the original timeline, but one edited by Robertson. These are just my ideas:

    Option 1

    1. Time travel was invented in 1981 and Robertson is tasked with creating the perfect temporal agent.
    2. Robertson researches medical textbooks and finds a case of a woman with full male parts.
    3. He travels back in time, kidnaps the baby from the parents, and takes her to an orphanage in 1945 (well within the 53 year limit).
    4. Robertson travels to 1960 to recruit Jane from the orphanage for SpaceCorps where she is impregnated.
    5. Her pregnancy results in a C-section, hysterectomy, and a reconstruction of her male organs.
    6. Robertson steals her baby and kills it. She falls into a depression. She hates her life.
    7. Robertson meets Jane in 1970 after her sperm starts working and offers her a second chance at life. He takes her back to 1964 so that she can impregnate herself and be in “full control of her life”.
    8. 1964 Jane has the baby, has emergency surgery, is reconstructed, and Robertson steals her baby.
    9. Robertson takes the baby back to 1945.

    Option 2

    1. The original Jane was born with male and female parts and given to the orphanage by her original parents in 1945
    2. Robertson worked for SpaceCorp, which was an organization who recruited from hookers and orphanages in the 60’s
    3. While the Original Jane was at SpaceCorp, doctors revealed to Robertson her unique anatomy and she was rejected
    4. In 1981 time travel is invented and Robertson is asked to find someone suitable to be a temporal agent
    5. Robertson remembers Original Jane who by 1981 has already had a child ‘naturally’ and been reconstructed as a man, Original John
    6. Original John hates his life, has a child, and is struggling to make ends meet.
    7. Robertson recruits Original John with the promise he can help him fix his life before it went wrong.
    8. Robertson goes with Original John back to 1964 in Cleveland and guides him to Original Jane, thereby changing history.
    9. Original John impregnates Original Jane, which creates a 2nd Jane Doe, but with the same DNA and unique anatomy.
    10. Original Jane Doe is killed.
    11. Robertson steals 2nd Jane Doe from nursery and takes her back to 1945.

    Possible Problems

    The problem is that they both result in 2 babies being in 1945. The problem is that if you kill one, neither timeline can happen. This move has at least 3 paradoxes that I can count. Now I will see what others are saying and post that below these 2 options.

    Possible Explanations

    There are multiple babies and they are all temporal agents. Bartender John mentions there are 11. That could mean there are 11 loops of himself. Not sure.

    Summary Explanation

    The irony is that Jane thinks Robertson was her redeemer, when in reality he was her destroyer.

    Other People’s Ideas

    The following 2 ideas are from Reddit and Quora:

    http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2nhhou/did_i_understand_the_plot_of_predestination/

    It could make sense if the original Jane was born to parents and then had a sex change due to some other occurrence and becomes John. Robertson makes John a temporal agent who eventually becomes the Fizzle bomber due to psychosis. Then, Robertson has the Fizzle bomber go back and procreated with him/herself. Then, Robertson also has the Fizzle bomber take the baby back to the orphanage. Thus the paradox begins. The Fizzle bomber then retires. So, Robertson goes back to recruit Jane/John after the post-birthing sex change. That John’s new job is to hunt down and stop the Fizzle bomber. That John becomes John(Ethan) due to his brush up with the Fizzle bomber. John(Ethan) is now asked to go back and procreate with the Jane that was birthed by the Fizzle bomber and past Jane and to then take that baby back to the orphanage. John(Ethan) forgets that he was once the other John. He is then asked to go back to the bar and help John(the one who he had a baby with) go back to meet Jane. The movie then unfolds from here.

    http://digestivepyrotechnics.blogspot.com/2014/12/predestination-plot-explained.html

    Barkeep makes one “illegal” jump to intercept the event that causes John to burn his face. However, Barkeep causes the confusion that ends up John burning his face.

    I think there are 11 versions of John. When John asks Barkeep how many temporal agents are there? He responds with ‘there are 11 of us’ and goes on to say that we were all ‘born into it’. Each time he takes the baby back in time a new Jane/John is created.

  • What Really Happened in Jake Gyllenhaal’s Enemy Movie?

    ***Major Spoiler Alert***Do not read this if you don’t want the movie spoiled for you. It contains major spoilers.

    enemy-movie

    We have met the enemy and he is us.” –Pogo by Walt Kelly, 1971

    What Really Happened in Jake Gyllenhaal’s Enemy Movie?

    In Enemy, both men (Adam and Anthony) are same man, a married history professor who acts on the side, and fantasizes about having an affair. In the end of the movie, in his fantasy, his girlfriend is killed, but he quickly turns back to his old ways (represented by the most scary movie ending of all time, the giant spider).

    Who is his girlfriend?

    The girlfriend is not real. When the door buzzes, he doesn’t get up, he goes into his head. She brings over food to his crappy apartment, hangs out, then leaves without a word. It’s all a fantasy.

    How do I know they are the same man?

    When the two men meet, the first meet the room they meet in is number “221”, which means “two to one”. His mother says he has “a nice apartment, a good job” and that he should quit his dream of acting. When he is with his wife, she asks, “How was school?” She asks him about having an affair.

    Reasons why they might not be the same man?

    Blueberries – He tells his wife he wants blueberries, but he tells his mother he doesn’t like blueberries.

    Unknown Name/Location to Wife? – Anthony makes up the name “Adam Bell” and writes it on a note for his wife to find. She Googles it, goes to the school, and he meets her there (as Adam), but acts (he likes to act) like he doesn’t know her. She can’t believe how far he’s going to perpetuate this fantasy.

    Where does he actually live? Which apartment?

    In the beginning of the movie we hear Adam’s mother’s voicemail where she sounds Russian like the other guy’s mother where she asks of his “new” apartment “how can you live like that?” and then we see a picture of the pregnant wife sitting on the bed in Adam’s apartment. She only refers to him as “Darling,” but he’s clearly sitting in Adam’s Volvo.

    There are two apartments, one “good” and one “bad”. Because he’s a school teacher and acts on the side, because of the way his mother described it (“how can you live like that?”), and because of the shot of his pregnant wife in the background, it’s more likely that he and his wife actually live in the bad one.

    Although in the movie, the times we see his wife she in the “good” apartment. This could mean the nice apartment is a fantasy too. But in the movie, his mind places his girlfriend/affair in the bad/real apartment and his actual wife in his good/fake apartment. This could mean he wishes he could provide more to his wife.

    How do we know when we’re in a fantasy and when we’re in real life?

    There is a definite yellow hue when we see Adam, the school teacher who is with the “girlfriend” in the “bad” apartment and a more ‘normal’, white light when we see Anthony, the actor and his “good” apartment, but this isn’t like the green tint in The Matrix movies. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is fantasy and the other is real because both have elements of each.

    One ‘totem’ (to use Inception vocabulary) is his wedding ring (which just happened to be Cobb’s totem). Adam, the school teacher, doesn’t wear it, but Anthony, the actor does (except for when he’s playing Adam towards the end of the movie – it’s also partially responsible for the ‘crash’ that kills his girlfriend and ‘ends’ the affair).

    If this topic interests you, read about more movies that question reality.

    What are some motifs in the film?

    Hallways – the beginning of the film starts with Adam walking down the hallway with a key while a guard walks behind him. When he sneaks into his own apartment, he doesn’t have the key and has the same security guard behind him who does have the key. These scenes are shot very specifically for the audience to draw the connection between the unknown guy at the beginning of the film at the club and his security guard, but you’d have to watch it again to fully get the connection.

    Is there any other scenes that we’re exactly as they appeared in the movie?

    In the teacher’s lounge, Adam is asked: “Are you a movie guy? In your free time I mean?” Adam responds, “I don’t know,”, but what I postulate is that the guy asking isn’t real. Here’s why: Adam tells him about a movie he’s recently seen recently that he really liked that he just happened to be in: “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way”.

    On his way home he stops by a movie store to see if they have that movie, but they don’t have it. He ends up watching it anyway because he already owns a copy. Even the actor uses a fake name: Daniel Saint Claire. His real name is Anthony Claire.

    What are some symbols used in Enemy?

    Street Art – On his way home from work, he passes by a mural with the same man drawn multiple times. Behind that mural is the movie store.

    Video Cameras – Even the security cameras don’t follow him around. When Adam is checking out Anthony’s apartment, he looks at the security cameras. If he didn’t want to be seen, he should have looked down, not directly at them for so long The director specifically decided to include them in the movie as the shot pans to include them and shows Adam staring at them as he walked by. As an actor, this is a symbol for how he’s not on camera (not working as an actor) as much as he wants to be.

    Phones – Adam has a cell phone. He ignores it when his mother is calling at his apartment, but picks it up when Anthony calls him at school, but when he’s calling his wife’s apartment he uses a pay phone first and then a land line at his apartment. Pay phones are often used during affairs, which was highlighted in the movie by the same name.

    Any other reasons why Adam and Anthony are the same person?

    • He calls his wife to act like a stalker to sow seeds of doubt about someone calling later on. He’s not home when she calls because he is him.
    • When she visits him at school she calls his cell phone, he answers, but he’s out of sight.
    • When Adam calls Anthony he says he spoke to his “wife”, but how did he know she was his wife?

      • What does the director of the movie think the film is about?

      The director states it’s about a man who decides to leave his mistress and go back to his pregnant wife. I don’t think he actually had two apartments or that he actually left his wife. I think he was just absent from her emotionally. Here’s why: After he turns off the radio after hearing about the accident from his fantasy. He wakes up when thinking about his affair and tells his wife, “I’m sorry.”

      What do you think happened in Enemy?

  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty debuted in the United States on December 25, 2013. This review focuses on the how the film is an essay on the transition from analog to digital – made for and by the children of the 70’s (otherwise known as Generation X), the “analog vs. digital” and “disrespect for the past” themes, “the purpose of life”, and symbolism in the film. Most of this is from memory and is my own opinions. I have not read any other reviews on this movie, but have seen the movie and trailers.

    * Spoiler Alert * This article contains information about the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please consider watching it first. * Photos credit 20th Century Fox *

    Walter Mitty and Cheryl Melhoff

    Generation X

    In #Mitty, the movie, the actors and the director are all Generation X. Stiller was born in 1965 and is currently 48 years old. To give you perspective on the person writing this article, I was born in 1980 which makes me part of Generation X, Y, and the Millennial Generation, however I’m most likely Generation Jones. While I was able to pick up on a lot of the references and music used in the film, there are still things that I didn’t ‘get’ like the name on the t-shirt Mitty’s mom kept for him.

    The movie is full of references to Generation X. Mitty’s sister is auditioning to be Rizzo in Grease, a movie that came out in 1978. She gets him a Stretch Armstrong (debuted in 1976) doll for his birthday. Mitty has a Jansport hiking bag (popular in the 80’s). At the end of the movie Mitty is wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, a leather strap necklace with a copper hex nut, and friendship bracelets. There are also several scenes referencing “Major Tom“, which is a fictional character created by David Bowie in the late 60’s.

    You can always tell about how old you are based on what music appears in commercials and it’s becoming apparent that the markets have begun marketing less to the Baby Boomers and more to their children, Generation X. No where is that more apparent than in this movie, which is filled with product placements tucked in and tied to the story line from eHarmony to Papa Johns to LIFE.com, but with nods to Conan O’Brien, TBS, Cinnabon, Dell, CareerBuilder.com, KFC, Instagram, the iPhone, and American Airlines.

    Generation X was the last generation to graduate high school and enter the workforce before cell phones and Internet access became ubiquitous. Ben Stiller’s directorial debut, Reality Bites, which came out in 1994, was the same year Netscape started. The World Wide Web had just begun and yet it was already clear that things were changing. It appears that Ben Stiller, despite the success he’s had since then, still longs for a time when things were more simple, more analog – and is betting his audience does too.

    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Movie Review

    Analog vs. Digital

    When Walter Mitty goes to give Rich the longboard at Cheryl’s home, there are at least three 70s-era cars on the street, which is very unusual for a movie set in 2013. In that same scene, on a wall, drawn in chalk is the words, “Here Comes the Sun,” which is an allusion to a Beatles Song of the same name from the album Abbey Road, which came out in 1969. On the cab ride back to his mom’s house, Walter Mitty wants to turn the cab’s digital video off to which the cab driver says ominously, “It stays on.”

    Walter Mitty has an analog clock in his apartment (not pictured, but you can hear it ticking in the background) and he wears an analog wristwatch with a leather strap. Although the watch is never specifically referenced in the film, it plays a small part in the short story by James Thurber. For a sense of how Thurber thought about watches, in The Gentleman in 916, he writes, “Even the sound of a wrist-watch prevents me from sleeping, because it sounds like two men trying to take a wheel off a locomotive.”

    While Walter Mitty does have a computer, it’s an older model, Dell laptop, which echoes his cell phone, an older flip-style phone. In contrast, Cheryl’s character uses a modern smartphone with Internet access. She still uses terms like “buffering” when searching the Internet (something she probably doesn’t have to do and isn’t a term used much any more). On the flip side, the photographer, Sean O’Connell does not have a phone at all – nor does any place Sean is currently located (ie. a shipping boat).

    While on the shipping boat, a deck hand takes a picture with his smartphone for Instagram, and asks to be Facebook friends. This foreshadows Mitty’s meeting with Sean O’Connel in Afghanistan who doesn’t take a picture at all, instead choosing to remember the moment as “me”/himself without the camera. This lost desire to be ‘in the moment’ shares a sentiment with those who identified with Charlene deGuzman and Miles Crawford’s I Forgot My Phone video which  went viral in August of 2013.

    Ben Stiller's Secret Life of Walter Mitty Movie

    Disrespect for the Past

    Walter Mitty works with analog film, something Kodak stopped making in June of 2013. Mitty’s co-worker, Hernando (which means “bold voyager”) has a man-crush on the photographer, O’Connell for still using film, which acknowledges he is well aware that although he is surrounded by film negatives, digital pictures have largely replaced analog film. Mitty states that he has never lost a negative despite “over a million” negatives passing through his care over the last 16 years he worked at TIME magazine.

    “Negative Asset Manager” is Mitty’s job title, but it’s also a metaphor for the deprecation of ‘everything that’s come before’. In the final scene of the movie, Mitty tells his former boss that the magazine has been built by many people over a long time, which the new boss is now treating as a negative asset on the balance sheet that needs debited or written off. The message is that businesses are created and ran by people, not balance sheets, and should be treated with more respect, even when things change.

    When Mitty’s boss, Ted Hendricks asks Mitty where the picture was, Mitty says it’s in a “silver bath” to which Ted does not even try to understand. He later asks someone else to look it up only to conclude that it “doesn’t exist.” Of course it exists, but simply Googling “silver bath” will only give you shiny pictures of bathroom accessories. You have to know that it was a part of photo processing, which is something older generations, even Generation X, understood – even if only in context.

    The most visual disrespect for the past occurs as Mitty is entering LIFE magazine for the last time and movers are literally dropping art onto the floor as they violently remove it from the walls. All of the desks are empty and covered in drop cloths like dead bodies, a symbol for the lost jobs and the lost magazine.  After working at the magazine for over 16 years, during his 17th year, the job ended – a ‘death” which could be a metaphor for the death of his father, which happened when Mitty was 17.

    Walter Mitty Purpose of Life

    The Purpose of Life

    In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie, LIFE Magazine’s motto is, “To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.” This motto is written on the wall of the lobby and is repeated in the wallet O’Connell gives Mitty and in the background of the movie as Mitty leaves for Greenland. However, on the wallet, O’Connell added one more sentence, “That is the purpose of life.”

    Off the coast of Greenland when Mitty jumps into the ocean, the captain of boat yells, “Don’t fear the porpoise,” which sounds like, “Don’t fear the purpose.” In this movie, Walter Mitty is 42 years old. In real life, Ben Still was 47 at the time of shooting the film. While younger than Brad Pitt, he still may have fears about the purpose of his life, just like Walter Mitty. Just like us. Just like me. He doesn’t want to be the old man bringing the news on a telegram.

    Film Symbolism

    The most blatant symbolism used in the movie was with allusions to 35 mm film reels and negatives. From the lights in Mitty’s apartment hallway to the windows on the outside of his apartment building, to the dots on the glass in LIFE magazine lobby, to the fuselage of the Greenland airplane at night, the film perforations, also known as perfs or sprocket holes and rectangular acetone film frames themselves were apparent throughout the beginning of the film.

    The word “Life” was used throughout the movie, not just as the name of the magazine, but also in conversations Mitty had with Cheryl and his mother. It’s also referenced on the bottom of the longboard Mitty traded for in Iceland. In large print it says, “LIFIO”, which is Icelandic for “can survive”. Similarly, Cheryl comments to Mitty “last in, first out”, which is commonly shortened as “LIFO” in business process management. Find any more? Leave a note in the comments.

  • Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty Longboards

    UPDATE: Bustin Boards has confirmed that it’s a Bustin Boards Boombox longboard and after seeing the movie, it should be noted that there is only one longboarding scene in Iceland. The other New York scene mentioned in this article is ‘covered’ by CGI which makes it look like Walter Mitty is longboarding on asphalt. All pictures copyright of their individual owners.

    Ben Stiller as Walter Mitty Longboarding in Greenland

    Ben Stiller stars in and directs The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where he is seen carrying and riding a longboard skateboard in several parts of the movie. At one point he’s longboarding down a hill in Greenland, while in another scene he’s longboarding down a street in New York City. The 2013 movie, which is based loosely on the original James Thurber short story and the 1947 Danny Kaye film, was filmed in Bronx, New York City, Greenland, and Iceland.

    While the movie doesn’t come out in America until December 25, 2013, after watching the trailer I wondered what longboard Ben Stiller was using in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie. A reddit thread on longboarding in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty offered up the following clues. According to justchilln, “a Freebord was actually used in a dream sequence in which Mitty is snowboarding down the street of NY. Source- My buddy was the freeboarder.” You can see Ben Stiller filming part of this sequence in New York in this video below.

    On June 14, 2012 Silverfish Longboarding posted the above video on Facebook where Jame Ka-stello pointed out, “It’s a Gravity Ed Economy, and Ben can actually skate, modestly as it may be – lets not get too fired up, the wires are there because they use that rig for a lot of stunts. Plus it would suck for ben stiller to catch a stop rock and faceplant I suppose.” And Aj Powell said, “At least he’s riding Paris Trucks“. However, Willy Staley noticed that, “the trucks are on backwards.”

    According to user, thewatches, on Reddit, “I saw this movie in a pre-screening in nyc, and it’s fantastic, but they use 3 different longboards in the movie (it’s supposed to be just one board). They change it situationally, some downhill board like a landyachtz or something and two different Bustin boards.” While I couldn’t find a picture of a Land Yachtz longboard skateboard used by Ben Stiller in the Walter Mitty film, the pictures below are most likely a Gravity Ed longboard and a Bustin Maestro Pro longboard.

    Ben Stiller Gravity Ed Longboard Ben Stiller Bustin Maestro Pro Longboard
    In this image, Ben Stiller is likely riding a Gravity Ed longboard with Freeboard attachments to keep his feet in place. Some have criticized the film for Walter Mitty not wearing a helmet, but in this image he is being hung by wires to keep him up. Originally featured on The Daily Mail on May 7, 2012, Ben Stiller is shown carrying an. “extremely large skateboard over his shoulder”, which is likely a Bustin Boards Maestro Pro Longboard.

    M Longboard Industry in France

    While I’m not sure how this fits into the story, I did find that on Nov 10, 2013, M Longboard Industry wrote on their Facebook page (translated from French), “What a pleasure when a huge company producing Hollywood knocks on the door of a small workshop shape French … On the occasion of the release of the film “The Life of Walter Mitty” January 1, 2014, 20th Century Fox has decided to win 3, Z-Shape M-longboard-industry autographed by Ben Stiller in person!” and “Ben Stiller on the set of “The Dream Life of Walter Mitty”, on the occasion of the French release January 1, 2014, M-3 longboard longboards industry, the effigy of the film autographed by the actor to be won at the national level through UGC! Soon find all photos of the production of these boards Z-Shape.” The associated picture was that of Ben Stiller holding the sign post, which is a different longboard skateboard than the other two longboards shown.

    Ben Stiller Other Longboard

    What are the 3 Longboard Skateboards used by Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?

    I have emailed customer service at Gravity Skateboards, Bustin Boards, Land Yachtz, and M Longboard Industry, but have yet to get a response about if any of their longboard skateboards were used in the Walter Mitty movie. However, both the movie and Bustin Boards are located in New York City so there’s a high probability that the movie used a local company. Gravity Skateboards are out of California, Land Yaachtz are out of Vancouver, BC, and M Longboard Industry is out of France.

    1. Gravity Ed Longboard – used in street scenes in New York city – buy on Amazon.
    2. Bustin Maestro Pro Longboard – used in the downhill scenes in Greenland – buy on Amazon
    3. Either the Land Yachtz Longboard Time Machine or the M Longboard Industry X Board as used in other parts of the film – buy on Amazon.

    If you have information about what longboard skateboard was used by Ben Stiller in the 2013 Secret Life of Walter Mitty Film, please let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.

    Matt at M Longboard Industry Matt points to this Rad Train article as evidence that Ben Stiller used Dregs Skateboards. I can’t find any hard evidence of that, nor can I find the original Concrete Wave Magazine article that supports it, but I will admit that the Dregs Blade Crest longboard does look a lot like the one used in the film. Josh Dickey, managing editor at The Wrap, said on Twitter that the downhill scene in Greenland features a LandYachts Wolf Shark longboard.

    If you’ve seen the movie and know what skateboard Rich is using in the park or think you have a different explanation for the longboard used, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

  • Symbolism in Wes Anderson Movies

    Colin Marshall recently commented on about a series of RogerEbert.com video essays on Wes Anderson films. These are my comments on his comments, but mostly it’s about the symbolism I see in Wes Anderson films.

    Wes Anderson Suitcases

    • Suitcases – first few movies they are always silver, last few canvas; they are always matching and of different sizes – like different aged members of a family; they could obviously literally represent emotional baggage, but more likely represent the ties (family) that bind us and that we always carry with us (throughout all films). In the trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel I noticed the hotel is full of suitcases – as if Wes Anderson is trying to tell us something – like this movie is all of his other movies combined into one hotel full of suitcases.
    • Guns – Bottle Rocket and Life Aquatic both had hand guns, but Mr Fox, Royal Tenenbaums, and Moonrise Kingdom all featured rifles. I think the obvious nod here is to violence, but I almost view it as a contrasting feature to the artistic, loveable characters – it lends to the ironic, comedic tone of the movie underscored by the understating the guns are given in each scene. They serve both as contrast and as comedy.
    • Binoculars – the commentator mentioned this as referencing Star Wars, but I think it’s much more than that. When you look through binoculars, there are many things happening
      • Your power is magnified – you can see farther, which gives you more power
      • You are symbolically looking into the future – children are often seen using binoculars – they want to see what’s coming. Adults do not want to know what’s coming because they are not looking forward to it.
      • You are seeing a mini-movie – what you see through binoculars is like a mini, personal movie inside a movie, which is a metaphor for Wes Anderson films, which are movies about making movies.
    • Trains – trains are featured prominently in Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel. They are both used to literally move the plot forward and as a way to showcase Wes Anderson’s iconic “dollhouse” sets.

  • Jobs, Grants, and Everything Else

    This is a blog post about jobs, work, getting grants, writing books, watching movies, the state of the Maker culture, and everything Elon Musk is doing nowadays. It started with a conversation I had last night with my wife’s cousin’s husband about these things. This is a summary of that conversation and of my current interests and this blog in general.

    How to Be Happy at Work

    Erich Stauffer Jobs, Grants, and Everything ElseHappiness at your job comes from being really good at what you do. Being really good requires deliberate practice to rise above the performance plateau that most people reach at their jobs. Once you’re really good you’ll be able to look back at all the good work you’ve done, all of the people you’ve helped, and you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment and happiness.

    Ultimately, you are in control of your own emotions. No one else can make you feel a certain way. You always have a choice of how you react to external factors. The hard part is changing the habits that cause these reactions, but if you can replace the action within the habit, you’re one step closer to managing your own actions.

    How to Apply for a Government Grant

    Anyone can apply for a government grant, but for most people the process is too long, complicated, and shrouded in mystery, so this is brief introduction to the grant application process. First you’ll need an EIN (employer identification number) from your state’s IRS and a DUNS number from Dunn and Bradstreet. Once you have these, you can start applying for government grants.

    How to Travel the Glory Trail Across America

    There is a path across America that strings together some of the most scenic parts of the western United States. If you’re starting in Indiana, you first go to Chicago, then Madison, Wisconsin, through Minnesota, across South Dakota into Mount Rushmore. From there you continue heading west to Yellowstone in Wyoming and up through Montana and Idaho into Seattle, Washington. From there you head south through Portland, Oregon to Sacremento, San Francisco, and Los Angelas, California. After driving through Las Vegas you finally reach the Grand Canyon in Arizona. At that point you can either choose to go back through Denver, Colorado and Kansas City, Missouri or keep south through New Mexico and Texas. I recently did the first leg of this trail in a tw0-day trip, but expect to spend at least two weeks to do the whole thing.

    One recommendation my wife’s cousin’s husband had was to buy a National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass that gets your vehicle into any national park for one annual fee. You don’t have to buy it in advance, just make sure you buy it at the first park you come to so you can take full advantage of the price benefits. One other tip is to rent a vehicle for this trip rather than to use your own vehicle. It will cost you between $30 and $50 a day depending on the vehicle and any current specials, but considering the amount of miles you’ll be traveling, the wear on your vehicle, and the amount of things that could go wrong along the way, it makes sense to rent a vehicle that you can swap out if something happens rather than face a big repair bill on your own vehicle while in a remote location.

    How to Write, Publish, and Sell a Book Online

    You may have heard that books are the new business cards or that it’s a great way to make passive income on the side and it’s both of those, but just knowing that doesn’t make it happen. You still have to do the work. If you’re not used to writing, you might consider starting a blog and writing a few blog posts first. Once you have several blog posts written you could consider rolling these up into a chapter or even a short ebook or white paper. This is called repurposing content and is just one of the ways to get started writing a book.

    The easiest way to write a book is to start writing it in secret – don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. You may not know what to write at first, so just start writing about anything and the clarity will come later. Sometimes I find it helps if I start out pretending I’m writing a letter to someone I know. However, you eventually want to let people know about the book if you intend to sell it. While it’s best to finish the book first, there can be some advantages to letting people know you’re about to publish a book.

    Imagine if when you were half-way through writing the book that you put up a landing page that let people sign up to get notified about the book when it comes out. In the meantime you start blogging about the book and asking for more email sign-ups. By the time you’re ready to publish the book you’ve got a list of people ready to buy and you’ve established authority and trust from a series of blog posts that are similar to the future book’s material. This is exactly what Nathan Barry did with his iPhone book.

    Alternatively you could do the more traditional approach and publish your paper book on Amazon using Createspace or on Kindle using Kindle Direct Publishing, but each of these models has two stark differences to Nathan Barry’s model. First, when a customer purchases a book from Amazon that customer belongs to Amazon, not you. You have no idea who that customer is and you can never contact them unless they contact you first. Second, Amazon takes at least a 15% commission, compared to 5% from your own credit card processing company.

    How to Find Good Movies on Netflix

    I subscribe to Netflix and have used it to watch everything from Glee to 10 Items or Less, but every since Starz left the movie selection has been left wanting. However, last weekend I watched Primer and this weekend I plan on watching Expendables 2. I knew Primer was good because I’d watched it before once, but since I didn’t understand it the first time I watched it again. I still didn’t fully understand it until I read this blog post explaining Primer. That movie is so hard to explain that when you start typing “what happened in…”, Google autocomplete displays “what happened in Primer” first above the next highest, “what happened in Benghazi”.

    Why Expendables 2? While I had reluctantly seen Expendables 1, my wife’s cousin’s husband reminded me that this movie is really a parody of itself and just a over-the-top 80’s action movie complete with all of the 80’s action movie stars. When I say complete I mean Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Seriously? Anyone from the 8-bit generation who grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoons will appreciate this movie even if you don’t like action movies. With a giant wink and a nod, Expendables 2 guarantees a Primer-like trip back to a time when guns were bigger and times were simpler.

    To help you find better movies, Netflix has invested heavily in algorithms that help you find movies you might like but this doesn’t always work when one account is used for a whole family. In fact I know it doesn’t work because I don’t actually want to watch My Little Pony despite Netflix’s constant insistence that I do. Thankfully they’ve recently came out with profiles that allow each family member to have their own likes and dislikes. It was with this method that I was able to see Primer after answering a series of questions like, “Do you like mind-bending movies?” I can say with confidence that I was happy to deselect all horror films and children’s films so that I could focus on what I like.

    How to Build Anything

    We live in an amazing time where we are only limited by our own imaginations and willingness to make things happen. Strictly speaking, we have the Internet which gives us access to more information than we could ever consume, hardware that is both cheap, powerful, and extensible, programming platforms that let us use hardware however we like, credit card processing and ecommerce tools that let us sell anything we could possible choose to make, and a world-wide audience plugged in and ready to be marketed to on Google and Facebook. There is literally nothing stopping you from taking an idea to market with the right amount of dedication and effort.

    My greatest fear is that 10 years from now my son or daughter is going to ask me why I didn’t do more with this time I had back then. They will have seen evidence of those who did take advantage of these tools and built something great, something sustainable, or something life changing. In 10 years we will have our next Facebook, our next Google, and our next Microsoft. They will be born out of Arduino boards, iPhone apps, and 3D printing technologies. But by then someone will already have done it and by then it will be too late. The time to act is now – be that person in your child’s past that built that thing that you can look back on with fondness and see how you helped people.

    How Elon Musk Builds Things

    Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors builds things using Physics’ first principles, which as Musk explains it, “boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.” One of his latest projects is the Grasshopper

    which is a test rocket that can take off and land vertically, allowing the rocket to be re-used on this planet or others. The other project is called Hyperloop, which is a new form of city-to-city mass transit that involves using tubes and cartridges instead of rails and trains to carry people and property quickly between cities. Elon Musk children will look back 10 years from now and know their dad helped make our world a better place. If you like Elon Musk, you might also like Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square.