For this assignment, I thought long and hard about what I movie I should talk about. Heck, I even convinced my parents to let me use the home theater the whole break to let me find the movie that had caused my viewpoint on life to change. Going through so many different movies made me realize how much time I was wasting but frankly I didn't care. Would I end up picking a classic such as the Shawshank Redemption or would I go down the path of fame and pick a movie that I loved such as Star Wars. However, I didn't want to pick a movie that I just liked or even loved, it had to have mad a area impact on me as a person and have changed my view on something that I lived with everyday. As my parents asked me how I had spent the first three days of the break just watching movies and still didn't have one that inspired me, it finally hit me which movie I should use.
I settled on using Slumdog Millionaire, the rags to riches story of a boy who uses his life experiences in order to win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I hadn't watched the movie in five years so my memory was fuzzy about the story so I told my parents that I needed to use the home theater for one more night and searched the internet for some illegal website to watch it. After searching and watching the movie, I realized how I was extremely ungrateful for the life that I had. I saw the story of how the young boy had to go through losing everyone and how he had overcome all of the challenges, including being tortured right before the last round of the game show. The main character, Jamal showed me that life is meant to be experienced and instead of just worrying about small things, worry about the big picture. Jamal's story also taught me that people can make a few mistakes in life and fall apart from who they were, but sometimes, you can trust in them to be the person that can help you through your position of trouble.
After watching the movie, I went upstairs and did something I hadn't done in years, I talked to my parents and had a good conversation with them about life. I asked them about the struggles that they had growing up and how they had adapted to this way of life. It really showed me how well that we as a group of people have it, especially after learning about the conditions my parents were born into. And that is how a single movie caused me to change the whole way I look at life and how it got me, an antisocial teenager, to converse with my parents about something other than "what's for dinner" or "don't come in my room, I'm studying in there."
