The assignment had hit me from nowhere. As a person who doesn't watch movies often, I couldn't really think of any that had really "changed my life" off the top of my head — except for one. I was hesitant on writing about this movie at first because my AP Lang teacher had already read us a stellar example essay that had also chosen this movie, but after racking my brain for an entire week to come up with something else, I decided to just screw it and go with my initial instinct.
That movie is "3 Idiots," and I've seen it a total of not twice, not thrice, but once.
The last time (the only time) I watched it was back in my toddler days when I had just entered the burdensome realm of high school.
If you had asked me about this movie a week ago, I wouldn't have been able to to recall any of the songs or even any of the names of the characters, probably because it was in a language that I couldn't even understand without subtitles. Regardless, there were a lot of aspects of the movie that made it enjoyable for me as a watcher, from its jokes to its tragedies to its bops that I can no longer remember, but what stuck with me for years was its message.
As a super emo freshman who thought she was going through hell at the time, I related a lot to the stressful environment that the movie depicted. Though a fictional movie, it managed to portray the faults in our education system and argued that there was more than one way to succeed. I was struggling to accommodate to the heavier workload and higher level of difficulty in my new AP and honors classes and the idea that grades and book smarts weren't the only thing that matter comforted me.
I'm not saying that watching a three hour movie automatically uplifted my angsty self, but I slowly learned to become more content with my lackluster grades and began directing more and more energy towards extracurriculars that actually made me happy to take part in. I was going to be okay.
I mean — don't get me wrong — freshman year still sucked, but that movie still comforted me a lot when I needed it most.
My emo self really did need to be reminded that "all izz well."
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