Connor Parrino

Ms. Coco
English 1001
22 August 2016
My audience is for the people who get inspired by watching movies and have been influenced in
life by movies.
Preface: After the peer review and the cut and tape revision I made many changes to my paper. I
revised most after my first draft by elaborating more on specific ideas and trying to stay on topic
as best I could about one thing. I also changed my focus from just good movies to how good
movies influenced me. My paper definitely developed better now that I went into detail on
specific part in my paper. The hardest part about writing this essay will be taking something I
love and putting it into words for academic purposes. It will be hard to avoid going on tangents
when writing about pop culture literacy through movies because of the different experiences and
mixed feelings I have had with movies. I also have trouble putting images, that seem golden in
my head, into words that are similar to my ideas. It always seems too different from what I had
originally thought. Your comments helped me find out where my essay had bad transitions
between the sentences. Also your comments showed me where I could expand to explain why I
included some things
Seeing is Believing
1. Growing up in todays media-centered world, its hard to find a kid or teenager who
isnt wasting most of their time in front of some type of screen. I was born into this media
centered world so like most kids I have been watching TV ever since I can remember. One of my
earliest childhood memories is of me watching myself take my first steps on VCR. I dont
remember exactly how old I was but its incredible that it made me feel as if I were back in that
moment and still a baby. From my earliest TV memories until I was ten I watched meaningless
cartoons and funny movies. I grew up in a house with two TVs and never had much restriction
on what I watched. Pop culture through movies has played a bigger role in my life than I have

realized by not only influencing me to take certain paths in my life and shaping me into a more
intellectual person, but also by showing me the negative effects it can have.

2. I didnt get into watching critically acclaimed movies, or movies with purpose, until I
was about ten, when my father asked me to watch a movie with him. My father would work all
day and come home to relax, usually by watching movies that were too complex and confusing
for my mind. We sat down together and watched Saving Private Ryan. That movie opened my
mind up to a new concept, war. I was fascinated with the soldiers, planes, tanks, guns, etc and
most of all the confusion it left me with. I had never seen war before or learned anything about
the bloody history our country has. I wouldnt have understood the movie without my fathers
key explanations of why they had to find Private Ryan so desperately and the things the soldiers
were doing such as fist fighting people on the same side and killing the enemy. I didnt know
much about my father until then, I realized his obsession with WWII and artifacts from the
decades of war in the past. One of these being planes, he built many model airplanes all modeled
after the WWII era. After watching Saving Private Ryan with my father, I felt a tingly
satisfaction in my head that I knew would only be satisfied by watching another great movie.
This is where my love for critically acclaimed movies and the way they have shaped my mind
started.

3. I didnt realize it at the time but my father had started me on a path of watching higher
level thinking movies at a younger age than most kids would have by the time they were twenty.
While other kids were watching cartoons and comedies, I was watching documentaries and
critically acclaimed thrillers such as Dead Poets Society, Braveheart, Schindlers list, the

Shawshank Redemption, Ben-Hur and Into the Wild. These movies would exercise my mind by
making me truly think and preparing me to comprehend the next movie. Through this, I gained a
detailed orientated eye for good movies and sometimes I could guess the outcome in a thriller
movie that would leave others puzzled until the end. I was being influenced and shaped by
watching these movies and sometimes thinking about a certain movie for days on end trying to
figure out why it captured my imagination.

4. A recent movie that I have become all too obsessed with is the Big Short. In the movie,
based of true events, Michael Burry predicts the great market crash of 2007. He does this by
studying the normal mans tendencies to take out a mortgage too expensive for his income, and
predicted that they would not be able to pay their monthly bills in 2007, leading the economy to
fail. No one believed him, but when he was proven right he made a profit of 700 million dollars.
I became obsessed with this movie at first because of Michael Burry, he is an awkward person
who means well but comes off as weird. I saw myself in him because Ive never really had a big
group of friends or been very good at being social. Then I became obsessed because they found a
simple flaw that no one believed would happen and ultimately made the few who bet against the
market very successful. This movie has influenced me more than most other movies because it
showed me that I dont have to be like everyone else and listen to what society thinks is normal
or right. It has also given me a deep interest and yearning for knowledge in business and how the
economy works. Through this movie I realized that taking risk is a part of life and my goals
which seemed unattainable at one point now seem very attainable and that I could do much better
than what I was going to settle for in life. Since then, I have started taking business courses in
college and I am also working towards a pharmaceutical program. One day, through hard work

and taking carefully thought out risk, I aspire to own my own business in the pharmaceutical
world of trade.

5. Unfortunately, there are more wasted hours on dumb witted comedies and silly shows
than hours spent on educational programs or critically acclaimed movies. One example of this is
Project X, a movie about a high school student who throws one of the craziest parties ever seen
in California. The movie made a total of 100 million dollars and has also been giving off a
negative influence. This makes young teens and older teens want to party and rage like the actors
did in the movie. It made my expectations for high school much different than high school
actually was and caused my friends and myself to make some very bad choices to try to feel this
experience. On average, 30 hours of senseless TV is watched by teens in a week that can
negatively influence the mind. This ultimately deadens the watcher mind and leads them into
acting like some of these dull-witted actors and finding comfort in that.

6. Pop culture through film could be one of the leading factors in this nations education.
As more and more books are put down each year and televisions turned on, the knowledge of the
nation is diminishing because of goofy sit coms and twisted comedies. Pop culture still
influences many great minds through critically acclaimed movies and education programs too. It
has put me on a path of hard work that will ultimately end up in success because of what my
father and critically acclaimed movies started in me.