MoviesI don’t watch many movies anymore. When I was a teenager, I would sometimes watch five or more a week! But as I’ve aged, I have become impatient with spending so much time spent just watching a screen. I’m very picky about which movies I watch now, because I’d rather spend my time doing other things. But I can’t deny the affect movies have had on my life. Not only have they fed my imagination, which my wife believes is overly evolved, but they’ve really changed the direction of my life, several times. And they’ve pulled emotions out of me that I rarely feel. Here are some of the movies that have influenced my life: The Joy Luck Club How Asian of me, right? Well, if you know me well enough, you know that I’m a fraud. I may (or may not) look the part of a Korean, but everything inside of me screams out, “WHITE!” Of course, since I’m half-Caucasian, that’s not unexpected. The first time I really identified with being Asian was through watching this movie (and later, reading the book). The story has to do with mothers and daughters, but I still identified with each character, whether by their actions and feelings resounded within me or by seeing my own mother’s sacrifice and background resonating in the mother characters. Dead Man Walking Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn drive me crazy. But I can’t deny this movie of theirs had an instant impact on my life. Just like that, after watching this film (preceded by watching various reports on the life of the sister upon whom the movie is based), I became an anti-death penalty proponent. I still am of that persuasion. But more importantly, I saw the power of grace and forgiveness. It’s funny that one of God’s first major assaults of grace on my heart came through a film starring two outspoken left-wingers, and directed by a third. God works through anyone He chooses! Braveheart This is the perfect man’s movie, right? It was the first heavily violent film that I’d seen in its entirety (Bonnie and Clyde having been my first taste of graphic violence in short bits), plus it has a way of tugging at a man’s heart strings. This film had me captivated – I could not think of anything else for weeks. To me, the best filmmaking is the kind that grabs the heart and squeezes it for all its worth. I think that’s why most of us would rather watch, say, Finding Nemo rather than a movie like The English Patient, which was of amazing “artistic” value, but of little sentimental worth. Saving Private Ryan I’ve seen four movies in my life that I can say were truly intense – Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, The Passion of the Christ and United 93. This film was the first of these I saw in the theatre. During the D-Day sequence, I was gripped to my chair, wanting to close my eyes but unable to look away. I think that if your father is a veteran, you come out of this movie with very different thoughts than the typical moviegoer. Both my dad and grandfather served in war, and no movie I’ve seen makes me feel the sacrifice (and build patriotism in me) as much as this one. The Passion of the Christ This is the only movie that has ever made me cry. Thank you for the cross, my friend. There are many, many others that have affected me. In fact, I think I must have a compartment in my brain responsible for remembering most every line from most of the movies I’ve seen (useful for Trivial Pursuit, but not for much else). Mostly, good films have great entertainment value and make me, for lack of a better word, happy. But every once and a while, a film will come by to make you think about yourself and the world differently, that will impact your life, or that will take you on a ride and refuse to let you go. Most of us have different movies that do this for us. What are yours? There's better writing than this on the same topic at the Christianity Today website: http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/commentaries/moviesthatchangedmylife.html | 
