Over the span of my life I have, at various times, heard movies celebrated as art, derided as escapism, lambasted as smut, and held aloft as allegories of right living. Very rarely–so rarely as to be countable on one hand–I have had an experience with a movie that has changed my life.
I know I am not alone in this. You Hate Movies’ own Peter Nikiforov and Mike Jensen share similar experiences. Peter is an engineer, largely because of Marvel’s Iron Man. After seeing Man of Steel and Interstellar, Mike moved his family away from their hometown in Georgia and up to the Pacific Northwest.
There are a few moments within movies that have shaped the way I see the world; when the Pevensies get their gifts from Father Christmas, or when Elasti-girl gives Dash and Violet a pep-talk in the cave on Syndrome’s island. However, there is one movie that has shaped not just my world-view, but my entire being.
That movie is Creed.
Despite it ranking highly on many people’s top 10 of 2015, I didn’t see the movie until Monday April 4th of 2016. The very next day I changed my alarm on my phone to read ‘one step at a time, one punch at a time, one round at a time.’ This dialogue appears throughout the movie as Stallone’s aged and retired Rocky Balboa evokes it to inspire and motivate Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Johnson, the illegitimate child of Apollo Creed. It is a refrain based in discipline, in determination and in self-denial.
Since that day in the Spring I have been to the gym five days a week, completely changed the way I eat, drink, and think about food. I have a picture of Michael B. Jordan from Creed on the wall that I look at every day. Creed was the movie that, while I was at the theater to watch Captain America: Civil War, inspired me to lean over and say to my co-hosts “I’m going to do it, I’ll be an Avenger by Christmas.”
And now we present to you the before and after:
Author: Matthew Hughes