This movie was amazing on many levels. It’s real, raw, and very honest with the characters that it portrays. A lot of people want this movie to be about social justice and racial profiling, and while there is definitely elements of that woven within this film, there is something else that you end up connecting with in the movie. There is a love story between the two main characters that is as real and honest as it gets. These were two people who were not a match made in heaven. Two imperfect people with flaws that they are quick to point out in each other. You basically get to see the story of two people who can’t stand each other, who end up falling in love in a very deep and honest way. They say that couples who have been through rough times together end up forming a bond that is not otherwise duplicated. This film displays that in the realest way possible. This is one of my favorite films of the year. https://youtu.be/G6Th84oGDno
Friday, November 29, 2019
Sunday, July 21, 2019
The Lion King 2019 Movie Review: By Cesar Reyes Torres
Well , knowing I have a few Hardcore Disney friends on FB. Hopefully they don’t get too mad when I say that in my opinion The Lion King remake sucked, the original is 1 million times better. The voice actors WAY underperformed this. Everybody in the theatre clapped at the end but, I’m just sitting there like ... WHY??? Am I the only one who sees that that the voice actors sound like they are literally just reading off a piece of paper... they put no emotion into the characters...The Lion King came out in 1993 and i saw it like a 1000 times. I truly hope I never ever ever see this horrible crappy movie again. The special affects were awesome and visually pleasing, but the everything else sucked. This was just Disney trying to make money by attaching big names to a beloved classic. Why else would they attach Beyoncé and Donald Glover. These actors are not known for voice acting and they delivered an emotionless performance. I know you are still going to go see the lion king, but honestly if by any chance your on the fence about this , trust me when I say you ARE NOT missing out if you skip this movie and watch ANYTHING else in the world.
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Subway: Stories from behind the counter(Part 4) A Job with a knife in your hand. By Cesar Reyes Torres
When you're surrounded by a certain environment, you tend to pick up on certain things. Whether you like it or not, the places that you are around and the people that surround you have an effect on you. So in my case when I started working with thugs, ex-cons, and tweakers, I either had to adapt or let them walk all over me. Now if my mentality or my actions sound immature to you, thats because I was only 18 at the time. And I thought that I knew it all. I did some very fucked up things to people and I know that I will pay for them someday, if I haven't already.
John was a hothead and an ex con. But he had a good sense of humor and he liked gangster movies like I did, and we generally got along. I considered him a buddy. Most of my friends in high school were girls and so he was probably my only guy friend. The same thing goes for Gary, he was a pothead, but he showed up on time, he was a Lakers fan, and he was easy-going. We got along well also. These were my boys; these were the guys that became my buddies. Michelle wasn't a friend but we could work together and it was like whatever with her.
But Espi was a different story. I didn't like her and she didn't like me. So few months after the store was sold to the new owners I set her up to get fired. I turned the staff against her. I constantly told them to complain about her. I pointed out every single thing I could about her. And I was able to finally get her fired when I commented to the owner that she paid for three cookies but in reality she really took five. He walked out to the front of the store and asked her to open up the cookie bag, and he pointed it out. That same day he cut her hours from 20 a week to 3 a week. She came back crying and said that she couldn't feed her kids or pay her rent on three hours a week, and when the owner pretty much shrugged his shoulders, she started to curse him out, and that's when the police were called, she was asked to leave the store. She was a pain in my ass, but on the other hand she had three kids and they were barely making do inside the garage they were living in. If I would have kept my mouth shut about $.50 worth of cookies, then, There lives might not have been made worse. But their lives were, and it was my fault. I never heard or saw Espi again in my life.
In the coming months, the stores went through some radical changes. In a short 10 months or so, we went through six different manager changes. The old owner had managers that worked for him for almost 10 years, and this owner hired people that couldn't stay on for more than one or two months sometimes. Joleene the tweaker girl with green teeth, simply walked off the job one day and got in a car in the middle of the lunch rush. Nobody ever heard from her again. She didn't even pick up her last check. Samantha was hired next, but she did not work well under the kind of pressure that the owner put on her and she ended up going to work down the street at Quiznos and she even tried to get some of the employees to follow her. Effrain was hired after her, but he was a pothead, and he sometimes would come in an hour late, and just said he overslept, and justified the whole thing by saying that he was okay and that he just wouldn't eat lunch that day so it would be fine. He got fired. Marie was the next manager and she was a good manager, so good that they took her to the other store on Broadway, to help get it back into shape. Apparently as bad as I thought my store was doing, that store was worse. It's across the street from the library, and apparently the guy that they hired to run the night shift thought it would be okay to take all of the bread that we didn't use at the end of the night, make sandwiches, and go give it to the homeless guys across the street. Eventually the homeless we're just coming into the store at the end of the night to eat for free. And since the owner had put in security cameras, he was able to witness all of it . Not to mention that the store now smelled like piss and cigarettes. And if that wasn't enough, he even caught the employees making their own pizza with the dough, cheese ,marinara sauce and pepperoni. To replace Marie they hired a guy named Javier, who brought his wife Vanessa to work with him, and the owners didn't say anything about it, because her last name was different on her application and they never noticed that she was his wife. Javier eventually stole about $200 from the store and went to Vegas with it. He was the one making the deposits to the bank, but eventually they caught on to him and they fired him, they didn't fire his wife, but she didn't show up after that day anyways. The last guy they hired while I was still there was my friend Kevin, but we all called him Kay. Kevin is not his real name, and for legal reasons and my own protection from what I am about to say about "Kevin", I have changed his name. Kevin was probably the....
To be continued
John was a hothead and an ex con. But he had a good sense of humor and he liked gangster movies like I did, and we generally got along. I considered him a buddy. Most of my friends in high school were girls and so he was probably my only guy friend. The same thing goes for Gary, he was a pothead, but he showed up on time, he was a Lakers fan, and he was easy-going. We got along well also. These were my boys; these were the guys that became my buddies. Michelle wasn't a friend but we could work together and it was like whatever with her.
But Espi was a different story. I didn't like her and she didn't like me. So few months after the store was sold to the new owners I set her up to get fired. I turned the staff against her. I constantly told them to complain about her. I pointed out every single thing I could about her. And I was able to finally get her fired when I commented to the owner that she paid for three cookies but in reality she really took five. He walked out to the front of the store and asked her to open up the cookie bag, and he pointed it out. That same day he cut her hours from 20 a week to 3 a week. She came back crying and said that she couldn't feed her kids or pay her rent on three hours a week, and when the owner pretty much shrugged his shoulders, she started to curse him out, and that's when the police were called, she was asked to leave the store. She was a pain in my ass, but on the other hand she had three kids and they were barely making do inside the garage they were living in. If I would have kept my mouth shut about $.50 worth of cookies, then, There lives might not have been made worse. But their lives were, and it was my fault. I never heard or saw Espi again in my life.
In the coming months, the stores went through some radical changes. In a short 10 months or so, we went through six different manager changes. The old owner had managers that worked for him for almost 10 years, and this owner hired people that couldn't stay on for more than one or two months sometimes. Joleene the tweaker girl with green teeth, simply walked off the job one day and got in a car in the middle of the lunch rush. Nobody ever heard from her again. She didn't even pick up her last check. Samantha was hired next, but she did not work well under the kind of pressure that the owner put on her and she ended up going to work down the street at Quiznos and she even tried to get some of the employees to follow her. Effrain was hired after her, but he was a pothead, and he sometimes would come in an hour late, and just said he overslept, and justified the whole thing by saying that he was okay and that he just wouldn't eat lunch that day so it would be fine. He got fired. Marie was the next manager and she was a good manager, so good that they took her to the other store on Broadway, to help get it back into shape. Apparently as bad as I thought my store was doing, that store was worse. It's across the street from the library, and apparently the guy that they hired to run the night shift thought it would be okay to take all of the bread that we didn't use at the end of the night, make sandwiches, and go give it to the homeless guys across the street. Eventually the homeless we're just coming into the store at the end of the night to eat for free. And since the owner had put in security cameras, he was able to witness all of it . Not to mention that the store now smelled like piss and cigarettes. And if that wasn't enough, he even caught the employees making their own pizza with the dough, cheese ,marinara sauce and pepperoni. To replace Marie they hired a guy named Javier, who brought his wife Vanessa to work with him, and the owners didn't say anything about it, because her last name was different on her application and they never noticed that she was his wife. Javier eventually stole about $200 from the store and went to Vegas with it. He was the one making the deposits to the bank, but eventually they caught on to him and they fired him, they didn't fire his wife, but she didn't show up after that day anyways. The last guy they hired while I was still there was my friend Kevin, but we all called him Kay. Kevin is not his real name, and for legal reasons and my own protection from what I am about to say about "Kevin", I have changed his name. Kevin was probably the....
To be continued
Subway: Stories from behind the counter(Part 3) I didn't sign up for this shit. By Cesar Reyes Torres
I was now working with ex cons junkies and people on rehab. You can say whatever you want about my reaction to working with these kind of people, but I didn't sign up for this shit. for the past four years I had worked with cute high school girls that I went to school with, it was fun, they were cute, and we were having a blast working there. And now 30 days later all of those girls seemed like a distant memory
I was what they called the night crew leader, which meant I was in charge of the night shift.I had a night staff which consisted of five people including myself. i had a guy working for me by the name of John. He served one year out in Kansas State penitentiary for some drug-related charge and moved out to Long Beach to stay with his brother and hopefully fly straight for a change.He was white , part Native American and part Mexican, he had a long well groomed ponytail and a clean-cut 3 line goatee and a tattoo of his girlfriends name on his left forearm. He was actually a pretty cool guy once you got to know him, but I found out eventually that he had a very short fuse and use to have a bad heroin problem, and that he was kind of a hot head. I made sure to take note of that.
The next guy they hired for the nighttime was Gary.Gary was kind of a sad excuse for an unaccomplished human being and how far you can get in life by mooching off of others and getting a little lucky here and there.Gary was 40 years old and literally did not have one thing to his name aside from his bike and a few zip lock bags of weed that he smoked. Gary moved out to Long Beach from Mississippi. In Mississippi he lived in a three-bedroom house with acres of land around him. He had gotten evicted and he had to move out somewhere else, so he moved out here to California with his uncle where he grew up for the beginning part of his childhood. He was a tall son of a gun who was about 6'1. He was half black, half white with a scruffy poorly maintained goatee. Gary smoked his pay check away every week on marijuana. He was living rent free and utility free in the building his uncle owned. All Gary had to do was take care of the lawn and take the trash out every few days, and his uncle didn't charge him a dime. Gary didn't own a car and he rode his bike everywhere. The only bill he had to pay was his prepaid phone. Every few weeks he had to go over to Verizon to put some minutes on his phone, but that all changed when he called their 1- 800 number to check his minute balance and the automated machine told him he had unlimited minutes. Gary didn't have a contract with them and he didn't even have a bank account. Someone somewhere over at Verizon had made some sort of mistake and Gary was benefiting from it. He now had free telephone usage for life essentially.
The third person was Michelle, she was a short white girl with dirty blond hair. I remember thinking that she honestly had the face of a treasure troll. She had done three months in a County correctional facility for women for drug charges and was released into a rehab program. Even though she was on the road to recovery she had gotten her two children taken away by the state and she was allowed absolutely zero visitation rights. For a mom to get her kids taken away, it takes a lot. They have to literally prove that you're a threat to their well-being and that you are no longer able to care for them. In her case they were able to prove both.
And lastly there was Espy which was short for Esperanza. She was one of the last regular employee that was still left over from the previous owner. I'm going to say it straight out, she smelled like pee, cigarettes, shit and sweat. She wore layers of make up and drew both her eyebrows and her eyelashes on. She lived in a garage with her three kids. She did stupid things like talk to customers in Jamaican or English accents because she thought it was funny. You could smell her coming from down the hall. She was what many who grew up in gang neighbourhoods would call a "Veterana". Which meant that she was a veteran gang member that had seen better days. Despite all of her imperfections, I personally didn't like her because she was slow, she stole food from the store, and she took an hour sometimes to use the restroom. Apparently she was so big, that she struggles at times to clean her self. And she didn't like me because she said I was quote " a little bitch, who had a fucken fit over everything she did wrong". I have certain expectations of people. And one of them is wiping your own ass correctly the first time.
I went from working with four beautiful young Latinas, to working with a short tempered ex con, a pot head that was mooching off anyone he could, a junky who had all of her kids taken away from her, and a lady who was not handicapped but who couldn't wipe her own ass correctly.
Life is all about adapting to the circumstances that you find yourself in. In my mind I had to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to survive. I had been their for four years, and I was gonna find a way to make things work. But I had to become.....
To be continued
I was what they called the night crew leader, which meant I was in charge of the night shift.I had a night staff which consisted of five people including myself. i had a guy working for me by the name of John. He served one year out in Kansas State penitentiary for some drug-related charge and moved out to Long Beach to stay with his brother and hopefully fly straight for a change.He was white , part Native American and part Mexican, he had a long well groomed ponytail and a clean-cut 3 line goatee and a tattoo of his girlfriends name on his left forearm. He was actually a pretty cool guy once you got to know him, but I found out eventually that he had a very short fuse and use to have a bad heroin problem, and that he was kind of a hot head. I made sure to take note of that.
The next guy they hired for the nighttime was Gary.Gary was kind of a sad excuse for an unaccomplished human being and how far you can get in life by mooching off of others and getting a little lucky here and there.Gary was 40 years old and literally did not have one thing to his name aside from his bike and a few zip lock bags of weed that he smoked. Gary moved out to Long Beach from Mississippi. In Mississippi he lived in a three-bedroom house with acres of land around him. He had gotten evicted and he had to move out somewhere else, so he moved out here to California with his uncle where he grew up for the beginning part of his childhood. He was a tall son of a gun who was about 6'1. He was half black, half white with a scruffy poorly maintained goatee. Gary smoked his pay check away every week on marijuana. He was living rent free and utility free in the building his uncle owned. All Gary had to do was take care of the lawn and take the trash out every few days, and his uncle didn't charge him a dime. Gary didn't own a car and he rode his bike everywhere. The only bill he had to pay was his prepaid phone. Every few weeks he had to go over to Verizon to put some minutes on his phone, but that all changed when he called their 1- 800 number to check his minute balance and the automated machine told him he had unlimited minutes. Gary didn't have a contract with them and he didn't even have a bank account. Someone somewhere over at Verizon had made some sort of mistake and Gary was benefiting from it. He now had free telephone usage for life essentially.
The third person was Michelle, she was a short white girl with dirty blond hair. I remember thinking that she honestly had the face of a treasure troll. She had done three months in a County correctional facility for women for drug charges and was released into a rehab program. Even though she was on the road to recovery she had gotten her two children taken away by the state and she was allowed absolutely zero visitation rights. For a mom to get her kids taken away, it takes a lot. They have to literally prove that you're a threat to their well-being and that you are no longer able to care for them. In her case they were able to prove both.
And lastly there was Espy which was short for Esperanza. She was one of the last regular employee that was still left over from the previous owner. I'm going to say it straight out, she smelled like pee, cigarettes, shit and sweat. She wore layers of make up and drew both her eyebrows and her eyelashes on. She lived in a garage with her three kids. She did stupid things like talk to customers in Jamaican or English accents because she thought it was funny. You could smell her coming from down the hall. She was what many who grew up in gang neighbourhoods would call a "Veterana". Which meant that she was a veteran gang member that had seen better days. Despite all of her imperfections, I personally didn't like her because she was slow, she stole food from the store, and she took an hour sometimes to use the restroom. Apparently she was so big, that she struggles at times to clean her self. And she didn't like me because she said I was quote " a little bitch, who had a fucken fit over everything she did wrong". I have certain expectations of people. And one of them is wiping your own ass correctly the first time.
I went from working with four beautiful young Latinas, to working with a short tempered ex con, a pot head that was mooching off anyone he could, a junky who had all of her kids taken away from her, and a lady who was not handicapped but who couldn't wipe her own ass correctly.
Life is all about adapting to the circumstances that you find yourself in. In my mind I had to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to survive. I had been their for four years, and I was gonna find a way to make things work. But I had to become.....
To be continued
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Breakthrough (Film Critique): By Cesar Reyes Torres
To be honest, I judged this movie before I even
saw it. I thought I understood the basic plot and premise. I told myself it was
a movie based on a miracle and events leading up to it and the aftermath. But
that is an unfair simplification of it. The film is based on a true story, but
it also tells a story about something that many people struggle with, and that
is that you can’t control the outcome of everything so that it turns out the
way you want in life. I’m sorry but it doesn’t work that way. WE need to learn
to let go of certain situations beyond our control or input and let God handle it.
I gained a lot of from this film. If anything, it just reminded me to thank ALL
the people that root for us when we fall. There is a lot of people who want to
see you fail so they can stand tall or prove themselves right. But there are SO
MANY more people who are rooting for us to get up and keep going. And I believe
that they deserve our attention much more than the ones who do the opposite. I
know that at some point or another we have all prayed for a miracle, only to
wait and wait and then not get one. Sometimes we may even ask ourselves, “Why
does God choose to save some and not others?” There is no simple answer for
that question in my opinion. This is more of a reflection on the film than a review,
I guess. I loved the movie, I hope everyone gets to go watch it. I don’t think you’ll
regret it.
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Lady Bird (film critique) : By Cesar Reyes Torres
Your parents end up doing more for you than you’ll ever know or realize. So I’m sure that it would hurt any parent to think that there daughter or son feels ashamed of them. The story is a familiar story, and it’s been told before. It’s a coming of age story about a young girl dealing with adolescence and discovering who she is. There are many small details about this movie that set it apart. For one it’s told within the backdrop of the start of the 2003 Invasion and War in Iraq. The Catholic in me was able to relate to many of the angles and subtle nuances that the movie points out. The story and movie was enjoyable, although somewhat predictable. This movie is currently trending at 100% on rotten tomatoes , and the reason for that is the several different side stories this it manages to balance really well. Topics such as sexuality, abortion, race, war, and family economics. I liked this movie, and I do believe it’s an oscar contender , although I don’t see it as an oscar winner.
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