090501 Summer Movies

Hello everyone. This is just me blogging once again. Nothing important, just kind of felt the need to get on here and type.

So the summer movie season officially started today when the clock struck midnight. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the first big budget blockbuster out the door. And it is a pretty good one at that. If X-Men: The Last Stand left a bad taste in your mouth, this one should do a good enough job of getting that out of there. I liked it enough to want to watch it again and I may just do that before I head on out next week to catch the midnight showing of Star Trek. Been hearing a lot of good things on that one, so now I am even doubly pumped to see it. Want to see what they did to revamp and reinvent the series is and if it is worth it. Then the following week I am off to see Angels and Demons and I hope they do a better job of staying with the characters than they did in The DaVinci Code. Still, I liked it for what it was. Then the following week is the release of Terminator: Salvation with Christian Bale and since I am a fan of both Bale and the Terminator series, I will be at the midnight showing of that as well. And finally wrapping up May, and just the first month of the summer movie season, Up launches into theaters and you all know that being the big Disney/Pixar fan that I am I just have to see that one as well. All I know is that May is going to just kill my wallet. I need to save money to get a new laptop, but with all the anime coming out and the summer movie season starting, I may not get around to doing that until August. Oh well.

But can you believe how many (hopefully?) good movies are coming out just in May alone. I am kind of happy that June seems to be a little more easy on my budget than May is. I mean, there are some movies that I want to see in June, especially Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which I will also be going to the midnight screening, at the end of the month, but for the most part, June seems kind of lacking to me. I mean, what do you have releasing there…Land of the Lost and Year One. I want to watch them, but they are not of great importance to go see. Not as much as the May set ones were or Transformers. July seems to be a better month for movies than June. I mean in July, you have Public Enemies, Bruno, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince all coming out within one week of each other. Still, only one movie that will make me go to the ever popular midnight showing and that is the Harry Potter movie. And then finally in August, you have movies like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and which I have really big doubts about but will still go see at midnight, District 9 which looks pretty good from what I have seen so far, Inglorious Basterds which I will go see because I love all that is Quentin Tarantino, and finally to end the summer movie season, we have H2 which completes that Rob Zombie remake of the classic Halloween horror film series and I will hopefully go to a midnight showing of that.

Okay, so for not having anything to talk about to going on about what movies I want to see this summer… yeah. I am a bit out of it, but still. This summer seems to be pretty packed with good movies. And I know there are some other ones coming out that I didn’t mention… I realize that, but this is just giving you all some insight in what I want to see this summer. Anyway… see you all later.

090114 Who Am I

So I guess that I should start off my first blog wit the all too obligatory who am I post. You know, the one where I tell you who I am and what it is that I do and what I will be blogging about and why. So I guess here we go…

My name is Richard and I was born in November of 1978. I was born and raised in Los Angeles to a father who was born in Texas and a mother who was born in Mexico. I have one younger sister who is three years younger than I am and I later found out that I have a half sister who is about thirteen years younger than me. With that last statement, it should be obvious that my parents are divorced and have been since I was eight, but for reasons that my parents still have not told me. I guess they think that if they did, I would lose respect for one or both of them. Anyway… I have been lucky enough to travel the world thanks to my parents.

I went to a magnet school up until junior high where the main focus was on academics and theater. And I appeared in school and community performances from the age of five up until about twenty. But don’t think that I am just a theater kid. I have played sports since five. I started in baseball where I was an okay player, moved on to martial arts where I won a couple of tournaments, and then on to football which became my passion. Good enough to be scouted during my junior and senior years, I gave football my all. In fact, I was so into football that I ended up breaking my knee so bad in football that I was put into physical rehabilitation for almost a year trying to heal my knee enough so they wouldn’t amputate it. Yeah, that was about the scariest thing to happen to me.

But aside from those sports, I also enjoy comic books, video games, and professional wrestling. I got into wrestling as a kid because my father was a pretty big fan of it. Since then, I have been lucky enough to attend such events as house shows, TV tapings, and main events like Survivor Series, the Royal Rumble, and Wrestlemania and have been lucky enough to go backstage and meet several of my favorite wrestling personalities. Comic books I kind of got into on accident as I really didn’t get into them until junior high. But I have been to comic conventions across the country including Comic Con and Wizard World (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Texas). My very first comic book was a copy of Uncanny X-Men. Since then, I have become a huge Marvel Comics fans. But I have branched out to other companies such as DC, Image, and Top Cow. I follow other independents as well, but only after hearing good things via word of mouth. In fact, my favorite characters are Wolverine, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, Flash, Braniac 5, Witchblade, Grifter, Backlash, Invincible, and Emma Frost. But my all time favorite character is Captain America.

But of my hobbies, video games are definitely my passion. I still remember my very first video game system which was the Atari 2600 in 1982. Since then, I have been lucky enough that I have had every video game system since then and even now have been lucky enough to have all next gen consoles. I have made it my personal mission to break into the industry somehow. I know I will never be a designer, but I figure I just might make it as a gaming reporter. I have been lucky enough so far to attend E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), E For All, CES (Consumer Electronic Show), and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo). Currently, I am also involved with three gaming communities online. I am an avid user of both, Game Trailers (http://www.gametrailers.com) and the GEN (http://www.girlsentertainmentnetwork.com) where I participate regularly in the forums and blogging post. I am also involved with and a member of the Entertainment Consumers Association (http://www.theeca.com), a grassroots organization dedicated to protect the rights of gamers around the country. Currently I am trying to start a local chapter here in the Los Angeles Gateway area. So if any of you are interested in joining, let me know.

Oh yeah, there is one other passion that I have. Anime and manga. I kind of consider them one and the same. But yeah, I got into anime back in the mid eighties thanks to cartoons like Robotech and Transformers. My mom and dad, seeing that I enjoyed the style of cartoon, went out and bought me some videos such as Guyver, Kimba, 8^th Man After, and Speed Racer. Since then, I eventually got into manga, cosplay, and going to conventions. In fact. I have kind of been a regular at Anime Expo since 1996. I stopped cosplaying about six years ago after becoming a bit out of shape but I have been recently trying to get back into shape, not just for cosplaying, but it would be a nice bonus.

Aside from all those likes of mine, I also enjoy movies and music… but more movies. My favorite genre is horror, but oddly enough a horror movie is not anywhere in my top 5. And they include, in order, Singing in the Rain, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, and Battle Royale. As for music, I am a fan of almost every genre and I am very open to listening to almost everything. My favorite musicians include Metallica, Beethoven, Celine Dion, System of a Down, Utada Hikaru, and Glenn Miller.

However, what defines me the most right now is my family. I am married and have been for three years now to my wife Desiree. And together we have two beautiful children… my daughter who is oldest, Liliana Sierra, and my son Alexander Dimitri. We are also expecting our third child, who should be arriving sometime soon. Being a husband and father has changed my life in ways that I would have never expected. And all for the better. It changed the way I view many things in life including censorship, education, and parental responsibilities. Mostly, they have become more radical than they were before. Except for the instances involving pornography, I do not believe in censoring anything from a child. I believe that they are capable of understanding what they are exposed to with just a bit of education into the subject. Children are indeed smarter than many people give them credit for. As for education, I believe that we as a country have let the lazy and unmotivated change the way we teach our children in schools for the worse. I was lucky enough to have a good education and going to college and graduating no matter where I went to school. And I hope to instill those same levels of intensity into my children that if they just work hard and not stop trying, they can succeed beyond any limitations anyone would ever put on them.

And as for parental responsibilities… I feel that parents today are lazier than ever and believe that they shouldn’t have to shoulder the majority of responsibilities of raising their children. I believe that they have become lazy and see fit to let others do the job for them. And when things go wrong they are quick to blame everyone else but themselves for what happened. When their children misbehave they are quick to judge anyone who they think is responsible for what happened. That includes music, TV, movies, and games. That most parents today are to lazy to sit down and explain and teach their children what is right and wrong. That they are to lazy to pay enough attention to what their children are involved in. That I will not be like the rest of them and I will do all that I can to make sure that I do everything for my children. … … …

Anyway, from what you read up there you will kind of get an indication of what I will be blogging about. And as you may have ascertained from what you read above I am not the best writer in the world. Most of my writing can become jumbled and jump from one subject to the other without any real bridge. And I make no apologies for this. It is the way I write and it is what makes me unique. I also would like to think that I am very unbiased. Though I do have strong opinions, I have been told that I am able to separate my beliefs from what I am writing about.

Anyway, I hope that I am able to deliver to you a blog that may be just like every other yet unique onto itself. I hope to give to you a very unique point of view on some things that you hear being talked about time after time. I hope to entertain you enough to hopefully come back and read my blog again and again. So yeah, I really just hope you enjoy.