Film Critics United

So my man Arvell kept pressuring me to watch this show Misfits, and to be honest he was getting a little obnoxious about it, but my viewing plate is pretty full, considering that I'm an international celebrity and stuff, but to get him off of my back I finally got around to watching this British TV show, and while Misfits isn't the best show I've ever seen, I can say that without fear of recrimination that creator Howard Overman's show is still pure, unadulterated genius. That you have just read, my friends, is called a run-on sentence. But what is it that makes Misfits a study in genius exactly? Imagine you want to make a show that features folks with superpowers, and you don't have a lot of money. What do you do? You get creative is what you do. Note that my observations are based solely on the six episodes of season one, so I don't know what may or may not have changed in the following two seasons, but season one takes place largely in one location, tha...

Probably not, but it's time to talk some LIONS FOOTBALL!!! It's no secret, the Lions are my team and even in the 0-16 season I did a few episodes of Totally Twisted Flix decked out in Lions gear to show my support despite their futility. But after the comeback against the snakebit Vikings last Sunday, we're starting to get a little bit of much needed national love. Mind you, had the Lions had lost that game I would've been fine with it. It's not like we expect them to go undefeated and it was a road game against a tough opponent in place they hadn't won since Bill Clinton was president, but they pulled it out in spectacular fashion, and while we try to take these things one game at a time... but as fans expectations are starting to get a little high. My hope at the beginning of the season was that The Lions go 10-6 and maybe squeeze into a wildcard spot, The Packers being the class of the division, if not the entire league, but realistically I was seeing 8-8...

There are great movies, but these are very few. There are good movies, and they are more numerous. The fat part of the bell curve is filled with mediocre movies, then there are bad movies, and those are very numerous as well. There are also terrible movies, and while these are more plentiful than great movies, they do show up less frequently than the others. But the rarest of movie, the kind we will be discussing today, is the Craptastic movie. The Craptastic movie is one that achieves a level of incompetence and awfulness that brings one a level of unbridled joy that is almost impossible to describe and the true Craptastic movie varies from watcher to watcher. The reason the Craptastic film is rare is because it is really difficult to pull off. It can't be planned, it can't be mapped out, it MUST happen accidentally on the organic level, and this is why there are so few. So for your perusal, we have my personal list of some of the most Craptastic movies ever made. 10....

In the movie 'The Help', Minnie the Maid, wonderfully played by actress Octavia Spencer, made the statement that there is something about Fried Chicken that makes everyone feel good. Or something like that. Never have truer words been spoken. We're talking real live, authentic, home brewed fried chicken over here. While KFC is decent chicken and all, if you have more than four pieces in a sitting you're not going to be feeling real good for a while. What you may not know is that your boy Armstead, that's me, makes arguably the greatest fried chicken wing in the history of existence of the universe. Arguably. Unlike KFC, if you eat twenty of Armstead's chicken wings, which is recommended for health reasons, the only thing you will be thinking about is that twenty first chicken wing. For real. And here's how it's done. The ingredients are simple. Grab about a dozen chicken wings, obviously. Not dings, but full wings. This isn't BW3. ...

Last Friday when I went to sleep I didn't want an HP Touchpad, just like nobody else on the planet Earth wanted an HP Touchpad. In fact I didn't want any kind of tablet since I don't particularly have a use for one. Then that Saturday when I woke up... since nobody on the planet Earth wanted an HP Touchpad... HP discontinued the HP Touchpad and had a fire sale. $99 for an HP Touchpad. I figured 'why not get an HP Touchpad'. What I didn't realize is that $99 is the sweet spot for massive insanity, chaos, mayhem, and essentially the end of society as we know it. As it turns out I'd have a better chance at a romantic interlude in Paris with Gabrielle Union while Salma Hayek is waiting at the hotel for us to finish up, than getting a $99 HP Touchpad. Oh wait... That's Paris thing has happened already. Forget I mentioned it. So I place an online order at this poor beleaguered resale outfit Onsale.com, through Amazon, for my Touchpad. Clicking ...

I'm reading one these trade magazines I get, because I'm like a really important Multimedia Professional and stuff right, and an article in this periodical is bemoaning the dropping stock prices of companies that provide 3D for movies and the poor sales for 3D TV's and the like. They observe that for the latest 3D movies, like Pirates 4 or Thor, that 60% percent of audiences opted for the regular old 2D version as opposed to the 3D versions. They theorize that because of the economy, maybe the public just isn't willing to pony up an extra 3 or 4 bucks for the 3D premium. Maybe. Or maybe the 3D in these movie suck. I'm no market researcher, but I think that's your answer Mr. Stock Analyst. Now I didn't say the movies suck, though some surely do, but the 3D in these movies suck. Out of the fifteen or so movies I've seen in 3D, three of them have had decent 3D. 'Avatar', 'Beowulf' and 'Resident Evil: Afterlife'. That...

Who is this handsome fellow right here? Well if you grew up in the 80's and the 90's and watched a bunch of mindless action flicks while you were growing up, then you know exactly who this cat is. You might not know his name, but you know the face and you certainty know the Gallagher-esque hair-do. This gentleman is Al Leong and he sports a Fu-manchu. I don't know in Mr. Leong's long and illustrious career if he got a chance to have a starring role in a movie, in fact if we go over the movies we've seen Al Leong on, he rarely even got the opportunity to speak. And on the rare occasions when we did hear Mr. Leong speak, when he wasn't forced to recite his lines in broken English, his diction was much closer to that of a Harvard Law Professor but alas Harvard Law Professor's tend to make for bad Asian Thugs which is probably why they made him keep his mouth shut. In fact if you were to peruse Al Leong's filmography a large number of his characters were...

I live in the state of Michigan, Detroit specifically, and it's no newsflash that the state is struggling no matter how many ultra-cool commercials we show with Eminem in them preaching about a Chrysler. The big news locally is that our governor is on the verge, if he hasn't done so already, of eliminating or severely reducing the extremely generous Michigan Film Credit that was put in place by the previous regime. In brief if you make a movie in Michigan, for every dollar you spend we will give 42 cents back. But I think you only get that entire 42 cents if you use 100 Michigan residents for your production, but I might be mistaken there. Now I'm not here to myopically support this tax credit because there are issues with this thing which I am way under qualified to discuss, but with everything else in this great nation of ours it centers around money and how it's distributed. But what I do know is that for the last few years we have actually had a movie industry ri...