Bob Chipman: The Worst Film Critic and Possibly Person to Ever Live

Kino Robert shall be analyzed

Bob Chipman is a film critic who makes YouTube film criticism (a subject I have already discussed here) But the real person we should talk about is not him, but his not so alter ego The MovieBob who has consumed and replaced Bob Chipman. The MovieBob is a loser who cares way too much about things meant for children. The MovieBob firmly believes that things meant for children should be hailed as high art because he himself enjoyed it, and he even once proclaimed (admittedly I am paraphrasing here), “I bet Orson Welles liked playing Unicorn because of the technical achievements of The Transformers animated movie.” First of all, I highly doubt Orson Welles liked being in a cartoon especially one as dull as Transformers the movie, and second what does he mean that a one-and-a-half-hour toy commercial was a technical achievement? Thirdly if The MovieBob knew anything about Orson Welles he would know that Orson Welles was forced to do work for films/tv he did not care about to get additional funding for his projects and just for basic needs of survival. Also, what did Transformers the animated movie do that was different from any other animated 80s film? The MovieBob does not explain he simply proclaims, and if you dare to disagree with him, he will call you either a Nazi or a Russian bot. What caused him to have such an extreme response? It might be an internalized victim complex that makes him have to lash out at anyone who does not support the mainstream as hard as he does, or he is just a complete idiot and idiots tend to react to opposition with anger. For someone who spends most of his day on Twitter/YouTube The MovieBob seems very upset when people react to his tweets or his videos negatively despite the fact that The MovieBob is posting these things on a public platform. The MovieBob is a shill for corporations, the ultimate white knight, and above all firmly believes that he is one of the most important people on the planet. And what does The MovieBob do for a living you ask? He makes videos on YouTube that honestly nobody really watches, so you may be asking where is the battlefield for The MovieBob if nobody except crazy people like me are watching his videos? That my friends is the hell world that is Twitter. I am just gonna let The MovieBob speak for himself on this one:

Deranged, right? The MovieBob as evidenced by the last tweet does a lot of self projection where he tries to say even though he only likes things meant for children he is still one of the smartest people in the country.

The MovieBob is a defender of all corporations. It really does not matter which one, he will defend it. I recall him defending Raytheon in the same tweet where he was attacking the concept of organized labor. He went on a strange tirade about how unions were racist I will not bother posting it here it is relatively easy to find. In a way it is kind of stunning because it is not like The MovieBob gets anything out of it. The MovieBob is working for corporate America on a pro-bono basis. Disney is the favorite corporation of The MovieBob, and so The MovieBob defends every movie made by Disney no matter what it is. For example, in his review for Cruella he keeps bringing up everything that is bad about it, but he refuses to ever say the movie is bad! You can tell from his review that he did not enjoy the film and questions almost every creative decision made in the film, but right at the end he still tries to pretend he would recommend it and even goes as far as to defend one of the most dumbfounding origins for a character in a work of fiction in any medium of storytelling including fan fiction that I have ever seen. SPOILER ALERT for Cruella: at the beginning Cruella’s mother (but it isn’t her mother) is murdered by Dalmatians. Yes, you heard that correctly, and what does The MovieBob say? He says it almost works, there is no “almost” in filmmaking it either works or it does not The MovieBob is such a coward that he chooses to remain on the fence if there is anything he questions about a Disney film.   And perhaps it is not a surprise that he is constantly attacking an auteur like Zack Snyder but praising the rest of the DC superhero movies, and even flying into a blind rage when pretty much everyone agreed that The Snyder Cut was surprisingly good. And we will not even go into how The MovieBob tried to will a Joker movie mass shooting into existence. I am also sure if you looked hard enough through The MovieBob’s tweets you will find tweets of him supporting the studio having say over the artist, because of course when the stupid anti-auteur segments pop up The MovieBob is more than ready to say that auteurs are not real, but if auteurs do not exist then how can Zack Snyder be as bad as The MovieBob says he is? Another thing about how The MovieBob reviews a film is he never elaborates or explains anything he says in his review and then claims he does not have to even though HE IS A FILM CRITIC, and isn’t the point of the review to explain your point of view so the reader can understand your criticism? So, then the question is if The MovieBob is simply making a list of the things he saw in the movie does that count as writing a review? What exactly is the point of The MovieBob’s work as a critic if he simply functions as more of a Wikipedia page than a film critic?

Anytime a superhero trailer drops The MovieBob is the first person to talk about how great it is. The MovieBob will almost immediately start praising a superhero film still 8 months out from its release. And who are the filmmakers who The MovieBob uses his influence to try and promote? Rosenbaum had Ruiz and Rivette amongst many others after all, so who does our friend The MovieBob use his platform to promote? Well, The MovieBob chooses people like James Gunn and Chloe Zhao, filmmakers who are already massively successful and popular. One of the strangest things about The MovieBob’s taste in film is that he loves all blockbusters and Oscar bait made between 1982-the present and has maybe legitimately never seen a foreign film that was not also a genre film, but despite having the most pop culture focused taste possible The MovieBob still acts like The MovieBob is the counterculture. When The MovieBob defends a movie like Captain Marvel The MovieBob talks about it as if it were a little engine that could midnight movie and not some billion-dollar blockbuster that millions if not billions of people have seen. This stems from what is the issue that has informed The MovieBob’s entire existence and that is the fact that The MovieBob is a proud nerd. Declaring yourself a nerd is the worst thing a person can do. One strange thing about the professional nerd like The MovieBob is what exactly is nerdy about liking extremely mainstream films and other media? When it comes to film criticism The MovieBob is usually rolling with whatever the consensus is, but years of being told that The MovieBob is a nerd has therefore made The MovieBob extremely defensive of everything The MovieBob likes, and The MovieBob has made these stupid nerd things that The MovieBob loves The MovieBob’s entire being, so, therefore, an attack on The Avengers is an attack on The MovieBob.

The MovieBob also wrote some books here they are:

Maybe this is going off the rails a bit, but I do not know how to talk about The MovieBob to be honest because I hate The MovieBob so much. The MovieBob represents everything wrong with Hollywood in the era of late capitalism. The MovieBob does not care about film as an art form The MovieBob sees it only as a spectacle and as a means to express The MovieBob’s own personal politics. There is no nuance in real life for The MovieBob either it is all spectacle for The MovieBob. The MovieBob is the Society of the Spectacle that Guy Debord wrote about. In fact, one could argue that The MovieBob read The Society of the Spectacle as a manual and not as a warning of a society based purely on consumption. The MovieBob only cares about consumption, and if your life is bad, it is because you consumed the wrong things. There are no outside causes to your problems it is purely because of yourself and what you consume. The MovieBob may not even believe in systematic poverty. The MovieBob is just some slob who thinks that screaming all day on Twitter is the same as doing actual activism. The MovieBob will post about Black Panther and say The MovieBob is a black ally, but then will attack black socialists on Twitter, so yes, The MovieBob wants to hear black voices but only if they are saying what The MovieBob wants to hear. And god for a guy who is not rich to begin with The MovieBob sure does like to talk down to poor and working people. The MovieBob blames poor and working people for why The MovieBob does not get to fly through space in a starship, and even goes on to imply that if they all would just die he could have his dream. What does the this even mean? The MovieBob has no interest in the plight of the proletariat, but The MovieBob is such a corporate bootlicker that he un-ironically supports eugenics. And also, why does he think he would get to be on this hypothetical starship? If there ever was an advanced America capable of starship travel as neoliberals like The MovieBob imagines I have to imagine that people like The MovieBob would simply be used as fuel. Does The MovieBob really think there can be a future without the labor of the working and to some extent the middle class? What causes this deranged sort of worldview? And why does The MovieBob think that a hypothetical journey through the universe would require a person whose only skill is knowing a lot about movies meant for children?

And who could forget the way The MovieBob white knights women on Twitter? Rest assured if you are a woman on the internet The MovieBob will jump in your mentions (and probably DMs) to defend you from strangers on the internet to the point that it feels like The MovieBob is the one harassing you. Let us not forget that The MovieBob went out of The MovieBob’s way to defend Ghostbusters (2016) and continues to do so even to this day against a group of hypothetical people who The MovieBob has made up in The MovieBob’s own head, and how do I know that this group of people do not exist? Because not a single person on this planet besides The MovieBob gives a damn about Ghostbusters (2016), so then who exactly is The MovieBob defending it from? You can just ask Lindsay Ellis what kind of guy The MovieBob is. I am out of steam when it comes to talking about The MovieBob I just hate The MovieBob so much it makes my blood boil, and with that I have decided to go ahead and wrap this up before this devolves into blind rage. I wish nothing but the worst for The MovieBob and I hope the company The MovieBob works for becomes the 26th company to fire The MovieBob. The MovieBob is not just worthless to film criticism but to society as a whole. I will leave you with one of the The MovieBob’s most powerful quotes, “You should not bother to learn anything new because somebody already knows more than you.” Those are the words that The MovieBob decided to live by when The MovieBob was 14, but I hope that you try to do better than The MovieBob.

Random recommendation of the week: Mustang (2015) a fantastic feminist film from Turkey about five sisters forced to live under patriarchal house arrest. Directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven and Alice Winocour