A few days before the Adam Sandler movie “Pixels” was released, Bob Chipman saw an advance screening. “I was bored within two minutes, angry after five, and by the time all hundred minutes had run out I was sad and numb,” he later said. Chipman, who is thirty-four and lives outside Boston, blogs about video games under the moniker the Game OverThinker and reviews films as MovieBob. (Tagline: “Film. Gaming. Politics. Geek.”) “Pixels” is an action-movie mashup of classic arcade games, such as Pac-Man. Chipman found the movie unequal to its subject matter. A few hours later, when his sadness had “simmered into pure, white-hot, pants-shitting rage,” he wrote down nineteen hundred words, read them into a microphone, paired the audio with a slide show and clips from the “Pixels” trailer, and posted the result on YouTube. “ ‘Pixels’ isn’t a movie,” Chipman says in the video. “It’s a motherfucking active crime scene, and the crime is cultural vandalism.” He goes on to describe the film as “a pile of skidmarked sumo thongs,” “a maggot-oozing head wound,” and a “waterfall of elephant jizz cascading into theaters this weekend.” He concludes, “Fuck everyone who made this movie.”
Within a few days, the video had been viewed more than a million times and had attracted enthusiastic comments from the gamer set: “Best. Movie. Review. Ever.” “Preach it bro. As a nerd myself, I’m pissed.” “Marry me!”
To some, MovieBob’s “Pixels” review isn’t a review at all; it’s a rant. The word comes from Shakespeare. Hamlet, at Ophelia’s funeral: “I’ll rant as well as thou.” Its meaning depends on the central question of the play: Is Hamlet raving mad, or is he making more sense than anyone else? This is the question we ask about our best ranters. In 2013 and 2014, Kanye West played stadiums in thirty-seven cities. For about ten minutes every night, he delivered an improvised performance that was part motivational speech, part critique of the fashion industry, and part off-the-cuff observations about water bottles and “The Hunger Games.” “I go off on these rants that don’t make any sense,” West recently acknowledged. “But I don’t give a fuck.”
A. O. Scott, a film critic at the Times, conceded, last week, that the rant has its place. (He is about to publish a book, “Better Living Through Criticism,” that explores this idea, among others.) “There’s a long history—proud or ignominious, depending on how you look at it—of vicious hatchet-job reviews,” he said. No one much liked “Moose Murders,” a Broadway play that opened and closed on the same night, in 1983, but Frank Rich, in the Times, strafed it so gleefully—invoking, for example, the possibility that the hunting trophies onstage were moose that “committed suicide shortly after being shown the script that trades on their good name”—that he subsequently became known as the Butcher of Broadway.
“There will always be people who say, ‘That went too far,’ ” Scott said. Last year, he saw “Blended,” another Adam Sandler movie. “I very quickly and angrily wrote up six hundred words,” Scott said. (Sandler might well be the great muse of the apoplectic pan.) “That afternoon, it was one of the biggest things on the Times site.” His review lamented the movie’s “sheer audience-insulting incompetence”; the PG-13 rating at the bottom warned, “It will make your children stupid.” Lindy West, who is working on a memoir called “Shrill,” may be best known for her 2010 evisceration of “Sex and the City 2,” a movie that, she wrote, “takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human . . . and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.” West said that she now regrets some parts of the review: “I’m still offended by garbage art that wastes my time, but I now try to reserve my ire for things that deserve it.”
Chipman, though, stands by his rant. “ ‘Pixels’ annoyed me for very specific reasons,” he said. As a child, he adored Pac-Man. “The younger version of me would have been so excited for this premise, and for them to do the worst possible version of it—as I said in the review, it felt like someone taking a shit in my house.” After his review went viral, Chipman was contacted by a talent agent who wants him to audition for voiceover work, “which has certainly never happened before.” But he is reluctant to self-identify as a ranter.
Donald Trump, for instance, gives ranters a bad name. “Fuck that guy,” Chipman said. Last month, Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and said that John McCain, a war hero, was “not a war hero.” On “The Daily Show,” while Jon Stewart rehashed Trump’s antics, a graphic appeared on the screen: “Rant-Man.” It was a parody of the poster for “Ant-Man,” a summer blockbuster that Bob Chipman actually liked. ♦
